Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Big Tech’s totalitarian ties
American tech companies have played a key role in helping China spy on and suppress its citizens, according to an investigation by The Associated Press. On Tuesday, the outlet reported:
Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
The discussion of American tech companies’ assistance for China’s digital police state came up earlier this year, thanks to a whistleblower’s claims that Meta (formerly Facebook) had once developed censorship tools for China. The AP report clearly shows that the list of tech companies that have aided China’s totalitarian crackdowns doesn’t end with Meta — and, in fact, that it includes many of the most popular tech companies in the U.S.
Read more at The Associated Press.
Trump dines, MAGA world whines
Donald Trump hosted a dinner for Big Tech executives at the White House, where the business leaders lavished him with cringeworthy praise — and the sight made some of the president’s biggest fans sick.
Read my post on the dinner at MSNBC.
Right-wing media dispute resolved
Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan secured control of his father’s conservative media empire after a yearslong dispute involving his siblings. The news suggests Murdoch’s empire will continue operating with a conservative bent.
Read more at NBC News.
MAGA influencer infighting
The Bulwark’s Will Sommer published a report on the online infighting that has broken out among right-wing influencers, stemming from allegations of paid shilling for India’s government.
The report pairs well with this piece of mine from last week, on conservatives’ turning against India amid Trump’s ongoing feud with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Read more at The Bulwark.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reactivated a controversial contract with a spyware technology company that has ties to former Israeli government officials and has developed technology that has been used to target journalists and activists. The move is a reversal of the Biden administration’s decision to place the contract with Paragon Solutions on hold. Read my report on ICE’s contract at MSNBC. And check out Rachel Maddow’s segment on the deal here: The European Union hit Google with a $3.45 billion fine related to its ad technology, spurning Trump’s threats to institute more tariffs on European nations over their regulation of Big Tech companies. Read more at Ars Technica. CNN’s Brian Stelter took time to note the blatantly racist framing some people were using to characterize a fatal stabbing in North Carolina that has been politicized by Trump and MAGA influencers … and conservatives weren’t too happy. Watch a clip of Stelter on CNN here: 👇🏼 How local news coverage of a sickening crime in Charlotte reached the president and became national news — and yes, the racist filth on this website is one relevant aspect of the story https://t.co/jEiQXyUG43
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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