How Facebook Turned its Market Success Into a Culture War on America | Mises Wire

In twenty-first-century America, millions of Americans Christians and social conservatives especially are finding that the nation s most influential institutions appear to be implacably hostile toward them.

These institutions include universities, public schools, the news media, and government bureaucracies. Moreover, corporate America has increasingly embraced a posture of hostility toward groups considered to be right wing or conservative.

Recent examples are numerous, to say the least. Major League Baseball, for instance, recently moved its all-star game out of the state of Georgia with the explicit purpose of punishing voters and policymakers who supported policies MLB didn t like. These objectionable policies were mostly supported by conservatives. Meanwhile, YouTube owned by Google bans content creators who express opinions Google s employees and leaders disagree with. These opinions are usually ones we would consider to be conservative or at least anti-Leftist. Twitter and Facebook employ a similar bias when actively intervening to ban users and opinions deemed unacceptable by corporate personnel.

In other words, corporate power is being used to wage ideological battles far beyond the usual issues of minimizing the firm s tax burden or avoiding regulatory compliance costs. Corporate America has chosen a side in the culture war.

This evolution from market entrepreneur to exploitive plutocrat illustrates a problem with the interventionist state in a mixed economy: economic power tends to be converted into political power. Moreover, so long as consumers continue to pour resources into powerful firms through the marketplace, these firms  exploitation of competitors, taxpayers, and ideological adversaries is likely to continue. 

via mises.org