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 18 - We don’t need you to type at all…

“One of the things that eventually happens … is that we don’t need you to type at all because we know where you are,” Schmidt, Google’s then-CEO, said of the company in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic. “We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.” He later added, “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”

On the internet, as in the realm of foreign policy, the U.S. security state is bipartisan in its bid to control the boundaries of acceptable behavior and thought, shepherding them by hook or crook into compliance.

The security state has sought to master this craft for more than half a century by sweeping through massive amounts of sociological data, tracking the attitudes, movements, and demographics of vast numbers of people in a bid to better map the tendency toward rebellion before it occurs.

Tracking how billions of people navigate the internet, innocent of the knowledge they’re even being watched, has provided the security state with the greatest petri dish it could have asked for.

Facebook and Google have emerged as two of the leading access portals between users and the outside world, and far from the image of impartiality they project, this prominence had made them central figures in governing which information from that world we are able to access.

The ties between these firms and the U.S. defense and intelligence spheres are myriad, not only harnessing for their own ends the high-tech R&D these firms develop for their own platforms, but also ensuring the manufacturing of consent over issues both at home and abroad that are favorable to the imperialist oligarchy and their security state.

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Source, links:

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

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