On MSNBC on Monday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) argued that democracy is unraveling and one example was Facebook ending fact-checking and argued that people kill democracy by controlling the media and Democrats have “logistical work to do to make sure that there are fair-minded platforms that hear all messages.”
Murphy said, “You’re watching the unraveling of our democracy. It’s not about to happen. It is happening right now. Elon Musk got into this speech a commitment to go to Mars, right? There is a dispute inside the scientific community, inside NASA, as to whether we should be going to Mars or to the moon. It makes Elon Musk an even richer man if the choice is to go to Mars. He got that. Mark Zuckerberg went down to Mar-a-Lago and got instructions to stop fact-checking on Facebook. When asked, Donald Trump said, yeah, I’m sure he made that change because he was afraid of what I might do to Facebook when I was president, right? This is the unraveling of our democracy, because what is happening before our eyes, literally, on that stage today, is that the billionaires who control huge parts of this economy are trading favors with Donald Trump — behind closed doors, often — where none of us can see it. And what is even worse about the moment today is that the first official policy that Trump is going to pursue here in Congress is a massive tax break for those billionaires and those corporations, paid for by devastating cuts to regular people, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, education programs. This is a government for, by, and of the billionaires. It’s an old-fashioned corruption. And you saw it on display inside the United States Capitol today.”
He added, “How democracy dies is a fairly simple story: First, you intimidate your opposition into staying home. And that’s what he’s doing by endorsing political violence today and threatening to lock up the people who investigated him over the past ten years. But then you control the media, you cut deals with all the people who own the information channels, and you tell them to just chill out on criticism, pump up my own narrative, and, in exchange, I’ll make you a little bit richer. That’s exactly what’s happening today.”
He further stated, “We’ve got to make sure that, if places like Facebook and Twitter aren’t venues where people can hear us, that we’ve got alternative forums where the truth can get out. So, we’ve got work to do to organize the public. We’ve got logistical work to do to make sure that there are fair-minded platforms that hear all messages. But that’s the work we’ve got to do. We’ve got to do it, beginning today, with urgency.”
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