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Google censorship continues - critics fired from foundation funded by Google


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2017 Aug 30, 9:21am   2,471 views  10 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html

The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.

But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.

...

Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.

While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.

“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

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1   bob2356   2017 Aug 30, 10:52am  

They should pay their own way then they can have any opinion they want. Duh.
2   joeyjojojunior   2017 Aug 30, 10:57am  

I agree. Not funding an organization is hardly censoring them.

3   MisdemeanorRebel   2017 Aug 30, 11:28am  

Democrats Then: Oligarchs are too powerful! Too influential! Control too much of the media, who references the Think Tanks they control! Also, we need aggressive busting of Monopolies and companies too big to fail!

Democrats Today: We need to listen to our most influential, powerful, Elite figures. Hey, if they paid for it, it's theirs! The handful of IT Giants can ban anybody they want!
4   joeyjojojunior   2017 Aug 30, 11:32am  

Yep some Dems are too much like Republicans. So, McGee's solution is to vote Republican.

Genius!

5   Dan8267   2017 Aug 30, 3:39pm  

Patrick says
“People are so afraid of Google now.”


This is clear indication that Google should be broken up by anti-trust laws. But Reagan and the Republicans destroyed enforcement of anti-trust laws. Ironically, this means that the left will now benefit from the censorship of the right's point of view by the big online media / advertising industry. The damn conservative right brought this on themselves. Too bad the rest of us have to suffer as well.
6   Patrick   2017 Aug 30, 7:31pm  

More on Google suppression of dissenting opinions:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/30/a-liberal-think-tank-has-just-pushed-out-an-employee-who-criticized-google-thats-worrying/

This happened shortly after Lynn published a piece for New America praising the European Union for fining Google. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet (the holding company that controls Google), is a major funder of New America and had sent an email to New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter expressing unhappiness about Lynn’s piece.

Slaughter and Schmidt both say that the decision had nothing to do with Schmidt’s displeasure. However, the Times reports that, in an email to Lynn, Slaughter accused the scholar of “imperiling the institution as a whole.” The Times also said that in an email ahead of a 2016 conference organized by Open Markets to focus on concerns about tech industry monopolies, Slaughter had asked Lynn to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”
7   anonymous   2017 Oct 30, 6:16pm  

The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”

No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.
8   anonymous   2017 Oct 30, 7:59pm  

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us all.

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