>From the US perspective, the problem is that the pile of excrement that is the Republican party in the US
It never ceases to amaze me that people can say something like this with a straight face. As if "the Republican Party" exists in a vacuum, and that the Democratic Party is some bastion of widely held ideals. This is why some people, like me, consider Silicon Valley hopelessly out-of-touch.
Nobody claimed the Democratic party was a bastion of ideals, you added that straw man.
Why is it that someone criticizing the Republican Party immediately makes you want to attack the Democratic party? It seems they are their own entity and can be criticized as such, no both-sides-ism needed.
It’s a pretty ignorant comment considering Nixon and the Republican Party was the one who got the US out of Vietnam and the Democratic Party was the one that escalated the conflict.
I'm not from the US, but the republican party is always held up as the "bad guy" in these conversations. Let's not forget that the original Obama campaign was the first to really leverage social networks and online advertising to great effect, the republicans then turned around and did the same but better with Trump. When the Democrats did it, it was praised as innovative and clever the future of election campaigns, when the Republicans did it, it was apparently the end of the world and the internet should be burnt to the ground for facilitating this terrible thing to happen.
==when the Republicans did it, it was apparently the end of the world and the internet should be burnt to the ground for facilitating this terrible thing to happen.==
Here, you have proven my point by creating yet another straw man. Ignoring that, you never established that they actually “did the same” thing, you just make the claim. I don’t remember seeing evidence of foreign bot farms supporting the Obama campaign on social media.
That said, maybe the comment was more about net neutrality, municipal wi-fi or expanded rural broadband. All actions to bring cheaper internet to more people that US Republicans have historically been against. You know, policies that actually impact the internet and it’s access/usage.
Roger Ailes built a media empire with the explicit idea that the reason why the "elites" (read: Republican politicians) had their hand forced on Vietnam was that they didn't control the propaganda around it sufficiently.
He is quite explicit and straightforward and is on the record about this.
If you don't acknowledge that Ailes set out to build a propaganda empire, you are already behind the 8 ball before we even start discussing the Internet.
It never ceases to amaze me that people can say something like this with a straight face. As if "the Republican Party" exists in a vacuum, and that the Democratic Party is some bastion of widely held ideals. This is why some people, like me, consider Silicon Valley hopelessly out-of-touch.