New York Times Publishes Anti-Google Rant, Doesn't Mention the Author is a Facebook Board Member
aristarchus writes:
Over at Gizmodo, a report on a piece published by The New Yorks Times that fails on full disclosure.
The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google's largest competitors.
Thiel first blasted Google as "treasonous" last month, saying that the FBI and CIA should investigate the company for working with the Chinese government. The tech investor even asked if Google had been infiltrated by Chinese spies, a highly inflammatory charge that he didn't substantiate. Thiel has now followed up his anti-Google remarks in a new piece for the Times praising President Donald Trump and railing against "globalization."
(Disclosure: Thiel secretly bankrolled a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, which bankrupted Gizmodo's former parent company, Gawker Media.)
Thiel's central argument is that anyone helping China to develop artificial intelligence technologies is assisting China's military because, he says, all AI should be seen first and foremost as having military applications:
Could it have something to do with this? Or from earlier coverage by Gizmodo,
Theil has a decades-long list of headlines behind him. He was a PayPal co-founder, the first outside investor in Facebook, a rare San Francisco Bay Area cheerleader, tech adviser for Donald Trump and a man who is known to spend his multibillion-dollar fortune on ventures like immortality, the singularity, and getting kids to drop out of college, among other things. Palantir is a developer of increasingly common predictive policing technology that's used by law enforcement agencies around the United States. And based on Palantir's opaque contracts with Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, its tech is reportedly helping fuel the agency's accelerated deportations under President Trump.
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