How to Get Your News Without Twitter or Facebook
MINOT, N.D. — “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?”
Those are the words of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, spoken at a recent congressional hearing featuring the heads of internet giants Google, Facebook, and Twitter. It was that last company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, who was the target of Cruz’s ire.
Whatever your opinion of Cruz, or congressional kabuki theater generally, he has a point.
Twitter, specifically, decided for its millions and millions of readers that a recent New York Post story about the questionable business dealings of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s family shouldn’t be read. Twitter and Facebook went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the story, claiming variously that it wasn’t reliable or based on hacked information.
Since when do we need these tech giants to protect us from journalism?
We never asked them to do that, but they’re doing it anyway, and as for Cruz’s who-put-you-in-charge inquiry, the answer is us.
We gave them this power.
But we can take it back.
