Tell Facebook and Google: We Deserve Fair Contracts

Tell Facebook and Google: We Deserve Fair Contracts

Tell Facebook and Google: We Deserve Fair Contracts

Add your name to The Nation’s open letter to Facebook, Google and other user-driven technology companies imploring them to enact fair and transparent contracts.

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While companies such as Facebook and Google rely on users for content and profits, as Ari Melber explains at thenation.com, they use one-sided “Terms of Service” contracts to exclude these same content providers from negotiating control of their pictures, text and personal data.

TO DO

Add your name to The Nation’s open letter to Facebook, Google and other user-driven technology companies imploring them to enact fair and transparent contracts.

TO READ

In this Nation essay, Ari Melber, Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger team up to call on social media companies to recognize user rights: “Social media companies say consumer privacy is just the cost of doing business. But what would happen if they actually had to bargain with users on equal footing?”

TO WATCH

This video conversation explores a recent unilateral move made by Facebook that could, according to Baker Hostetler attorney Gerald Ferguson, allow the socila media company the unfettered right to sell user data to any advertising agency Facebook has a stake in.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.

Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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