Microsoft’s browser (Edge) now has an add-on to rate sources of news. Green = trustworthy and Red = untrustworthy. Gee, I wonder why they picked those colors. You can enable or disable this feature. Still, it’s a dismaying innovation. Why? The last thing thinking persons want is to have someone else do their thinking for them. I hold some sites in high esteem and others in low esteem, but in many instances the high-esteem site prints hogwash and the low esteem site may publish something valuable. Furthermore, even when a site is wrong, it still may be valuable to read for a host of other reasons; and a site may be right and still be saying some things that are objectionable. In short, informing oneself is not a simple matter of reading and believing The New York Times, which NewsGuard rates as trustworthy; and it is not a simple matter of not reading Breitbart, which NewsGuard rates as untrustworthy. LRC readers know this already because they think for themselves.

This big-tech innovation further aligns big-tech with censorship and with establishment news sources that contain immense amounts of editorializing within their news stories. As big-tech censorship spreads a blight of wholesale suppressing of sources and speech, people are less and less likely even to learn to think for themselves when faced with contradictions and propaganda. Those who do not think for themselves are more and more likely to be the victims of thought-control and thought-suppression. Big tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Microsoft more and more join all the other established business interests who influence government policies. In big-tech’s case, the influence is on the information that is generated and spread to the public, a matter of vital social and political concern. Allegations and instances of Russian influence are small potatoes compared to big-tech’s influence.

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