Do you find that the people responsible for making the Internet "a corrupting influence on civil society" — the people who run Facebook and Twitter and so on — are influenced by Republican Party ideologies and concerns?

Not particularly.

The issue with our currently large companies seems to have become that the goals of shareholders are not necessarily aligned with the goals of society.

And there needs to be a long conversation about that.

> The Internet is the single biggest repository and distributor of human knowledge the world has ever seen.

This is true, but I worry about the quality of the information and it’s longevity. We may yet lose a huge amount of information because we take it for granted that the internet will save it all, when it doesn’t. The term for this is “digital dark age”.

> If you wish to find the truth, you can.

I mean, aside from all the people learning lies. A lot of utter nonsense has found its home on the internet too.

> the problem is that ... Republican

I’m going to stop you there. While I might agree politically, philosophically this is a bad road. It tempts you to think that everything is fine if only you could defeat your political foe, which I just don’t think is true.

>From the US perspective, the problem is that the pile of excrement that is the Republican party in the US

It never ceases to amaze me that people can say something like this with a straight face. As if "the Republican Party" exists in a vacuum, and that the Democratic Party is some bastion of widely held ideals. This is why some people, like me, consider Silicon Valley hopelessly out-of-touch.

Nobody claimed the Democratic party was a bastion of ideals, you added that straw man.

Why is it that someone criticizing the Republican Party immediately makes you want to attack the Democratic party? It seems they are their own entity and can be criticized as such, no both-sides-ism needed.

It’s a pretty ignorant comment considering Nixon and the Republican Party was the one who got the US out of Vietnam and the Democratic Party was the one that escalated the conflict.

I'm not from the US, but the republican party is always held up as the "bad guy" in these conversations. Let's not forget that the original Obama campaign was the first to really leverage social networks and online advertising to great effect, the republicans then turned around and did the same but better with Trump. When the Democrats did it, it was praised as innovative and clever the future of election campaigns, when the Republicans did it, it was apparently the end of the world and the internet should be burnt to the ground for facilitating this terrible thing to happen.

==when the Republicans did it, it was apparently the end of the world and the internet should be burnt to the ground for facilitating this terrible thing to happen.==

Here, you have proven my point by creating yet another straw man. Ignoring that, you never established that they actually “did the same” thing, you just make the claim. I don’t remember seeing evidence of foreign bot farms supporting the Obama campaign on social media.

That said, maybe the comment was more about net neutrality, municipal wi-fi or expanded rural broadband. All actions to bring cheaper internet to more people that US Republicans have historically been against. You know, policies that actually impact the internet and it’s access/usage.

Roger Ailes built a media empire with the explicit idea that the reason why the "elites" (read: Republican politicians) had their hand forced on Vietnam was that they didn't control the propaganda around it sufficiently.

He is quite explicit and straightforward and is on the record about this.

If you don't acknowledge that Ailes set out to build a propaganda empire, you are already behind the 8 ball before we even start discussing the Internet.