This is one of many criminal activities an extremely small number of exorbitantly wealthy people are perpetrating on the vast majority of the public.
This is racketeering—it also includes collusion and extortion, and conspiracy and intent to defraud the public.
This IS organized crime against us as a nation but also the world’s population as a whole and it’s been going on for over 10 years, more like 35 to 40 years—RICOH!
They know that the general population is slow to react. They know our mind is on our families and survival, and that our whole system of economics is structured to benefit this minute group of individuals.
They know the vast majority of the population cannot understand the codes of laws that protect us nor can we take action in the form of direct violence against these criminals for their conspiracy to defraud and extort us.
This is one of the many reasons why we have elected representatives to protect us from these criminal activities and the insane greed these megalomaniacs seem to be possessed by.
We have allowed these criminals to pick our pockets in our preoccupation and struggle and to exist and provide for our families and ourselves.
We have been manipulated and abused by this extremely small group of billionaires—all of us.
We have inadvertently handed over our highest Court and our legislative department and allowed these select billionaire/trillionaires to gain access to vast profits—our money that we worked hard for—which became their money.
We must raise our heads and realize that the majority of the adults in this country and now our children are being exploited by these people and it has to stop.
The one thing we still have is our power of numbers. This is the one thing these grifters are terrified of. We need to use these numbers to change things—now. The power of the majority of humans who want a decent life, who work for it, pay our taxes for and deserve the life we work for, plan, and want.
Stop with the begging bowels and demand change—now.
Despite the fact that my family and I have always eschewed social media as much as possible (a couple are required to be on some platforms for their work), we feel its negative consequences every day. One must remember that Zuckerberg, an unattractive near incel at Harvard, started "The Facebook" to rate the looks of Radcliffe women (this is before the two schools combined). He has been a bitter, insecure sexist his entire life. Rather like our grotesque POTUS.
I am not sure I can keep reading you, Thom. The truth hurts too much, when one knows there is nothing one can do about it short of things that would be illegal, immoral, and in my case against my faith. The problem is that the morbidly rich--that term you first used, or at least where I first saw it, and which I have happily coopted for use constantly now--have too much power now to be subject to restraint. They will shrug off even a tidal wave loss in November just as easily as this $375 million fine. They will just buy what they need and whomever they need to avoid regulation that interferes with their domination. And Vlad will help with poison and defenestration against those who stand in their way.
Bleak? You bet. I wonder if our species is worth saving. We seem to lack the will, wholly aside from the ability, to curb our worst instincts and control the monsters among us. While that may have been true always, in the modern age, with the speed of technology, the impact is faster, deeper, much worse.
As I repeat almost every post now, I am sad I have a beloved grandson, the center of my and my wife's lives literally since the day he was born, as we have co-parented him. We have helped give him an idyllic childhood. Not that of a billionaire heir, but lacking for very little in housing, clothing, schools, toys, love beyond all else. I am sad because when he faces the reality that lies ahead as he matures, he will feel betrayed. He will know that the life he was given by his doting mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles was a fantasy. And that the reality will be far uglier for him, his generation, the country, the world.
That my time will soon end is no comfort at all. Because on my deathbed I will be thinking of all those good and kind people who do not deserve what the malevolent morbidly rich are imposing upon them and the planet. While I have to trust that the God I believe in will call them to account in some manner hereafter, I would have liked seeing some calling to account in this life. I know now I will not.
But keep posting, Thom. You must. Because others stronger than I am, healthier, with more money--or nothing to lose--may find the will and the means to bring about a better world. That is my hope and my prayer.
I have deleted all of my Meta accounts and it was like a withdrawal process but in the end I felt relieved. The thousand of friends that I had I no longer miss except for a few. I now see Substack having the same problems. Most of my followers are buxom young ladies. As a 78 year old man I find that highly suspicious.
The point was that there are people trying to befriend others for who knows what purpose. And most likely these beautiful women are actually Russian men looking for victims. Am I paranoid?
WTF, this Section 230 is an outrage. Clinton was a phony. He passed a LOT of bad laws. I would be so out of touch with reality if I didn’t have your essays, Professor Hartmann. I cannot thank you enough for your work.
