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Omni College Plus Up to October 2019

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me, because the person I had been chatting with had a crush on the man I went out with and then<br />

denounced me on WeChat. Many Chinese American business owners with whom I am<br />

acquainted have had similar experiences, having been ‘denounced’ on WeChat by rival business<br />

owners who wanted <strong>to</strong> eliminate their competition.<br />

What Americans do not, in my opinion, fully appreciate is that something very similar<br />

could happen here in the United States, and perhaps already has. Amazon is an amazing<br />

company, and it makes life easier for Americans. But it has such a <strong>to</strong>tal monopoly on online<br />

retail that, should it decide <strong>to</strong> endorse certain political views, it could easily do so—and do so<br />

without people even knowing it. It could simply refuse <strong>to</strong> publish certain kinds of books or let<br />

them be published but direct traffic away from them, and it could do much the same with video<br />

entertainment and music (Gaffari, <strong>2019</strong>). Growing up in China, I came <strong>to</strong> learn that any<br />

entertainment medium can be politically weaponized: pop songs, car<strong>to</strong>ons, newspapers, blogs,<br />

children’s s<strong>to</strong>ries—anything.<br />

Also, a company such as WeChat or Amazon can be used as away for the government <strong>to</strong><br />

carry out agendas ‘off the books.’ It is obviously not easy for a Sena<strong>to</strong>r <strong>to</strong> ram through a bill that<br />

prohibits certain kind of speech or that steers trade in a certain direction, since he is likely <strong>to</strong><br />

meet with resistance from other lawmakers and also from the general public. But all of this<br />

pressure can side-stepped by making a deal with an executive at a big tech firm—and with<br />

extremely effective results (Wang, <strong>2019</strong>). Amazon and Facebook are private companies and are<br />

therefore under no legal obligation <strong>to</strong> give equal ‘air time’ on their platforms <strong>to</strong> all political<br />

views; so there wouldn’t be much standing in the way of a CEO at such a company who wanted<br />

a certain bill <strong>to</strong> be quashed or a certain Presidential campaign <strong>to</strong> take a nose dive (Gaffari, <strong>2019</strong>).<br />

In addition <strong>to</strong> having the ability <strong>to</strong> serve as proxies for political agendas, tech-giants such as

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