The threats to freedom of thought aren’t coming from the government these days, but from corporate America, says a columnist in the Wall Street Journal. Kind of a groupthink, which Psychology Today speaks of as the result of members of a group valuing “harmony and coherence over accurate analysis and critical evaluation.” “It causes individual members of the group to unquestioningly follow the word of the leader and it strongly discourages any disagreement with the consensus,” the group explains. It’s
Mark Epstein who is noting Google and Facebook account for 84 percent of all digital advertising outside China. This, he claims, gives the companies enormous leverage to censor content. Indeed, websites which are reliant on Google’s ad revenue have even removed articles after receiving warnings from the company, according to the Journal. The dependence on Google ad revenue is also creating perverse incentives for “clickbait” and draining traditional news producers of the revenue needed to invest in serious reporting at news sites. READ MORE
