Posted on 01/12/2018 9:15:28 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
Today, as you read this, my website Right Wing News is shutting down operations. It has been around since 2001, but became massive a few years ago because of Facebook.
Remember the mainstream media liberals going out of their minds because the Russians reached almost 150 million people with their $100,000 Facebook ad buy? In July of 2015, in just a week, the Right Wing News Facebook page reached 133 million people. Because conservatives were sharing content they were interested in, little ol’ Right Wing News (well, I guess nearly 3.6 million Facebook likes isn’t so little) was driving the same amount of web traffic as some of the biggest newspapers in America. Barack Obama’s Facebook page was 36 times bigger than our page; yet we had 7 times as many people talking about our content.
Ironically, that’s a big part of what killed the website.
You see, what Facebook giveth, Facebook can take away. So, why would Facebook want to kill extremely successful Facebook pages that its users enjoyed?
One of the reasons goes back to something I told multiple reporters during the 2016 election. I believe that all of the thriving right wing Facebook pages activated large numbers of what I like to think of as “instinctive conservatives.” You know, the sort of people who love God, guns and America, but who don’t follow politics day to day, read National Review or consume any of Milton Friedman’s books. From what I could see on Facebook, that group of people LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Donald Trump and I believe they were responsible for getting him the GOP nomination and probably even got him over the hump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I think the liberals that run Facebook came to that same conclusion.
Before the election season got into full swing, Facebook had already made some mild downgrades to reach. Afterwards, when liberal mainstream media outlets were screaming about Russian ad buys and “fake news,” Facebook systematically, methodically reduced the reach of all its pages with each algorithm change. By then, most of us understood where it was going long-term. If Facebook killed every conservative page overnight, there would be a huge outcry. On the other hand, if Facebook slowly strangled us to death, we’d fade away and would people even notice?
Yes, non-political pages were affected, too, although conservative pages got it worse and, yes, there is a business incentive to do this. When people click on a news story, they leave Facebook. On the other hand, conservative pages like Right Wing News were able to become so massive because we are putting out content an awful lot of people on Facebook want to read. That’s no longer going to be allowed in part because we’re putting out a message that the liberals who run the company don’t want out there.
In addition to that, as someone who has been working for a living in this business since 2005, let me drop a little truth bomb on you. We are now in a very oversaturated, corporation-dominated media environment. If you don’t already have a legacy website that captured traffic years ago and held onto it, huge traffic you can bring in from elsewhere, or millions of dollars to spend, your chances of getting a political website off the ground today are infinitesimal.
That gets to the heart of the biggest problem conservatives don’t realize that they have.
Social media IS the new public square. It’s the place you go when you want to reach out and find an audience.
…….Except Facebook has for all intents and purposes announced that it’s killing off pages. So much for having a conservative voice there.
As James O’Keefe just revealed in his latest sting, Twitter felt comfortable banning pro-Trump accounts and one of his unwitting sources said, “Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” Charles Johnson, who’s a conservative gadfly, is currently suing Twitter because it admitted that he didn’t violate Twitter’s policies; Twitter just wanted to get rid of him. It’s good to know that if you’re conservative, you can spend years building up an audience on Twitter and the liberals at Twitter can arbitrarily throw you off their service because they decide they don’t like your views.
Speaking of building up an audience on a platform for years and then getting screwed, YouTube is also doing that to conservatives. YouTube arbitrarily decided that many conservative videos should be demonetized. Yes, there were profane or gross liberals demonetized as well, but just presenting a conservative point of view was enough to have YouTube cut people off. Dennis Prager’s PragerU is suing YouTube for exactly that reason. Just to give you an example of the sort of content YouTube thinks is over-the-line, here are some of the videos it demonetized: Why America Must Lead, The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder, Why Did America Fight the Korean War, and The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians. Of course, YouTube would claim that it’s not censoring the videos because it didn’t take them down. However, people are not going to spend large amounts of time and money putting together high-production-value videos if they’re not going to be allowed to make money on those videos because of their political beliefs.
Furthermore, YouTube’s radically liberal parent company Google is being sued by James Damore for targeting white men and conservatives. Incidentally, Damore was fired from Google after he wrote an internal memo for other employees to read (something that is common at Google) called, Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion. Don’t kid yourself because if you are conservative, “diversity” and “inclusion” don’t include you. If you want a more concrete example of that besides its heavily biased search engine which pretty clearly prefers liberal sources over conservative ones, the latest controversy with Google is that if you search for many prominent conservative websites, it has a “fact checking section” next to them while many sketchy liberal websites don’t.
Many of these companies effectively became monopolies because they worked hard to serve ALL of their users. Now that they completely dominate their spaces in the marketplace, their liberal political views are impacting their services. As Robert Conquest once said, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing” and that is a much bigger threat than most conservatives realize.
It’s easy to say, “Build your own social media website and compete with them,” but we’re talking about companies with billions of dollars and monopolistic control of their markets. The obvious solution would be to break these companies up or to at least acknowledge their importance to modern society and regulate them heavily, but conservatives don’t seem to be interested enough in either solution to even THREATEN to do this.
