When Government Demands Your News Feed: The FTC's Propaganda Push
I’ve been sitting here this morning, staring at my phone in disbelief. The Federal Trade Commission – you know, the agency supposedly tasked with protecting consumers and maintaining fair competition – is now apparently in the business of telling Apple News which political outlets it should promote. Specifically, they want more Fox News and Breitbart stories pushed to users.
Let me just say that again for those in the back: a government agency is demanding a private company promote specific political content.
The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. This is coming from the same crowd that’s spent decades banging on about “small government” and “free markets.” Remember all that rhetoric? The party that was supposedly all about getting government out of people’s lives? Well, here they are, quite literally trying to insert themselves into what you read on your morning commute.
Someone in the discussion threads pointed out that Fox News had to argue in court that no reasonable person would take them seriously – and they won on that argument. Tucker Carlson’s defence was literally that he shouldn’t be held accountable because obviously nobody would actually believe what he says. Yet here’s the FTC treating them as a legitimate news source that needs more promotion. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
And Breitbart? A publication that was explicitly created to “discredit Clinton,” according to its own founder, and which once maintained a section specifically for cataloguing “black on black crimes”? That’s what the FTC considers essential reading that Americans aren’t getting enough of?
The whole “both sides” argument falls apart pretty quickly when you actually look at the track record. There’s a reason fact-checkers disproportionately flag conservative news sources – it’s not bias, it’s that these outlets are disproportionately publishing rubbish. Facebook’s own internal papers revealed this years ago. Their staff kept flagging stories from conservative sources because they were overwhelmingly more likely to post fake news, unsourced claims, and obvious fabrications. The solution, naturally, was to hire right-wing executives who issued blanket protections for preferred sources. Problem solved, I suppose, if your goal is propaganda rather than truth.
What really gets under my skin is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. These are the same people who claim to worship the Constitution and the First Amendment. Yet here they are, with the FTC suing NewsGuard for rating news sources, going after Media Matters for exercising free speech, and now demanding Apple promote specific political content. It’s almost impressive how quickly “free speech absolutism” transforms into “speech I agree with only.”
The thing is, I actually believe in a marketplace of ideas. But a marketplace requires honest actors, good faith participation, and some baseline agreement on what constitutes reality. When one side of the political spectrum has built an entire ecosystem of outlets that won a legal case by arguing they’re entertainment rather than news, that’s not a marketplace – it’s a con.
Working in IT, I’ve watched the tech giants evolve from scrappy innovators to massive corporations that’ll bend whichever way the political winds blow. Tim Cook rushing to create a gold-plated award for Trump, Google bending the knee, companies scrambling to become oligarchs in this new authoritarian structure – it’s depressing but entirely predictable. They care about their shareholders and their bottom line, full stop.
The scarier part is what this signals about where we’re headed. Trial balloons like this aren’t random. They’re testing the waters, seeing how far they can push before actual legislation follows. It’s a well-worn tactic: float an outrageous idea, gauge the reaction, then either push forward or retreat slightly and try again later. The fact that a government agency is openly naming preferred political outlets and demanding they receive preferential treatment should alarm everyone, regardless of political affiliation.
I’ve already blocked Fox News in my Apple News feed – you can do that, by the way, though apparently it still surfaces with a note saying it’s blocked, which is irritating in its own right. But that’s not really the point. The point is the principle. A democratic government shouldn’t be in the business of telling private companies which political viewpoints to amplify. That’s not regulation, that’s not consumer protection – that’s state propaganda.
The midterms can’t come soon enough. If people don’t wake up to what’s happening here, if we don’t see massive pushback at the ballot box, we’re looking at a very different country. One where “small government” means a small number of people controlling everything, where “free speech” means freedom for approved speech only, and where regulatory agencies exist not to protect consumers but to enforce political orthodoxy.
Look, I’m not naive enough to think any news aggregator is perfectly neutral. Algorithms have biases, human curators make choices, and every platform has its blind spots. But there’s a massive difference between imperfect neutrality and government-mandated propaganda. What the FTC is demanding crosses that line in spectacular fashion.
The question now is whether Apple and other tech companies will have the spine to tell the FTC to get stuffed. Based on their track record of kowtowing to authoritarian demands – whether from Trump or various foreign governments – I’m not holding my breath. But we can make it clear that if they cave on this, we’re done. Cancel subscriptions, delete apps, make noise. Because once government agencies start successfully dictating media content, we’ve lost something fundamental.
The party of “don’t tread on me” has made it abundantly clear: they meant “don’t tread on me” – treading on everyone else is not just acceptable but required. We can’t let them get away with it.