When will Democrats finally realize that big tech is not an ally? | Zephyr Teachout

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When will Democrats finally realize that big tech is not an ally? | Zephyr Teachout

As Democrats think about how to counter the Trump administration, they need to accept a very simple lesson from the last eight years. Big tech and big business are part of the political opposition working on behalf of Donald Trump, not the Democrats’ allies working against Trump and Trumpism.

It shouldn’t seem necessary to point out what seems to be an obvious fact. Nonetheless, there are some Democrats trying to stay close to big tech, or downplaying the importance of anti-monopoly policy when it comes to authoritarian risks. For example, a few days ago, Priorities USA, the largest Democratic party Super Pac, held a big resistance strategy session hosted by “

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”.

As another example, Adam Jentleson, a political writer and a former chief of staff for US senator John Fetterman, wrote a

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for the New York Times that among other things criticized fighting monopolies as a “niche issue”. He argued that there’s a dichotomy between kitchen table issues and challenging corporate power, and we should focus on the former.

The belief that big tech, and more broadly big business, is helpful to Democrats has already been tried – and found to be untrue.

When Trump was elected in 2016, one central pillar of the Democratic resistance involved using big tech platforms as a counterweight. If you remember, the CEO of

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even

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.

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,

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,

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,

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and pre-Elon Musk

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were scolded for using technologies that enabled extremism, but instead of aggressively moving to regulate the algorithmic design, change liability rules or break them up, Democrats focused on nudging platforms on editorial policy.

The assumption was they could be corralled into the “right” set of editorial practices, ones that would help defeat Trump and Maga-ism, and limit the reach of his rhetoric in the short term. This was the context in which the “misinformation and disinformation” framework was born.

We use the phrases all the time now, but it is worth reflecting on how strange they are. Sometimes misinformation refers to inadvertent *****, and disinformation describes purposeful *****, but sometimes the terms encompass factually correct but misleading information, or as Barack Obama

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in 2022, the “suppression of true information” if such suppression was done for, among other things, “political gain” or “targeting those you don’t like”.

Not only did these new categories infuriate those who were caught in the broad, fuzzy definitions, but they focused Democratic attention away from questions of power. The mis/disinformation framework fit part and parcel with joining with big tech as an anti-fascist alliance. “We”, the science-grounded Democrats, would successfully work hand in hand with the biggest tech companies in the world to protect America.

Big tech has destroyed the actual bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – while cozying up to actual autocracy

Eight years later, the Democrats have lost the White House, House of Representatives and Senate. The big tech platforms are awash in extremist content. Big tech should not look like the ally anymore. Not only is Musk fully ensconced at the head of the power table, right next to Trump, but the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, Apple and

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all reached out to Trump before the election, perhaps taking seriously

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to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he opposed him, perhaps just realizing that Trump is a deregulatory juggernaut.

Musk

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a recent phone call between Trump and the CEO of

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. We can anticipate dozens of such meetings at the highest levels, and strong relationships being born. And instead of repeatedly insisting that tech titans have too much power, we have spent eight years arming them with language that can be used to suppress dissent.

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has shown that voters actually hate corporate monopolies, and antitrust politics are extremely popular. I don’t want to overclaim the point – antitrust politics disappeared in America for the 30 years between 1980 and 2020, and it is fair to argue that anti-monopoly policy, especially against big tech, can use more experimentation in how we talk about it. On the substance, however, we should be very concerned.

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,

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and

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have destroyed the actual bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – while cozying up to actual autocracy. They now control the digital ad industry. According to one recent research report, if they paid news organizations what they make off them by standing as a middleman between readers and writers, they would

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a year. The very journalists and news organizations we rely on for fact-finding and fact-checking are scared of being shadowbanned – Jeff Bezos’s ***** of Trump being exhibit A of how that can impact editorial content.

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, thankfully, has officially been called an ******** monopolist by a court, thanks to the work of the Department of Justice under assistant attorney general Jonathan Kanter, and other antitrust cases regarding

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and

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are winding their way through the court system. But even if

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is forced to divest Chrome, which seems possible, the ******** of Democrats in power to put serious tech-busting legislation to a vote now seems grotesque. It looks like we didn’t even try to stop the incoming power couple of Trump and tech.

While pundits are trying to sort through the messaging lesson of how Kamala Harris lost what seemed like a winnable election, we would do well to look further back, and remember the real lessons from 2016: joining hands with big tech oligarchs is joining hands with the destruction of the Democratic party and democracy.

• Zephyr Teachout is a professor at Fordham Law School and the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money

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#Democrats #finally #realize #big #tech #ally #Zephyr #Teachout

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