Hacker News Reader

Comment by googthrowaway42 | Hacker News Reader

The lines get blurry when there is a revolving door between Silicon Valley tech companies and DC.

Recent example from the banning of Bret Weinstein from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1319451084859953154?...

This is a Facebook communications person responding with an official reply to this incident. She describes herself as "Facebook comms, formerly @TheDemocrats and @SpeakerPelosi".

This is an example of power leakage. These institutions do in fact (i.e. de facto, not de jure) have elements of sovereign power given their relationship with the political/ruling class, it's just that they are not directly accountable in the same way that a government is. They engage in censorship for the benefit of the ruling/political class and use political formulae as a mask (TOS violations, "community standards" violations, exhortations to the first amendment, section 230 protections, etc) in the same way governments do.

View on HN

> Recent example from the banning of Bret Weinstein from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1319451084859953154?...

What's most f-ed up about that one is that Liz posts from her personal account. The appropriate thing to do is to post from facebook comms or something.

Overall though, its a continuation of the grand old tradition that appeals to SV tech companies must come from "important" people or trusted sources (like Twitter or here) or they don't matter. It is super disturbing though.

And Joel Kaplan, head of Facebook Public Policy was one of the people involved in the "Brooks Brother Riot"[1] that shutdown the recount of the 2000 election and took over from Karl Rove in the GW Bush Whitehouse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

It’s not limited to DC - Former UK deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg @Facebook VP, Global Affairs

"Power leakage" is inevitable. Everyone has political opinions. Most cops are Republicans. That alone doesn't mean that they're incapable of doing their job competently.

What you're doing amounts to an ad hominem attack: you're criticizing the person delivering the message, rather than the message itself.

I'm not talking about political opinions, I'm talking about highly connected political operatives in positions of power within these companies.

Liz Bourgeois would be an example of such a person.

She was Assistant Press Secretary at the DNC and prior to that was a Legislative Correspondant for Nancy Pelosi and Debbi Wasserman Shultz.

Now she works as "Director, Strategic Response Communications" at Facebook.

This would be a valid criticism if these companies didn't hire top tier operatives from both parties and donate substantial amounts via their PACs to both.

It's not clear why this would be the case. Why should we care which "party" somebody is from when then issue at hand is a revolving door between DC and the Valley? The military-industrial complex has done fine under a two-party system and so presumably will the private-public corporate surveillance state. Everybody in power in the US has to pick one of two letters to put after their name, but they're all part of the same ruling class.

Even if completely neutral with respect to the two parties, the effect of social media as a transport for political information means it has a high involvement in political activity.

Don't pretend those two parties form an ideal set of alternatives; they have many common problems maintained by their duopoly.

Do they? As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley is Joel Kaplan, and we know from leaks that Zuckerberg spends a significant amount of his time trying to stop his workforce from lynching the guy.

> As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley [..]

"Thiel is Silicon Valley's most outspoken Trump supporter" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

Another one just popped up in my mind: Condoleezza Rice @ Dropbox

Would it be possible to compile a list of all of the political operatives (current and former) in tech? Can we make them register in the future?

I didn't know this was happening, but I guess I should have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com