An Orwellian George Soros Calls Facebook and Google a ‘Menace’ for Hacking Our Minds
Isaac Davis, Staff Writer
Waking Times
Apparently forgetting that he owns stock in the megalithic corporations Facebook and Google, billionaire George Soros called the companies a ‘menace to society’ because they are monopolistic and deliberately engineer their products to be addictive.
Soros is, of course, correct, and his statements come on the heels of comments recently made by ex-Facenook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, who made headlines with his scathing criticism of the platform.
“I feel tremendous guilt… I think in the back deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen… It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are. It is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools, and the things that you rely on. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works… No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem… this is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” ~Chamath Palihapitiya
Soros’ appearance at Davos is already being broadly criticized, as he went out of his way to dramatize his personal opinions of the Trump administration, and because his statements about Google and Facebook have an almost Orwellian quality as he talks about the need to free people’s minds from certain information.
As reported by The Independent:
Mr Soros also turned his attentions to Google and Facebook and argued they were in need of regulation. Branding the companies a “menace”, he warned against the rise of “ever more powerful monopolies”.
“The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies,” he said. “It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’. There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it.”
He added: “People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential elections”.
Soros is well-known for his fiscal support of social revolutionary movements around the world include his support for Antifa, which serves as fifth-column agitators to foment political instability and press for communism in the United States.
Soros continues:
“They deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents. There is a similarity between internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook gamblers to the point where they gamble away all their money, even money they don’t have. Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in the digital age. Not just distraction or addiction: social media companies are inducing people to give up their autonomy.” [Source]
Soros also said that giants like Facebook and Google should be looked at as public utilities, calling for government regulation of the platforms, a move which would completely solidify political control over the a vast majority of content on the internet. As it is, the censorship we see emerging today is motivated by corporate elites, however regulating these companies would introduce federal control over content as well. An Orwellian nightmare.
Watch the entire speech at Davos 2018, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDmJcEB7O0c
Read more articles from Isaac Davis.
About the Author
Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here.
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