Rush Limbaugh’s Brilliant Solution To Social Media Monopolies (Mark Zuckerberg Should Be Terrified)
There has been a lot of discussions recently on how to address the massive amount of power Silicon Valley’s big tech companies have over the flow of information, access to voters, private information, and our lives in general. Both the right and the left agree they seem to have simply too much power, but what no one anywhere seems to be able to come up with is what, exactly, should be done. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on his radio show this week came up with a brilliant, and simple solution.
It’s time to bust them up.
Limbaugh referred to an op-ed written in USA Today by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who proposed it’s time to look back to the anti-trust era. “Teddy Roosevelt busted up the trusts, among them Standard Oil, the Rockefeller family, and J. P. Morgan, who was on the verge of owning the United States financial markets,” said Limbaugh.
“You know, I don’t like monopolies, and I really hate government intervention, but this social media stuff is getting totally out of hand,” he added.
He then cited a recent poll that said that 42% percent of Americans believe that Russia and Trump colluded to win the 2016 election, even to the point of tampering with votes.
“This has been one of the most successful hoaxes that has ever been run in politics,” he said, pointing the finger directly at big tech for helping orchestrate “one of the most successful disinformation campaigns ever.”
He explained that, despite the conspicuous lack of evidence to the contrary, social media companies have directly participated in perpetuating the myth that Trump and Russia somehow influenced the 2016 election.
Directing his attention back to massive tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, he said: “They have become monopolies. But more importantly, they have become monopolies of information. The old Drive-By Media, old mainstream media had a monopoly on the news, and it was a profound monopoly, three networks, and all the newspapers.”
“This is far denser. The tentacles of this monopoly are woven much more deeply into the grain of our culture and society,” Limbaugh continued. “And they are every bit as partisan as anything ever has been. They are exclusionary. Anything to the right of Karl Marx is obliterated, is not permitted. It is simply eliminated from Facebook, Google, search results, you name it, and the impact that it is having on our culture is deleterious.”
Limbaugh agreed with Reynolds that it is time to take a page out of Roosevelt’s book and break these companies up, as the power they have over the flow of information is far too great to ignore. Reading from the article, he said:
“‘Big monopolies aren’t just an economic threat: They’re a political threat. Because they’re largely free of market constraints,’ because they don’t have any competition, ‘they don’t have to put all their energy into making a better product for less money. Instead, they put a lot of their energy into political manipulation to protect their monopoly.’”
“These are people who are uber-leftists,” Limbaugh pointed out. “Whether you’re talking Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, they are all uber-leftists, and they are not just setting up their systems here to make money. They’re setting up their systems to influence public opinion.”
“‘Today, things look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s era,’ with Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan. ‘A few monopolies occupy much of the tech world: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google … They gobble up potential competitors, as Facebook did with WhatsApp and Instagram.’”
“‘These new tech monsters have a one-two punch that Standard Oil (didn’t have): Not only do they control immense wealth and important industries but their fields of operation … give them direct political power that in many ways exceeds that of previous monopolies of the Teddy Roosevelt era,” he continued.
“This is exactly right,” Limbaugh commented. “They should be busted up. They are monopolies controlling the flow of information.”
“The left loves to throw around the word ‘fairness,’” he continued. “They’re obsessed with it. There isn’t any fairness. There isn’t anything approaching fairness in the social media universe. Busting them up as monopolies is not to facilitate conservatism. It is to help American consumers by providing competition and so forth, which they, these companies, are all shutting out by buying them up.”
No one on the right likes government interfering with the private business sector.
But when a handful of companies in the private sector have so much influence over the way people receive and share information, it’s time to step up and consider the threat they pose to our republic.
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Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes
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Why Facebook Welcomes Regulation
RUSH: I don't know if you're familiar with this if you heard about it. You probably have. One of the co-founders of Facebook, a guy named Chris Hughes, no longer with Facebook, had this gigantic piece in the New York Times yesterday that just savaged Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Yeah, he says Zuckerberg's a fine guy, nice guy, very kind person. Used to be a good friend. Haven't seen Zuckerberg since 2017. But this is way out of control. Facebook is too big. Facebook needs to be broken up just like AT&T and Standard Oil was. Facebook needs to be broken up, Facebook one division, WhatsApp another division, Instagram another division. Break 'em up, they are a monopoly, nobody can compete with 'em, they need to be regulated, we gotta break 'em up, otherwise, Mark's got too much power. Mark has more power and more influence over politics than anybody who's ever had, it's unfair, it’s gotta happen, do it now.
And what really got this guy off was this Cambridge Analytica thing. I have to tell you, Cambridge Analytica, that was the Mercers found a way to mine the Facebook membership in a way that benefited Donald Trump. The left is out using Facebook the same way Cambridge Analytica did, they just haven't been as big and successful.
But because Zuckerberg didn't stop Cambridge Analytica and because Zuckerberg didn't stop the Russians from running their anti-Hillary ads – they actually were running anti-Trump ads if you want to know the truth, and the Russians didn't start buying ads on Facebook until after the election, but that's neither here nor there.
Let me tell you something. Facebook, have you seen their response? See Zuckerberg's response? No. He wants to be regulated. Chris Hughes may have a point. We do need to be regulated. Come on in and regulate us. Now, why do you think Zuckerberg wants the government to set up some oversight bunch that's gonna regulate social media?
Because he will never have any competition. He doesn’t have any competition now. But it's no different -- remember how we pointed out how crony capitalism works. Let's say you're Walmart, and you've got a gazillion thousand million dollars and your nearest competitor is Costco and they've only got a gazillion dollars.
What do you do as Walmart? You come out and favor the minimum wage going up to a hundred bucks an hour, whatever it is, you're in favor of it. Why? Because you know Costco can't afford it. You can. So you can put your competitor out of business by getting in cahoots with the government to raise the minimum wage when everybody thinks, wait a minute, Walmart, private sector, they ought to be opposed to minimum wage. Not if it will run their competitors out of business.
It’s no different. Zuckerberg and Facebook, “Please, regulate us, please, 'cause it'll make it impossible for startups to get started if the regulation starts from the moment –" you know, Facebook's already established, regulate the hell out of them all you want, you can't change anything. The regulation would end the opportunity for any competition. The regulation would guarantee Facebook's perpetual monopoly status. That's why they're for it. And don't think anything other than that.
No, I'm not saying Chris Hughes is running a scam and is actually hoping and doing Facebook's dirty work. Not saying that. Not saying he's in on it. I’m just saying that Facebook welcoming regulation is no different than, in my hypothetical example, Walmart eagerly supporting a minimum wage increase.
If your competitors can't do business under the new rules, if your competitors can't do business while being -- by regulation, we're talking about speech, hate speech, the government gets to define it. Hate speech, fun speech, political speech, offensive speech, dull speech, dry speech, whatever it is. Facebook's already established. Nothing's gonna possibly be done to them. They own it, and by regulating the business, what competitor is gonna want to join that market when you face regulation from the get-go?
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