The legacy media doesn’t want to talk about the Social Media trial, because they’d have to discuss psychological concepts, LIKE THEY NEVER DO ! — PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION ? - what’s that ? — TRANSACTIONAL ISM ? - The King is totally consumed by that, but God-forbid you claim any smidgen of that, for yourself, because you’d have to know about what it IS, first ! — The King is a DEMENTED DARK TETRAD ? — but The King wants to pay-off his hired doctors, and he wouldn’t want you to find-out what the terminology means, anyway ! — LEGACY MEDIA FAIL ! — SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA !
It was covered in the NYT. Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case, by Cecilia Kang, Ryan Mac and Eli Tan
Is Big Tech Facing a Big Tobacco Moment?
Back-to-back courtroom losses have put technology giants, including Meta and Google, in uncertain territory as they face lawsuits and bans on teen users.
By Andrew Ross SorkinBernhard WarnerSarah KesslerMichael J. de la MercedNiko GalloglyBrian O’Keefe and Ian Mount
March 26, 2026
Some legal experts wonder if Big Tech is staring at a Big Tobacco moment, a reference to how cigarette makers had to overhaul their businesses — at a huge expense — after courts ruled that some of their products were addictive and harmful.
“We’re in a new era, a digital era, where we have to rethink definitions for products based on which entities might have superior information to prevent these injuries and accidents,” Catherine Sharkey, a professor of law at N.Y.U., told The Times. She added that the “implications” of those verdicts were “very, very big.”
“This has potentially large impacts on other areas in tech, A.I. and beyond that,” Jessica Nall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents tech companies and executives, told The Wall Street Journal. “The floodgates are already open.”
Meta and Google plan to appeal. The companies have signaled that they will fight efforts to make them drastically redesign their products and algorithms.
+++++
I am banned from Facebook. I've written about it many times.....
I just left the message with my Senator Adam Schiff. The corruption is so deep and wide. Here we are today. I’m trying to understand how to live in all of this painful insanity. Our world truly is a jungle. Maybe I shouldn’t care about corrupt billionaires? In fact it is feeling absurd to even read about them. I am an ant, living in the big, wide and deep jungle. I do not matter and this may be my biggest strength.
Liquor stores and bars can be closed for serving underaged customers; restaurants can be closed for having roaches in the kitchen. The harm done by social media can be just as bad, if not worse, yet they are guaranteed as a right to remain in operation.
Jeffrey,its because they have a shitload of money and can buy off regulators and and Wall Street loves them. Find out who the large institutions who own Meta stock,call them and tell them we are identifying those firms and will boycott them. Unfortunately the financial markets are always the behind this kind of behavior.
Actually...Meta has been down and the shareholders have lost about 25% in the past 6 months and 6% today. If you are a shareholder you have standing to sue if you've lost money because this was a contingent liability that could be avoided.
I cited to the NYT article that compares this to what happened to the tobacco industry. Sued into bankruptcy.
Agree they need to get ride of Section 230. No longer needed to spur internet growth. Time to hold big social media to same standards as all other companies.
Europe has demonstrated that what is needed is not just the elimination of 230, but also replacement with new guardrail laws like requiring algorithms designed to detect and censor things like hate speech and sexual seduction. One thing to keep in mind is that troll farms exist because they have an audience that finds their hate and lies appealing. They reinforce their distorted and hateful worldviews. Yes, sites groom kids, but that is likely because kids have already been pre-groomed by their unwitting families.
As a kid in the 1950s racism was subtly infused into our little brains. I was 9 when Ed Sullivan premiered Elvis. My mother turned to my sister and me, asking, "Wasn't that awful? A white boy singing nigger music? You didn't like it, did you!" Frank Sinatra Elvis was not. LOL. But my folks loved Black Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, so they likely did not view their remark as racist any more than we kids did.
However, 4 years later, the grooming was complete. I conned my parents into sending me to a Catholic prep school in downtown Chicago as a way to escape from all Whiteflightburbia grooming (not just racism). When I shared the news with my pals, they chorused, "Don't let the niggers getcha." By that age, the entire neighborhood had been subtly groomed to be racist, even though there was not a single black face in our town of 9,000.
Wow... congratulations for surviving the Golden Age of America. After JFK was killed, it all started going down hill and we all never looked back until 2016 - 2025. NK III was possibly a wake-up call, but there are still 320+ million of us out there who need to wake up. When only 2/3 of us vote, despots-in-training take advantage of that, just like the cigarette people who know how to hook fellow Americans on nicotine, alcohol, etc. and make big money doing it. I am glad that my end of the life rainbow gets shorter.
