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World News See other World News Articles Title: 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. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is in the spotlight for “dining with far-right figures,” and their influence over the information that appears in your feed is apparent. However, Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm that’s masquerading as nonpartisan as it curates the “facts” you see in ads, posts, or searches: Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and others are deeply wedded to the U.S. security state and the billionaires it upholds. Walter Lippmann’s groundbreaking 1922 study of the news media, “Public Opinion,” begins with a chapter titled, “The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads,” in which he presents the media as a bottleneck through which information about the world beyond the perception of our senses must pass. Aside from the question of which stories get passed through that bottleneck, which information about an event that survives the crucible of condensation into an article, news bulletin or wire is determined by the biases of the writer and editor. In turn, control over that information bottleneck gives the controller incredible power to shape the consciousness of readers about “the world outside” – the “manufacturing of consent,” as Lippmann originally described it. The depth of information about the world made available by the internet seems to remove the bottleneck about which Lippmann fretted — indeed, a generation of techie evangelists tried to present it in just such a manner — but the truth is that it only further obscured both the bottlenecks and the crucibles that distill information for our consumption. The media giants that control our access to information, from search engines like Google to social media like Facebook, have turned themselves into portals to the world and present themselves as impartial in that role. However, behind a facade of separateness, strong connecting links bind the tech giants to the oligarchy and security state on which they rely, giving the interests of the elite determinative influence over which information we access. This article will expose and discuss some of the many ways this shady web of influence and oversight operates. The revolving door between these tech companies and intelligence agencies, think tanks, defense contractors and security companies is constantly revolving, especially at the higher echelons of important departments, like cybersecurity. Notably, many of these companies cater along partisan lines depending on the political proclivities of their owners, in a bid to tip the scales toward their point of view. They have embraced this role as an information portal, offering special “news” sections on their platforms. They are rolling out new apps to judge the trustworthiness of news sources. Facebook and Google, in particular, have also become two of the largest funders of journalism around the world, helping to further entrench State Department-approved models of truth in key hotspots of geopolitical interest. This cyberpunk dystopia isn’t a new perversion of a previously free internet, though – in fact, it is the internet’s raison d’être in the first place. It’s astory so old, it goes back to the very origins of computing, as a tool for census counting in pursuit of racist immigration policies, and the internet, born of the Pentagon’s attempt to model whole societies for the purposes of improving counterinsurgency warfare in Southeast Asia. Right hook Facebook has been under fire, most memorably from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, since news broke from Politico that Mark Zuckerberg, the great Facebook wunderkind, has been palling around with right-wing figures for quite some time. Politico documented how Zuckerberg’s private dinners have fed a whos-who of conservative talking heads and hosts from across the corporate media, including Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Washington Free Beacon editor Matt Continetti, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and Byron York, The Washington Examiner’s chief political correspondent, and others. There’s no word on whether Zuckerberg made them slaughter their own meat, however. One Silicon Valley cybersecurity researcher and former government official is quoted as saying “the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.” “For years, Mark Zuckerberg has met with elected officials and thought leaders all across the political spectrum,” a Facebook spokesperson said. Yet when The Intercept put that claim to the test, they couldn’t find a single left-wing figure invited to his private California estate for one of these wine and dine symposia on free speech. Facebook News Zuckerberg’s swearing off a right-wing bias rang hollower still when Facebook debuted a specialized news tab on its app later in October 2019 that included stories from the right-wing site Breitbart, once described by co-founder Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top adviser, as “the platform for the alt-right.” Zuckerberg reassured journalists at a “fireside chat” that Facebook has “objective standards” for news, calling the new tab “a space that is dedicated to high-quality and curated news.” Breitbart, mind you, has defended the “glorious heritage” of the Confederate flag, arguing that the banner of a rebel state founded on the basis of protecting the enslavement of Black people wasn’t racist. Some other heinously incendiary headlines include “The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ is Simple: Women Should Log Off”; “World Health Organization Report: Tr*nnies 49xs Higher HIV Rate”; and “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield.” That’s in addition to its more mundanely inaccurate reporting, such mistaking German soccer star Lucas Podolski for the leader of a Spanish human trafficking ring. It’s also where Trump’s immigration war chief Stephen Miller trafficked white nationalism to a mainstream audience Russiagate creates the ‘troll army’ narrative For the social media giants, a new opportunity to double down on methods of social control came from the rise of the Russiagate conspiracy, promulgated by a growing corporate media-Democratic Party-intelligence community rallying cry that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was the work of Russian meddling rather than the United States’ outdated Electoral College system that was created as a progressive roadblock by the country’s founders. The opening shot of this information war was the accusation by U.S. intelligence that hacker Guccifer 2.0 had worked on behalf of Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee’s servers and steal damning emails exposing the corrupt inner workings of the DNC — particularly how it cooked the books for Hillary Clinton in the primary race — to whom the DNC had become deeply financially indebted. When the emails were published by WikiLeaks in the summer and fall of 2016, U.S. intelligence claimed the site was also controlled by the Kremlin. Further fuel for the Russiagate fire came in the form of accusations that the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) had flooded U.S. social media with trolls, sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertisements intended to sway voters toward Trump and away from Clinton, as well as more generally sow social chaos by promoting discussion of divisive topics such as racial, gender, and class inequalities. 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