We’ve already lost the schools, Hollywood and the mainstream media. What happens when you can’t get out conservative opinion via social media because they block, shadow ban and demonetize everyone who gets any traction? What happens if they put rules in place that essentially make expressing conservative opinions something that gets you kicked off their service? You’re pro-gun? Sorry, not allowed. You don’t like gay marriage? Get out of here. Criticizing Black Lives Matter? Out of bounds! We can hope for the best, but that seems like the future we’re headed toward and it’s one that will leave conservatism weaker than ever.
Class action lawsuit in the billions of dollars. Enough to bankrupt Twatter and Fecesbook. Every single conservative can sign on to the lawsuit and any others who wants to get a few bucks after the lawyers take most of it. We don’t care because the goal is to slay the evil giants.
Yes, they are privately owned businesses, but so were the baker’s businesses and look what happened to them. Kill them with their own blade right through the heart of what hurts them the most.
They basically have a monopoly right; so use that. Force them to be broken up into little pieces so they are rendered moot. Sweep the pieces into a dung heap and don’t look back except to throw a match on the gasoline soaked pile.
Let GAB, a non ideological Twitter type site, take over from Twatter. Slay the beasts legally and finally.
Prayers offered up for our country.
This was one aspect of net neutrality that was never discussed. One bad choice in the design of the Internet did contribute to its decline, and that was choosing 32 bit IP addresses. If we had not run out of these IPV4 addresses, the Internet would have been substantially more peer-to-peer oriented, as it was originally. That was the architecture's original design.
The idea of Google or Facebook dictating content is complete blasphemy to those who designed and engineered the Net, most of whom, if not conservative, could be at least characterized as libertarian.
I guess in the past some conservative refused to make Zuck a birthday cake on moral grounds. /sarc
Zuck is a Traitor, and hopefully will be dealt with as one.
I really do not understand the power of Facebook. I do have a Facebook account and its only purpose is to reach out and find long lost friends of many years ago and this has been most successful.
I get all my news from political sites both left and right on the internet. I know both sides. I even watch TV and it pisses me off but I do watch it. Fox News pisses me off the least and the others piss me off in the extreme.
Please explain to me why Facebook is so powerful. I really do not understand.
I understand this is unfair.
Legal actions necessary maybe can be taken.
Sounds like it is time for a conservative Facebook type of company.
Sounds like Patreon, bitchute, and gab.ai offer at least some of the features of the companies mentioned in the article.
Maybe this loss here can be turned into a strength with a slew of powerful internet platforms for conservatives emerging as a result.
All kinds of people trying to improve technical skills and their ability to communicate.
FR is as close to Facebook as I would ever get. Thank God for FR, and if we ever get slammed, then I will really be worried.
Say something on Facebook and all of your friends see it. If anyone else comments on it then all of their friends may see it. So each comment may multiple the viewership of the conversation by hundreds or thousands of people.
They control key web technologies and buy up or copy any potential competition. This is a violation of antitrust laws.
The current Congress and president eyther puts an end to these abusive monopolies or there will be no more conservative for a generation or more. Google and Facebook are monopolies they must be broke up and sued out of existence. Their key technical advantages must be license out
Leftists have made social media such a vile cesspool since Trump won. Why would any conservative with a life to live want to swim in that?
“Any organization not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing” is John O’Sullivan’s axiom. He was a regular contributor & editor of National Review long before it imploded.
I don't use Facebook.
The power of Facebook is that it caters to the overwhelming number of low information voters, gossips, busybodies, and airheads in the world.
Imagine a high school clique on steroids and growth hormones. My guess is that most Facebook users are airhead women who exchange cat pictures with their friends. Nothing wrong with that of course. Whatever floats your boat.
But when these people are manipulated by Soros, it is a formidable reservoir of "approved and acceptable" public opinion. In social settings no one wants to be perceived as a bigot, so baloney like "Black Lives Matter", "Hands Up Don't Shoot", "Trump Is Racist" is readily adopted through shaming and peer pressure. Groupthink is what Facebook is good at.
ping
BFL
The TRUTH is, Facebook is THE FAKE STORE FRONT for a profiling and surveillance operation run by the CIA/globalists/Deep State masquerading as a social media platform.
Feed the globalist's police state pig called Facebook? No thanks.
I recently joined Facebook.
I have found that its ubiquity means it is highly skewed towards absolute conformity of opinion.
There are many millions of people who use it far more than you do. They get headlines, news, opinion, everything - from it. Moreover, as a platform where all your opinions are open and public for eternity to everyone you know, whether closely or casually, it automatically becomes highly skewed towards blandness and conformity. Facebook can then manipulate that conformity.
Facebook also appears to prefer to ban the owners/moderators of conservative FB groups, leaving them unmoderated and unowned, and at the mercy of leftie trolls, who quickly destroy discussion with their trolling and spam.
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