It is claimed that Einstein warned that a time will come when the rich means of communication will be controlled. Here is the truth
Claim:
Albert Einstein He warned that the time would come when the very rich would control the means of communication so much that it would be almost impossible for ordinary people to make informed decisions.
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Context:
Many social media posts have paraphrased what Einstein wrote in an essay published by the independent socialist magazine “Monthly Review” in May 1949. Although the passage Einstein wrote amounts to the same thing as the various paraphrases, it wasn’t writing something. it would happen in the future, but what was happening in 1949.
For years, social media posts have claimed that Albert Einstein, the revered 20th century physicist, warned that the time would come when the very rich would control the means of communication so much that it would be almost impossible for ordinary people to make informed decisions. The most recent example we found of this claim, as of this writing, was posted on Facebook on March 20, 2024:
https://www.facebook.com/thomas.zaremski/posts/pfbid026MAPMp6DWV1DAuxRYTZ32zbEMtm3TkUfAxwM2dayX2HUzKqgETYytyCZHVkKWKSXl
We also found another Facebook post that included Einstein’s alleged warning from February 2020:
It included a screenshot that purported to show a post from X (formerly known as Twitter) from two days prior, which read:
Albert Einstein warned in 1949 that a time would come when the very rich would control the means of communication so much that it would be almost impossible for ordinary people to make informed decisions and democracy would be broken.
We live in the times Einstein warned about
We found social media posts attributing the quote to Einstein on Tic Tacin addition to other publications published on Facebook and X regarding the complaint. Variations of this claim have appeared on these social media platforms. For example, Einstein reportedly said, “There will come a time when the rich will own all the media and it will be impossible for the public to form an informed opinion” on Facebook. We’ve also received emails from Snopes readers asking about this claim as well.
Einstein wrote a essay entitled “Why Socialism? » for the first issue of the independent socialist magazine “Monthly Review”. Published in May 1949, the article included the following paragraph which said (sentences bolded for emphasis):
Private capital tends to concentrate in a few hands, partly because of competition among capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of larger ones. small. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital whose enormous power cannot be effectively controlled, even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all intents and purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not sufficiently protect the interests of disadvantaged sections of the population. Moreover, under current conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is therefore extremely difficult, and in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to reach objective conclusions and make intelligent use of his political rights.
The bolded quotes in the paragraph above actually amount to the same thing as the various paraphrases we found on social media: it would be difficult for people to make informed, objective decisions because the sources of information would be controlled by private capitalists.
But importantly, Einstein was not writing about something that would happen in the future, but about what was happening in 1949. This is a key detail that the various paraphrases got wrong.
As such we have given the claim — that Einstein once warned that the time would come when the very rich would control the means of communication so much that it would be almost impossible for ordinary people to make informed decisions — a “Mixture” note.
We have already checked other quotes allegedly said by Einstein, which you can find here.
Sources:
Allen-Kinross, Pippa. “Einstein argued for the richness of controlling communication and that harms democracy.” Complete factFebruary 27, 2020, https://fullfact.org/online/Einstein-warning-rich-control-communication/.
Einstein, Albert. “Monthly review | Why socialism?” MonthlyMay 1, 2009, https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/.
Lee, Jessica. “Albert Einstein: Quotes He Never Said and Other Facts.” SnopesFebruary 15, 2022, https://www.snopes.com/collections/albert-einstein-collection/.
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