I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”
It reaffirmed my belief that a healthy portion of either side doesn’t actually have any principles. They just care that their side is winning and the other is losing.
I’m a moderate that a lot of people confuse for a conservative, and I say nail big business to a wall. I think the Microsoft-Activision deal should be declined just on the nature of the size of each business, not because it meets some arbitrary standard of anti-competitive behavior. Businesses as big as Microsoft do not need even bigger market coverage through owning more production houses. The whole point of the anticompetitive corrections is to avoid these giant conglomerates that have their hands in everything.
Microsoft already owns video game production houses. They produce one of the most popular home consoles in the world. They own a lot of the ecosystem that most people use on a daily basis on their pcs, namely Windows OS, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.
Why does one company need to have a bigger market share than this?
Keep in mind this works both ways. The progressive outrage machine is arguably even more active than the conservative machine. Look at the reaction to Sound of Freedom. An extremely neutral movie when you consider the politics of its content. But the main actor is a conspiracy theorist, so I guess that means the movie is a far right propaganda vehicle? By that logic most movies are far left propaganda vehicles.
A similar phenomenon has always followed Trump around. Media gets insane hits for anti-Trump content. Some people built entire careers off of reporting on his tweets. The more shocking and exaggerated they could make the content, the more money came flooding in. That’s why so much of the coverage of Trump was sensationalized and uncharitable. It’s also why moderates couldn’t help but root for him. There’s only so much the established powers that be can lie about someone before you want to support him regardless of his character flaws. It helped that his policies were generally great, focusing on anti-war and populist market adjustments.
This is why you should always take the news with a grain of salt. They’re all out to make money, and they all have agendas.