This is what happens when you hire Gawkerites. The stink gets on everything.
Thiel is no stranger to inconsistency. For decades, he cultivated a reputation as a radical Silicon Valley anti-statist; in 2009, he wrote that Facebook, in which he was an early investor, might “create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.” Yet, six years earlier, he had co-founded the most aggressively “statist” company in the 21st century: Palantir, the global surveillance company used, for example, to monitor Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal. Can you really claim to uphold individual freedom if you’re profiting from a mass-surveillance government contractor?
How can you claim to uphold individual liberty if you’re monitoring Iran’s compliance with a nuclear deal?
If you define an Islamic terror regime developing nuclear weapons as a form of individual liberty, then sure you’ve got a problem. If on the other hand, you’re sane…
Facebook did indeed create space for new modes of dissent. That’s why lefties, post-election, went after Facebook and are still demanding that it censor conservatives, on an individual basis, and also ads by conservative candidates.
Virtually every Facebook scandal invented by the media in the last few years has been some variation on the theme of “Conservatives have too much space on Facebook”. Whether it’s fake news, Russian bots, or lying ads, it all comes down to the same thing.
But sure, Palantir monitoring Iran is a threat to individual liberty.
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