In a rare piece of positive news, social media giants Meta and YouTube were ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages for causing pain and suffering to a young user. A jury found the social media companies liable for creating addictive design features that led to mental health distress.
Of course, they will appeal, but still, this is a welcome step towards some form of accountability for the big tech companies that have fellated Trump and made billions by promoting disinformation and hate. However, will this decision signal a much-needed reckoning, or will lawmakers answer to their corporate donors instead?
Recently, Meta announced it was spending $65 million in state and local primaries to promote candidates who supported pro-AI growth and deregulation. Corporate Democrats are rallying behind another “pro-growth” political group known as Next American Era, headed by ex-DCCC chair Cheri Bustos, whose lobbying clients include OpenAI and Oracle. Billionaires are planning to spend 500 million in California races as “tax the rich” gains steam ahead of the elections. Another pro-AI group, Leading the Future, led in part by Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the surveillance company Palantir, is spending $100 million in the upcoming elections.
Translation: Big Tech is buying both Democrats and Republicans ahead of the elections. It’s a big club, friends, and you ain’t in it.
With this news in mind, are you at all surprised by the latest revelations from the House Judiciary Committee that Donald Trump stole classified documents that compromised our national security and advanced “his business interests?”
No shit!
This man, after all, is a convicted criminal who unleashed a violent insurrection and has made nearly $5 billion with his family in the first year of his second term. Trump and his billionaire friends also seem to be making a fortune through insider trading and market manipulation, literally getting rich off of war crimes as civilians die in Iran and Lebanon.
Why miss the opportunity to grift, especially when you’ll never be held accountable?
Danielle and I lay a lot of the blame on the feet of Merrick Garland and complicit Democrats who were not aggressive in their investigation and prosecution of Trump and his criminal cronies during Biden’s term. But this “slap on the wrist” approach to the Epstein Class is business as usual. You just have to go back to the 2008 Economic Crisis and the bailout that was rationalized by the nonsense that these institutions are “just too big to fail.”
To have true accountability, we need to cull our politicians who are bought by big money and elect and champion those voices who are promising to fundamentally transform our corrupt institutions and take on the broligarchy. If we don’t, this cycle will simply repeat as the Epstein Class continues to profit off of our collective misery.
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