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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Because big tech companies are now at the point where they can pick the winners in democratic elections, if they choose to do so.

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Really? Doesn't seem like it worked out well for them during the last elections, given that people like Dustin Moskowitz and Larry Page were directly supporting and assisting the DNC campaign (with others assisting the campaign less directly).

Google[1] and Facebook[2] have sponsored the Republican party. Both have accepted ad contracts from Republican candidates.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/google-gop-convention... [2] https://fortune.com/2016/05/07/facebook-confirms-it-will-spo...

They accepted ad contracts from both sides, while the leadership directly supported DNC. The pendulum was definitely on the DNC side when it came to support from tech companies.

Just because they were giving some support to the Republican party, doesn't disprove my assertion at all.

What is your assertion?

My assertion is that "tech companies can choose the winners of the election" is an extremely over-exaggerated statement that holds no basis in reality. Some of the most powerful people in tech industry openly sided with and assisted DNC, and yet they lost the election. Yes, they sold ads to both sides, but the level of support (direct and indirect) that DNC received from big tech was incomparable to that of the Republican party.

I don't think anyone implied that Facebook et al. tried in earnest to sway the election. Facebook execs endorsed candidates and donated money to campaigns or PACs but that's the routine for any company that has a stake in politics. If Facebook wanted to, they could invisibly change the content recommendation algorithm on facebook dot com to only show negative news about the wrong candidate (or 90% negative) and only show positive news about the right candidate. They could have also made up excuses to ban right or left wing figures from facebook dot com. Stuff like that is possible to accomplish and get away with, but Zuckerberg was merciful to us this time.

I'm not claiming they've deliberately swung elections yet. But do you doubt Facebook or Google could easily do it? They self-evidently have the data needed to identify swing voters in key districts and the reach to control a large part of the media those people are exposed to.

If they haven't done it (yet), it's only because they've decided not to (so far).

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