Social Media and Social Control: how Silicon Valley serves the US State Department

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.

by Morgan Artyukhina 

Part 9 - Facebook’s Expanding Media Empire

This clique of far-right figures is really johnny-come-lately to Facebook’s plot to influence your worldview by pruning the information you access on their platform. Casting the initiative as a fulfillment of its responsibility as one of the largest distributors of information on the planet, Facebook began launching in 2017 a slew of ventures that partnered with the world’s leading consent manufacturers to ensure their platform didn’t interfere with the carefully manicured information landscape crafted by billionaire string-pullers like Omidyar and the Saudi Royal family.

By May 2018, Columbia Journalism Review was able to hail Facebook and Google for having sunk more than half a billion dollars into journalism initiatives, making them two of its largest funders on the planet.

The Facebook Journalism Project (FJP), launched in collaboration with the Comcast-dominated Vox Media and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, aimed to train journalists in what it called “news literacy.” In describing FJP’s mission, the New York Times effectively laid out a blueprint for social control:

                     The effort calls for the company to forge deeper ties with publishers by collaborating on publishing tools and features before they are released. Facebook will also develop training programs and tools for journalists to teach them how to better search its site to report on news and events. And Facebook wants to help train members of the public to find news sources they trust, while fighting the spread of fake news across its site. 

FJP’s partnerships include the Knight Foundation, Poynter Institute, the American Journalism Project, and News Integrity Initiative, all of which are financially tied to the vast Omidyar media empire.

Journalists Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal documented in atomic detail how through this media empire, Omidyar has directed an information war around the world to further U.S. foreign policy.

Source, links:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-control-how-silicon-valley-serves-us-state-department/263267/

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