Billionaire globalist George Soros has vowed to destroy Internet giants Facebook and Google because they are “obstacles to innovation.”
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the philanthropist predicted that the social media…
Billionaire globalist George Soros has vowed to destroy Internet giants Facebook and Google because they are “obstacles to innovation.”
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the philanthropist predicted that the social media giants’ “days are numbered” and claimed their mere existence represented a threat to democracy.
Guardian reports: “Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.
“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”
In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”.
“The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’. There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”
Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.
“This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,” he said.
The companies, which he described as “ever more powerful monopolies” are unlikely ..
