Truest statement of the week

Corporate social media is not neutral. It’s not especially social either, except that like so much else in capitalist society, the product is produced by ordinary people – our social interactions, our entertainment choices, our networks of friends and associations and all the rest which is captured by outfits which claim it as their private property to be sold to the highest bidding marketers. Social media is on the one hand a deceptively named marketing contraption, and on the other an actual tool of ruling class propaganda and information suppression.
The aggregate of human interaction hijacked by Google, Facebook, Amazon and their lesser cousins is in moral truth as much the commons as are nature and the environment. It’ is impossible to imagine a truly just world where the public conversation doesn’t belong to the public, where these things belong to and are run any other way than in the interest of all the people rather than that of a handful of billionaires and their stooges. That place and time is some distance away yet, but there are things we can do today.

-- Bruce Dixon, "It's Getting Real – Google Censors the Left. And Us." (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).