Political segregation

David Greenfield writes in Sultan Knish,

...Facebook has 2.3 billion active users, Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day, Twitter has 321 million monthly users, and 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. Segregation at this level can shut entire populations out of political participation in the marketplace of ideas. AI can then invisibly automate discriminatory policies and structurally embed them into countless sites across the internet.

...A powerful elite has decided that a certain class of people should be shut out from being able to fully make use of public services. These policies of political segregation have not been openly articulated, but they have been exposed by hidden camera investigations, by lawsuits from employees fired for their political views, and by the pattern emerging from the mass of bans, shadowbans and demonetizations.

The latest crackdown by Google’s YouTube is typical of the use of non-transparent policies that are selectively applied and whose rationale represents structural discrimination against conservatives.

The new segregation masquerades as desegregation. Its implementation is segregating millions.

...As many as 70% of Democrats have negative stereotypes of Republicans. It's the only socially acceptable prejudice. And what we are seeing in Silicon Valley is the implementation of those prejudices in policy.

This is the civil rights crisis of our time. The segregation is growing. And it must be met with a new movement to fight political discrimination in businesses, and especially among the dot coms.

America no longer has a racial segregation problem. It has a political segregation problem.

Some of the biggest companies in the country, which wield nearly total control over the internet, are politically segregated, have developed a culture of discrimination toward conservatives, and have engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct based on those prejudiced views.

...It is an “elementary right”, as President John F. Kennedy put it, for conservatives to enjoy the same use of services at Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon, as anyone else. And the same access to financial services, such as MasterCard and Visa, which at one point banished the Freedom Center over its politics, the same right to visit a restaurant or a bar, or to teach in a school, regardless of their political affiliation.

This elementary right must be safeguarded by protecting not just sexual identity, but political identity.

The Bill of Rights is not built around most of the protected classes listed by many states, but around religious and political freedom. These were the issues that the revolt against British rule was built on. These are the rights that were meant to be safeguarded above all others. That guardianship has failed.

Conservatives are being silenced on the internet, fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes.

Republicans have enjoyed repeated majorities, have held the White House, and yet failed to take meaningful nationwide action to stop these abuses. Protecting political affiliation is a first step.

It is time for another Civil Rights Act to end political segregation by some of the most powerful corporations in America.

"We face," as Kennedy put it, "a moral crisis as a country and a people.”

Political segregation is the crisis of our time. It is time to meet it, not merely with rhetoric or excuses, but with solutions.

Read more here.