I watched Timothee Chalamet's "Dillon" a while back. In one scene, he was walking down a NYC street with his guitar, reminding himself that he had to get to a CORE meeting. That blew my mind. I was sort of a mascot to the Chgo Northside CORE, and I used to bring my guitar along at the ripe age of 16 back in 1963 to play hootenannies now and then. I thought, OMG! Dillon and I had something in common.
One night, while playing at a CORE meeting, an old geezer (he was 50 back then) arrived later in the evening with an old beat-up electric guitar and a small amp. I was asked to play backup with him - strum along. Later, I learned the name of the guy - Muddy Waters. How many white teenagers ever played a duet with Muddy Waters?
There is no escaping getting tracked and ID'd today......
Therefore the limited capabilities when 230 came into being are no longer a problem. They can do the clean-up. We need to make them; we need our consumer protections BACK.
All kinds of people and things are kicked out of their "castles" these days. Commenters here have said they are banned from Facebook. Probably had something to do with telling the truth in their case.
The whole Technate of America concept of ruling the Western Hemisphere is that the Tech Bros and Crypto Creeps do not want rules, especially from a democratic government. Save our democratic values, because these psychos have NONE. See you in the streets on Saturday. Hope you can bring a friend.
Alis,great post and you are so right,the Technate do not want rules. They do not believe in Democracy,do anything they like and Wall Street,CNBC love it. There isa solution to the META issue,find a way to get Mark Zuckerberg who obviously knows what damage to children instagram and facebook have done. This issue has been around for a long time.
When are Americans going to really fight back? "GET MARK ZUCKERBERG " should be on every parent's "ToDO" list.
Section 230 should be done away with tomorrow,find out who supports it,go after them.
The same for Musk ,and of the course our "Nazi" in the white house. He's not my president.
The NSA data center at Bluffdale, UT was the subject of a 60 minute expose. It is humongous beyond the scope of anything you can imagine, and stores all electronic communications, not only of the US, but the world, anything it captures, and with the powers of AI it sniffs everything at the speed of light, Including our comments on substack and Facebook.
To see how fast AI is, it has access to everything that has appeared on the internet, including your emails. I asked a question about origins of a DNA SNP and the answer was essentially derived from an email I sent to others,
Ask google AI any question, and if it doesn't have an immediate answer, it comes back "thinking". It is not thinking it is scouring the data base at the speed of light.
I recently watched Adolescence a mini series on Netflix about a 13 year old kid who murders a young female classmate from school due to the effects of extremely toxic internet influence. It was so intense, I thought about it for days after I saw it. I hope this ruling is a start to bringing about change.
When are we going to take a closer look at how capitalism or our tolerance for its abuses contribute to or cause these kinds of problems? When can we take time to examine how our operating systems and their flaws, faults, and issues harm all of us and how all these things are perpetuated?
Henry A. Giroux points out in an article entitled, “Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Authoritarianism: Challenges and Possibilities” (2019) that “oppression is learned”. Critical pedagogy for Giroux is controversial and even revolutionary. He says, “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism” (my emphasis).
Giroux gives the example of the elephant which is chained at a very early age to a post driven firmly into the ground. The elephant “learns” it is not free to move, and later, when it is no longer chained, is unaware of its freedom to move outside an established range. Another example is given in the book, “The Mis-Education of the Negro” by Woodson, who explains that, once a person is made to believe he is inferior and that he should only go to the back door, he will even create a back door if there is none there and only ever use that door.
Giroux teaches that “critical pedagogy” can free students from the learned confinement instilled in a repressive environment. But he is not on the same superficial level as so many others.
Great leaders and great teachers are inspirational. But inspiration while one is locked in a closet with no means or hope of escaping confinement does not take one far unless or until it offers a plan for getting out of the closet. If the closet is one’s own mind, somehow one’s mind must be liberated from the sensations and belief of its confinement.
A little earlier in, speaking about language used, Giroux says,
“If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hanna Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. Language can be a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehood and injustices.”
Students are routinely exposed to language which is ambiguous or which suggests ideas that should have been eradicated long ago. Quoting Giroux further, he says, “…it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties, civil liberties, a market economy and a market society, and capitalism and democracy. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it” (my emphasis).
