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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

At what point do the big tech companies see the real threat of Trump and begin actively campaigning against him?

Feels like they have immense power if they decided to act politically.

Eric Schmidt worked on Hillary's campaign in 2016[1] so it's not out of the realm of possibility that it's already been happening.

[1] https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...

I mean, if this goes through essentially what will have happened is the president used the power of the state to get a foreign company to sell control of a valuable product to Microsoft at what will almost certainly be a firesale price. If I were Microsoft, I wouldn't be complaining!

I don't know why this is getting downvoted; companies in other sectors (e.g. oil) get involved in US politics regularly.

But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly. (IANAL, but I suspect there are legal impediments as well). Taking a political stand, or providing support for one side, might force big tech companies to resolve the ambiguity as to whether they're media companies or not.

EDIT: Actually maybe there is nothing stopping tech companies from choosing a side; apparently media companies do make political contribitions: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/news-corps-million-...

EDIT 2: I can see I've accidentally opened a can of worms about biased coverage and editorials; but my usage of "support" was intended as overt and consistent involvement in political campaigning, generally through donations. And to my surprise, that does occur.

There is extreme precedent, media companies have been political for their entire history. They're pretty tame today for what it's worth, William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell newspapers.

> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly.

Isn't this pretty much one half of their business, the other being advertising?

> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly.

Newspapers routinely make political endorsements, that is overt.

> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly

Sorry, but are we in the same country?

In general, multinationals could more actively cede their host nation. My guess is we'd see less restrained behavior from corporations if Trump wins a second term for a variety of reasons.

They already are. There were revelations just this week that Google has removed conservative media from search results in what would appear to be a direct effort to interfere in the 2020 election.

One can assume they already are. By virtue of having a disproportionate representation of one political party within their ranks (which they do), you can argue that a lot of their decision making (however benign/simple/small) will fall in line with that parties platform, or end up promoting that party in some way.

Right now from my point of view, it absolutely looks like the big social-media companies like Youtube/Twitter/Reddit/etc are actively purging large conservative opinions/voices in anticipation for the US election coming up. It's downright Orwellian that we allow them to have such a huge impact on political elections under the guise of "community standards". Those same community-standards that are touted for protecting the vulnerable are acting as camouflage for political meddling.

As for Tik-tok, I'd ban it just for the degenerate social impact it's having on a large section of our youth population. Ditto for gang-glorifying, misogynistic rap music.

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