Day: October 11, 2015

Matt Drudge, an early internet content aggregator who became a Beltway darling during the "get Bill Clinton by any means" era, recognizes social media as a threat (hat tip mbm):

“Stop operating in their playground, stop it,” said Drudge [on the paranoid Alex Jones Show --tm], asserting that people were being confined by what the likes of Facebook and Twitter defined as the Internet as a result of this “corporate makeover” of the web.

“I’m just warning this country that yes, don’t get into this false sense that you are an individual when you’re on Facebook, no you’re not, you’re a pawn in their scheme,” concluded Drudge.

In a related development, someone in the EU actually attempted to do something about Facebook scheming:

When, in 2013, the Austrian law graduate Max Schrems filed a data-privacy-infringement lawsuit against Facebook after Edward Snowden had revealed the full extent of the company’s collusion with the NSA, little could he have imagined the impact he would end up having. Now, two years later, the European Court of Justice has ruled that the Safe Harbor Agreement that has governed EU data flows across the Atlantic for some 15 years is no longer valid.

Lauren Weinstein, concerned about any crimp in global information flows, believes the EU's ruling is disingenuous -- that ultimately Euro-governments just prefer to do their own spying and don't want US spooks treading on their trenchcoats. But Max Schrem's do-something approach is vastly preferable to the US left's "gosh darn it, let's start a Facebook group and see what we can do to positively change Mark Zuckerberg's emotional vibes from within."
Somewhere between bringing a lawsuit that boomerangs into repressive court rulings and "working from within" lies the simple message of Matt Drudge: stop operating in their playground.