Thom Hartmann will love this. In another section, Giroux says, “…critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged citizens.” Does that not sound a lot like what I have been saying for years? The educational conditions he refers to are conditions which are NOT based on the arbitrary authority demanded by the written laws, regulations, and rules in attendance law.
You might be wondering why we don’t have more of the influence of a Bernie Sanders, Ike Eisenhour, Thomas Jefferson, or Fredrick Douglass in our schools. We would have to get the Arnie Duncan’s, the Bill Gate’s, and the Diane Rativich’s out first. Not by eliminating the Department of Education, but by eliminating the power and influence those people hold by virtue of the legal framework made necessary by attendance laws
This next paragraph from the paper is a must. Giroux states unequivocally,
“A disconcerting number of academics and teachers in the current moment continue to join forces with right-wing pundits to argue that classrooms should be free of politics. Their falsely shared conclusion is that schools should be neutral spaces in which matters of power, values, and social justice should not be addressed and should not enter the classroom. The usual scornful accusation in this case is that teachers who believe in critical pedagogy indoctrinate their students. In this supposedly ideologically pure and politically neutral world, pedagogy is reduced to a banal transmission of facts in which nothing controversial can be stated, and teachers are forbidden to utter one word related to any of the major problems facing the society. Or, teaching is reduced to an imagination killing exercise of teaching to the test-which is code for a pedagogy of oppression”
There you have it. There is indeed indoctrination. However, it is an indoctrination of political correctness from those with money and influence and those who inordinately fear change, controversy, or conflict. No one has listened when I have said this. Perhaps someone will pay heed to these more eloquent expressions of the same ideas.
Before I approach a million words, let me get back to where I started. Giroux is highly inspirational. I had encountered his writing earlier. But it is all ‘pie-in-the-sky’ and academic, and the revolution is invariably stopped before it starts. These ideas, no matter how cogent or essential cannot take hold or gain traction under a paradigm where power is assigned to state authorities by virtue of the necessity for total compliance with attendance laws. Giroux may not yet have realized that is where we must go. But his brilliant insights are going nowhere as long as those unconstitutional laws still apply.
There is no question that schools play a major role in shaping society.
If orthodoxy, behavioral modification, obedience to authority, and busyness as opposed to intellectual exploration are emphasized in schools, however, (and they are), they will never be the engines of innovation or democratic progression. Quoting from the article again, he says, “Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, while often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.”
The alarm bells have been ringing loudly. The harsh criticisms were coming from all directions and they were relentless since well before Dewey. Yet y’all put on earphones and turned up the volume of the comforting music or the mantra of the schools promising to cure the ills of society. You let the hum-drum of pleasant and uncontroversial sounds relative to schools lull you to sleep and you dreamed of a bright future for students whose spirits were in fact being subdued and whose rights and liberties were systematically repressed and denied. This is why, as Giroux says, “It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for making education central to politics.”
In the same paragraph he states, “In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without informed and critically engaged citizens.
It would be negligence here to omit the following description: “…pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, Muslims, and others considered excess, wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion.” He did not specify exactly to what that portrayal referred. To some, applying those items to schools may seem an exaggeration. But, a look at what is all over social media and to hear what is being said openly in many places, one should be careful to exonerate the schools without consulting the reams of literature with respect to images acquired.
Giroux speaks about “the politics of educated hope”. I have not even scratched the surface and this will require intensive work and attention to connect some of the dots. He clarifies by saying, “…we are not arguing for a naïve optimism, but for a militant optimism that stems from an understanding of and resistance to the very contradictions of the capitalist system itself.” If Thom would find time for some of this literature, he would be better able to steer us in a better direction.
This is one of many criminal activities an extremely small number of exorbitantly wealthy people are perpetrating on the vast majority of the public.
This is racketeering—it also includes collusion and extortion, and conspiracy and intent to defraud the public.
This IS organized crime against us as a nation but also the world’s population as a whole and it’s been going on for over 10 years, more like 35 to 40 years—RICOH!
They know that the general population is slow to react. They know our mind is on our families and survival, and that our whole system of economics is structured to benefit this minute group of individuals.
They know the vast majority of the population cannot understand the codes of laws that protect us nor can we take action in the form of direct violence against these criminals for their conspiracy to defraud and extort us.
This is one of the many reasons why we have elected representatives to protect us from these criminal activities and the insane greed these megalomaniacs seem to be possessed by.
