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Comment by hackyhacky | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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