Verizon doesn’t just want to deliver your content. Like many other big corporations it wants to make content too–to make sure you’re consuming the right stuff. The company is recruiting staff for its new tech-lifestyle site, SugarString. It’s going to be “best-in-class” according to the site’s about page.
But you can’t get everything there. According to an article in The Daily Dot, journalists being recruited were warned that they’d need to avoid articles about things like net neutrality and other issues that Verizon has a giant stake in. Verizon told Newsweek that the bans on certain subjects aren’t true. But journalist Patrick Howell O’Neill, who wrote the Daily Dot article, said he was recruited and “the premise and rules behind the site were explained to me in a series of messages throughout the day. I declined the job offer.” If Verizon would rather readers not see a lot of opinion on the subject of net neutrality, could it apply subtle filters to subscriber content that’s not on SugarString?