We have allowed these criminals to pick our pockets in our preoccupation and struggle and to exist and provide for our families and ourselves.
We have been manipulated and abused by this extremely small group of billionaires—all of us.
We have inadvertently handed over our highest Court and our legislative department and allowed these select billionaire/trillionaires to gain access to vast profits—our money that we worked hard for—which became their money.
We must raise our heads and realize that the majority of the adults in this country and now our children are being exploited by these people and it has to stop.
The one thing we still have is our power of numbers. This is the one thing these grifters are terrified of. We need to use these numbers to change things—now. The power of the majority of humans who want a decent life, who work for it, pay our taxes for and deserve the life we work for, plan, and want.
Stop with the begging bowels and demand change—now.
Our One True God is money. Money good. Not money bad. We need to do something about that.
No chance, without money people will starve, die of exposure and OMG not have a cell phone or social media for addiction.
We don’t need to eliminate money, we need to adjust our prayers.
To whom to pray? Which god, so many gods, so little time.
Despite the fact that my family and I have always eschewed social media as much as possible (a couple are required to be on some platforms for their work), we feel its negative consequences every day. One must remember that Zuckerberg, an unattractive near incel at Harvard, started "The Facebook" to rate the looks of Radcliffe women (this is before the two schools combined). He has been a bitter, insecure sexist his entire life. Rather like our grotesque POTUS.
I am not sure I can keep reading you, Thom. The truth hurts too much, when one knows there is nothing one can do about it short of things that would be illegal, immoral, and in my case against my faith. The problem is that the morbidly rich--that term you first used, or at least where I first saw it, and which I have happily coopted for use constantly now--have too much power now to be subject to restraint. They will shrug off even a tidal wave loss in November just as easily as this $375 million fine. They will just buy what they need and whomever they need to avoid regulation that interferes with their domination. And Vlad will help with poison and defenestration against those who stand in their way.
Bleak? You bet. I wonder if our species is worth saving. We seem to lack the will, wholly aside from the ability, to curb our worst instincts and control the monsters among us. While that may have been true always, in the modern age, with the speed of technology, the impact is faster, deeper, much worse.
As I repeat almost every post now, I am sad I have a beloved grandson, the center of my and my wife's lives literally since the day he was born, as we have co-parented him. We have helped give him an idyllic childhood. Not that of a billionaire heir, but lacking for very little in housing, clothing, schools, toys, love beyond all else. I am sad because when he faces the reality that lies ahead as he matures, he will feel betrayed. He will know that the life he was given by his doting mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles was a fantasy. And that the reality will be far uglier for him, his generation, the country, the world.
That my time will soon end is no comfort at all. Because on my deathbed I will be thinking of all those good and kind people who do not deserve what the malevolent morbidly rich are imposing upon them and the planet. While I have to trust that the God I believe in will call them to account in some manner hereafter, I would have liked seeing some calling to account in this life. I know now I will not.
But keep posting, Thom. You must. Because others stronger than I am, healthier, with more money--or nothing to lose--may find the will and the means to bring about a better world. That is my hope and my prayer.
I have deleted all of my Meta accounts and it was like a withdrawal process but in the end I felt relieved. The thousand of friends that I had I no longer miss except for a few. I now see Substack having the same problems. Most of my followers are buxom young ladies. As a 78 year old man I find that highly suspicious.
I get notification of followers, but delete them without looking further. Not interested.
The point was that there are people trying to befriend others for who knows what purpose. And most likely these beautiful women are actually Russian men looking for victims. Am I paranoid?
Not at all.
WTF, this Section 230 is an outrage. Clinton was a phony. He passed a LOT of bad laws. I would be so out of touch with reality if I didn’t have your essays, Professor Hartmann. I cannot thank you enough for your work.
Thanks, Elizabeth!
I’m O.K., but the legacy media, ISN’T :
The legacy media doesn’t want to talk about the Social Media trial, because they’d have to discuss psychological concepts, LIKE THEY NEVER DO ! — PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION ? - what’s that ? — TRANSACTIONAL ISM ? - The King is totally consumed by that, but God-forbid you claim any smidgen of that, for yourself, because you’d have to know about what it IS, first ! — The King is a DEMENTED DARK TETRAD ? — but The King wants to pay-off his hired doctors, and he wouldn’t want you to find-out what the terminology means, anyway ! — LEGACY MEDIA FAIL ! — SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA !
