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I thought Republicans were for small government and were anti-censorship.
All the tech ceos are on the trump train this time around, it was a specific strategy of the trump campaign. Using words like “caved” as though they were pressured and not already aligned with the government is a disservice.
What a surprise, IIRC in Hong Kong there was a platform that was fully decentralized. HK protesters used it on their phones during their uprising and China could not block it.

Maybe it is time people move to that. Sadly I forgot its name or where to get it. Of course the app stores could block that too.

There is always USENET I guess. I wonder if there are apps on Cell Phones that can access USENET and format the posts to work with the small screens. And of course reformat posts to comply to USENET formatting requirements (ie: wordwrap at Col 70).

The Censorship-Industrial Complex is troubling no matter which party benefits.
Including Apple. If it's that easy, how long do we really expect Advanced Data Protection to be free from government backdooring?
Now that it’s targeting dems, maybe can get some bipartisan support to limit government power here.
Large corporations, especially publicly traded ones, have zero power to resist their sovereign government. Publicly traded companies are heavily regulated and dependent on their stock price, making them trivially vulnerable to political retaliation.

I’m not sure why people look to corporations for political resistance. It’s the wrong place to look. They’re not structured for it and it’s not their purpose.

Licking the boot provides shareholder value.
I wonder how much the tech bros are going to regret having bent over for Trump in 2028 when a Democrat is sitting in the Whitehouse looking at rolling out some retribution using the new legal tools the Trump team succeeded in securing during his second term. We might see some heavy regulation descending onto the industry as a response.

On the other hand, the long term trend of billionaires and large companies getting their way politically will likely continue.

Isn't Democrats retaliating just the status quo for them?

Democrats have been picking on the poor tech billionaires ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when they were thought to be at fault for getting Trump elected.

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What I find most interesting about this is that US tech companies are doing what people accuse China of doing.

In fact, theoretical Chinese informed was the entire (performative) justification for the Tiktok ban. The reality of course was that TikTok wouldn’t censor what the US government wanted to censor.

The irony is that these companies are sowing the seeds for their own destruction and the US government is undermining US tech dominance, which is a potent foreign policy tool.

I think Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at Tim Cook’s capitalization. I once trusted Apple to be more user-forest than any other platform. Now? I think I’d trust Huawei more.

Now I experience doubt when I read this article whether the journalist actually interviewed anybody, or just cut and pasted ChatGPT.
Of course they do. We gave the DHS (and any other government agency) far too much power and they flex it.

We have so many agencies that can regulate businesses to death without any congressional intervention that it would be beyond idiotic to stand against them.

Not to mention that it's been proven again and again that the American populations attention span is far too short to do anything meaningful about the aforementioned powers / abuses.

Maybe it's age, or the attention I've paid to the erosion of liberties post 9/11. but is this headline a surprise to anyone?

As an anecdote, a few days ago Kagi's Research (Experimental) model had no problem generating critical images of Trump and Vance. But yesterday it expressly refused to generate the likeness of Pam Bondi.

(This is surely the underlying component models' censuring, not Kagi's.)

Gotta demonstrate loyalty to the king
Why are we expecting businesses to act against the interests of the entities that allow them to operate?