Will never cease to enrage me how much of all of this can be traced back, directly and cleanly, to Bill Clinton's administration

Federal Telecommunications Act (1996), signed by Clinton at the behest of corporate media, essentially creates the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon, empowering Gingrich and serving as proof of concept for Fox News

Limbaugh begets Alex Jones, Fox News the dapper white nationalists, the conspiracy theorists. Consolidated news media means less of a chance at meaningful resistance to a poisoned discourse

The same Act deregulates the ISP market and allows cable companies to monopolize the industry, stunting access and creating the digital divide, which impacts historically marginalized folks most of all

It also over-broadly absolved online platforms of any responsibility over user-generated content, which is why Facebook can allow political ads containing straight-up lies

If you take a look at this thing it's one of the most corporate-friendly pieces of legislation in history, and it has quantifiably harmed this country, continues to

It's not like the effects were totally unpredictable; we protested and whatnot. But cable companies, pre-streaming video, and consolidated telcos were SO powerful then

Have a look at how our government once recognized the harm of these monopolies, and how this and other legislation set the conditions for the monopolies to return https://twitter.com/nototally/status/1148707345226055680

I mean... that's staggering, and it's only gotten worse since then, because the FCC's been allowing basically any merger these companies can think of

Everything's all fucked up, but it didn't just come from nowhere. This shithole of a country and its morally bankrupt free-market capitalist joke of a democracy actively created all of this, in exchange for more money and more power for a very small amount of people