It was covered in the NYT. Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case, by Cecilia Kang, Ryan Mac and Eli Tan
Is Big Tech Facing a Big Tobacco Moment?
Back-to-back courtroom losses have put technology giants, including Meta and Google, in uncertain territory as they face lawsuits and bans on teen users.
By Andrew Ross SorkinBernhard WarnerSarah KesslerMichael J. de la MercedNiko GalloglyBrian O’Keefe and Ian Mount
March 26, 2026
Some legal experts wonder if Big Tech is staring at a Big Tobacco moment, a reference to how cigarette makers had to overhaul their businesses — at a huge expense — after courts ruled that some of their products were addictive and harmful.
“We’re in a new era, a digital era, where we have to rethink definitions for products based on which entities might have superior information to prevent these injuries and accidents,” Catherine Sharkey, a professor of law at N.Y.U., told The Times. She added that the “implications” of those verdicts were “very, very big.”
“This has potentially large impacts on other areas in tech, A.I. and beyond that,” Jessica Nall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents tech companies and executives, told The Wall Street Journal. “The floodgates are already open.”
Meta and Google plan to appeal. The companies have signaled that they will fight efforts to make them drastically redesign their products and algorithms.
+++++
I am banned from Facebook. I've written about it many times.....
Facebook wouldn't post my essay today, "The Blob, Wendigo, and Capitalism." Sometimes my Substack article posts and sometimes it won't.
The billionaires really have to go!!!
I just left the message with my Senator Adam Schiff. The corruption is so deep and wide. Here we are today. I’m trying to understand how to live in all of this painful insanity. Our world truly is a jungle. Maybe I shouldn’t care about corrupt billionaires? In fact it is feeling absurd to even read about them. I am an ant, living in the big, wide and deep jungle. I do not matter and this may be my biggest strength.
The key to revoking Section 230 is Children. Even hard core Christians, MAGAts, get anxious over the mental health and well being of their children
That's a true to beat, loud and continuous. This ruling against Zuckerberg is only a start, let it not die down but amplify.
William,agree 100% . How best to amplify.
That's a good point. Everyone wants to protect children.
As nothing good happens outta Ruski troll farms, just cut that mafia state outta the loop. Sever them from the internet.
As for the freakazoids like Zuck who rake in billions? TAX the F outta them.
Donnie flaunts that he's a MEDIA-WHORE. [That plus race hate is his secret sauce.]
But Billy C. [Mr. Lewinsky] will never admit that he was a MEDIA-ESCORT.
VOTE
SEND BORON [deliberate sp] and the newly eligible for combat, the aged-in ERIC to war.
Liquor stores and bars can be closed for serving underaged customers; restaurants can be closed for having roaches in the kitchen. The harm done by social media can be just as bad, if not worse, yet they are guaranteed as a right to remain in operation.
Jeffrey,its because they have a shitload of money and can buy off regulators and and Wall Street loves them. Find out who the large institutions who own Meta stock,call them and tell them we are identifying those firms and will boycott them. Unfortunately the financial markets are always the behind this kind of behavior.
Actually...Meta has been down and the shareholders have lost about 25% in the past 6 months and 6% today. If you are a shareholder you have standing to sue if you've lost money because this was a contingent liability that could be avoided.
I cited to the NYT article that compares this to what happened to the tobacco industry. Sued into bankruptcy.
Agree they need to get ride of Section 230. No longer needed to spur internet growth. Time to hold big social media to same standards as all other companies.
Europe has demonstrated that what is needed is not just the elimination of 230, but also replacement with new guardrail laws like requiring algorithms designed to detect and censor things like hate speech and sexual seduction. One thing to keep in mind is that troll farms exist because they have an audience that finds their hate and lies appealing. They reinforce their distorted and hateful worldviews. Yes, sites groom kids, but that is likely because kids have already been pre-groomed by their unwitting families.
As a kid in the 1950s racism was subtly infused into our little brains. I was 9 when Ed Sullivan premiered Elvis. My mother turned to my sister and me, asking, "Wasn't that awful? A white boy singing nigger music? You didn't like it, did you!" Frank Sinatra Elvis was not. LOL. But my folks loved Black Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, so they likely did not view their remark as racist any more than we kids did.
