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In defense of Facebook, Twitter, Google

I have written many blog posts about how the huge Silicon Valley tech megacorporations that control 90+% of all internet traffic and people's online presence and interactions have become more and more tyrannical and totalitarian, silencing, banning and punishing people for the "wrong" political opinions.

Some people have presented an argument in their defense: Basically, these corporations are politically tyrannical (and becoming more and more so) because they have no choice.

How so? Money, by dear boy. Money.

These corporations are offering free services to people. You don't have to pay a single dime for their services. You can create accounts, you can post and communicate with people, you can upload and share text, pictures and video. All for free.

Yet these are some of the richest corporations in the world. How? How are they making money, without paying customers?

Advertising, that's how.

And that's the problem. Advertisers hold them by the balls, so to speak. Whatever the advertisers say, these companies have to obey. These corporations exist thanks to advertisers. If advertisers were to boycott them, they would go bankrupt. The advertisers effectively and de facto own these giant social media platforms.

So what happens when advertisers, at large, tell a company like Facebook "we don't want our brand associated with these wrongthinking people. Don't you dare show our ads alongside these hateful posts and videos. If you keep tarnishing our brand by associating it with these people, we'll pull out."

What happens is that Facebook, and the other companies, have pretty much no option than to stop those ads from showing on the same platform as the "hateful" wrongthinkers, and the only option they have is to ban those people and kick them out.

The advertisers themselves might not be doing this out of a political agenda per se. They may simply be honestly scared of their brand being associated with the "neonazis", "far right" and so on, because of all the noise that the mainstream media and the SJWs are making about it. There's nothing these advertisers fear more than some mainstream media publication making a major hit piece on them associating them with the wrong crowd. (There might of course also be some SJW infiltration going on inside these advertising companies and the companies they are advertising for, so it's a double motivation.)

The higher-ups at Facebook have in recent months actually given hints of exactly this, and apparently they actually want the government to intervene and put laws in place that would force Facebook to stop banning people for political reasons. They want this ostensibly because they can then tell the advertisers "there's nothing we can do about it. The law says we cannot ban these people."

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