Who Elected Google and Meta and Made Them King?

Micah Sifry
4 min readAug 22, 2022

Without any of us ever having a say, we’ve become subjects of quasi-governmental powers who know the intimate facts of our lives.

The call to protest Meta’s presence at Netroots Nation 2022

Friday morning, during the annual Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh, a crowd of about 100 attendees gathered in the exhibitor hall to loudly protest the presence of Meta at the event. The giant company was a Premier Sponsor of the conference, which brought together several thousand liberal and progressive activists for three packed days of trainings, panels and keynotes. Brittany Williams, an organizer with the Facebook Users Union who helped organize the protest, wrote her fellow attendees, “Facebook should not be here. They just helped prosecute a teen and her mom for seeking an abortion. Facebook also allowed anti-abortion advocates to use data from abortion seekers to target them with anti-abortion ads. Facebook has aided in genocide in Ethiopia and India. They have meddled in elections in India. They are being accused of human trafficking of workers in Kenya. Facebook should not be allowed in our progressive space -PERIOD.”

A sign posted at Meta’s booth at Netroots Nation 2022

At the exact same time that the anti-Meta protest was pulling together, a similar number of Netroots…

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Micah Sifry
Micah Sifry

Written by Micah Sifry

Co-founder Civic Hall. Publisher of The Connector newsletter (theconnector.substack.com)

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