However, 4 years later, the grooming was complete. I conned my parents into sending me to a Catholic prep school in downtown Chicago as a way to escape from all Whiteflightburbia grooming (not just racism). When I shared the news with my pals, they chorused, "Don't let the niggers getcha." By that age, the entire neighborhood had been subtly groomed to be racist, even though there was not a single black face in our town of 9,000.
Wow... congratulations for surviving the Golden Age of America. After JFK was killed, it all started going down hill and we all never looked back until 2016 - 2025. NK III was possibly a wake-up call, but there are still 320+ million of us out there who need to wake up. When only 2/3 of us vote, despots-in-training take advantage of that, just like the cigarette people who know how to hook fellow Americans on nicotine, alcohol, etc. and make big money doing it. I am glad that my end of the life rainbow gets shorter.
I watched Timothee Chalamet's "Dillon" a while back. In one scene, he was walking down a NYC street with his guitar, reminding himself that he had to get to a CORE meeting. That blew my mind. I was sort of a mascot to the Chgo Northside CORE, and I used to bring my guitar along at the ripe age of 16 back in 1963 to play hootenannies now and then. I thought, OMG! Dillon and I had something in common.
One night, while playing at a CORE meeting, an old geezer (he was 50 back then) arrived later in the evening with an old beat-up electric guitar and a small amp. I was asked to play backup with him - strum along. Later, I learned the name of the guy - Muddy Waters. How many white teenagers ever played a duet with Muddy Waters?
There is no escaping getting tracked and ID'd today......
Therefore the limited capabilities when 230 came into being are no longer a problem. They can do the clean-up. We need to make them; we need our consumer protections BACK.
All kinds of people and things are kicked out of their "castles" these days. Commenters here have said they are banned from Facebook. Probably had something to do with telling the truth in their case.
The whole Technate of America concept of ruling the Western Hemisphere is that the Tech Bros and Crypto Creeps do not want rules, especially from a democratic government. Save our democratic values, because these psychos have NONE. See you in the streets on Saturday. Hope you can bring a friend.
Alis,great post and you are so right,the Technate do not want rules. They do not believe in Democracy,do anything they like and Wall Street,CNBC love it. There isa solution to the META issue,find a way to get Mark Zuckerberg who obviously knows what damage to children instagram and facebook have done. This issue has been around for a long time.
When are Americans going to really fight back? "GET MARK ZUCKERBERG " should be on every parent's "ToDO" list.
Section 230 should be done away with tomorrow,find out who supports it,go after them.
The same for Musk ,and of the course our "Nazi" in the white house. He's not my president.
The NSA data center at Bluffdale, UT was the subject of a 60 minute expose. It is humongous beyond the scope of anything you can imagine, and stores all electronic communications, not only of the US, but the world, anything it captures, and with the powers of AI it sniffs everything at the speed of light, Including our comments on substack and Facebook.
To see how fast AI is, it has access to everything that has appeared on the internet, including your emails. I asked a question about origins of a DNA SNP and the answer was essentially derived from an email I sent to others,
Ask google AI any question, and if it doesn't have an immediate answer, it comes back "thinking". It is not thinking it is scouring the data base at the speed of light.
I recently watched Adolescence a mini series on Netflix about a 13 year old kid who murders a young female classmate from school due to the effects of extremely toxic internet influence. It was so intense, I thought about it for days after I saw it. I hope this ruling is a start to bringing about change.
When are we going to take a closer look at how capitalism or our tolerance for its abuses contribute to or cause these kinds of problems? When can we take time to examine how our operating systems and their flaws, faults, and issues harm all of us and how all these things are perpetuated?
Henry A. Giroux points out in an article entitled, “Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Authoritarianism: Challenges and Possibilities” (2019) that “oppression is learned”. Critical pedagogy for Giroux is controversial and even revolutionary. He says, “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism” (my emphasis).
Giroux gives the example of the elephant which is chained at a very early age to a post driven firmly into the ground. The elephant “learns” it is not free to move, and later, when it is no longer chained, is unaware of its freedom to move outside an established range. Another example is given in the book, “The Mis-Education of the Negro” by Woodson, who explains that, once a person is made to believe he is inferior and that he should only go to the back door, he will even create a back door if there is none there and only ever use that door.
Giroux teaches that “critical pedagogy” can free students from the learned confinement instilled in a repressive environment. But he is not on the same superficial level as so many others.
