Dear John,
Donald Trump lies like most people breathe, and his lies have grown more vicious and dangerous as he’s been cornered — conjuring up conspiracies, spewing hate, and saying established facts are lies, and lies are truths.
This would be hard enough for a democracy to handle, but Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook sends Trump’s unfiltered lies to 43 percent of Americans, for whom Facebook is a source of news. And Jack Dorsey’s Twitter sends them to 67 million Twitter users every day.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey insist they are not publishers or journalists. They say Facebook and Twitter are just "platforms" that convey anything and everything – facts, lies, conspiracies, vendettas — with none of the public responsibilities that come with being part of the press.
That is ridiculous. They can’t be the major carriers of the news on which most Americans rely while taking no responsibility for its content.
Our latest video explains why Facebook and Twitter should be held responsible for spreading lies and misinformation on their platforms.
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Donald Trump lies like most people breathe.
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We can’t do anything about Trump for now. But we can and should take action against the power of these two enablers.
If they are unwilling to protect the public against powerful lies, they shouldn’t have so much power to spread them to begin with.
They should be broken up. So instead of two mammoth megaphones trumpeting Trump’s lies, or those of any similarly truth-challenged successor to Trump, the public will have more diverse sources of information, some of which will expose the lies.
A diverse information marketplace is no guarantee against tyranny, of course. But the system we now have – featuring a president who lies through his teeth and two giant uncritical conveyors of those lies – invites tyranny.
Thanks for watching,
Robert Reich
Inequality Media
P.S. While the Dow numbers are up, this is a good time to watch and share our video on stock buybacks. Nothing gives the stock market a sugar high quite like cutting taxes on corporations — and corporations using the savings to buy back their shares. (The 1% now own a whopping 50% of all stock shares.)
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