Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see
If you&#x27;re not always looking for independent alternative sources of information and cross-checking claims from different sources while also looking for internal self-consistency then of course you&#x27;re going to end up with a skewed perspective on reality engineered by some group of professional propagandists.  Whether these PR specialists are working for governments or corporations in China, Russia or America is sort of besides the point.<p>There is a set of skills that&#x27;s needed to objectively classify information that&#x27;s found on the Internet or in other media sources (yes including books).  Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age, although certain groups (religious fundamentalists, corporate advertisers, government authoritarians etc.) would oppose this for obvious reasons.<p>The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn&#x27;t seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they&#x27;d prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of &#x27;acceptable sources&#x27; and who don&#x27;t have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.