Great leaders and great teachers are inspirational. But inspiration while one is locked in a closet with no means or hope of escaping confinement does not take one far unless or until it offers a plan for getting out of the closet. If the closet is one’s own mind, somehow one’s mind must be liberated from the sensations and belief of its confinement.
A little earlier in, speaking about language used, Giroux says,
“If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hanna Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. Language can be a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehood and injustices.”
Students are routinely exposed to language which is ambiguous or which suggests ideas that should have been eradicated long ago. Quoting Giroux further, he says, “…it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties, civil liberties, a market economy and a market society, and capitalism and democracy. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it” (my emphasis).
Thom Hartmann will love this. In another section, Giroux says, “…critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged citizens.” Does that not sound a lot like what I have been saying for years? The educational conditions he refers to are conditions which are NOT based on the arbitrary authority demanded by the written laws, regulations, and rules in attendance law.
You might be wondering why we don’t have more of the influence of a Bernie Sanders, Ike Eisenhour, Thomas Jefferson, or Fredrick Douglass in our schools. We would have to get the Arnie Duncan’s, the Bill Gate’s, and the Diane Rativich’s out first. Not by eliminating the Department of Education, but by eliminating the power and influence those people hold by virtue of the legal framework made necessary by attendance laws
This next paragraph from the paper is a must. Giroux states unequivocally,
“A disconcerting number of academics and teachers in the current moment continue to join forces with right-wing pundits to argue that classrooms should be free of politics. Their falsely shared conclusion is that schools should be neutral spaces in which matters of power, values, and social justice should not be addressed and should not enter the classroom. The usual scornful accusation in this case is that teachers who believe in critical pedagogy indoctrinate their students. In this supposedly ideologically pure and politically neutral world, pedagogy is reduced to a banal transmission of facts in which nothing controversial can be stated, and teachers are forbidden to utter one word related to any of the major problems facing the society. Or, teaching is reduced to an imagination killing exercise of teaching to the test-which is code for a pedagogy of oppression”
There you have it. There is indeed indoctrination. However, it is an indoctrination of political correctness from those with money and influence and those who inordinately fear change, controversy, or conflict. No one has listened when I have said this. Perhaps someone will pay heed to these more eloquent expressions of the same ideas.
Before I approach a million words, let me get back to where I started. Giroux is highly inspirational. I had encountered his writing earlier. But it is all ‘pie-in-the-sky’ and academic, and the revolution is invariably stopped before it starts. These ideas, no matter how cogent or essential cannot take hold or gain traction under a paradigm where power is assigned to state authorities by virtue of the necessity for total compliance with attendance laws. Giroux may not yet have realized that is where we must go. But his brilliant insights are going nowhere as long as those unconstitutional laws still apply.
There is no question that schools play a major role in shaping society.
If orthodoxy, behavioral modification, obedience to authority, and busyness as opposed to intellectual exploration are emphasized in schools, however, (and they are), they will never be the engines of innovation or democratic progression. Quoting from the article again, he says, “Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, while often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.”
The alarm bells have been ringing loudly. The harsh criticisms were coming from all directions and they were relentless since well before Dewey. Yet y’all put on earphones and turned up the volume of the comforting music or the mantra of the schools promising to cure the ills of society. You let the hum-drum of pleasant and uncontroversial sounds relative to schools lull you to sleep and you dreamed of a bright future for students whose spirits were in fact being subdued and whose rights and liberties were systematically repressed and denied. This is why, as Giroux says, “It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for making education central to politics.”
In the same paragraph he states, “In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without informed and critically engaged citizens.
It would be negligence here to omit the following description: “…pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, Muslims, and others considered excess, wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion.” He did not specify exactly to what that portrayal referred. To some, applying those items to schools may seem an exaggeration. But, a look at what is all over social media and to hear what is being said openly in many places, one should be careful to exonerate the schools without consulting the reams of literature with respect to images acquired.
Giroux speaks about “the politics of educated hope”. I have not even scratched the surface and this will require intensive work and attention to connect some of the dots. He clarifies by saying, “…we are not arguing for a naïve optimism, but for a militant optimism that stems from an understanding of and resistance to the very contradictions of the capitalist system itself.” If Thom would find time for some of this literature, he would be better able to steer us in a better direction.