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.
Facebook is dying. I only check it because many niche products I enjoy reach their customers directly through. The number of posts by individual “friends” has dropped off dramatically in the last year, and we are 50-somethings. My kids don’t even look at Facebook.
Try switching it up to Fuzzie and Mag, and see if the, uh, algorithm still flags it.
I do not participate in social media other than Free Republic for this very reason. It’s a cesspool. If there were a conservative equivalent to these sites, I’d be all in.
there was a time you could search free republic in parentheses and add the words of the title or in the thread and you would get pages of FR links.
Gone. All.
Well I have done searches way after the 2003 date and received many many searches. Google spends a lot of time crawling FR. But they are not indexing the way they used to. Just gathering information.
But from the succeeding post #27 I did a google search for the sentence: “I realized a couple of years ago what FB was doing and how it was luring the naive into it’s net”. Google found the post.
__
bizarre.
of course the goog only shows you what it wants each individual to see. It gives you results based on your past searches. Manipulated information.
Federal Anti-Trust laws may be of use here.
“They know he won because of the relative freedom of the internet, and are focused on removing that obstacle to their complete control of the media.”
That prospect terrifies me.
Before the Internet, Kennedy was able to steal the election from Nixon, and if you said anything about it, you were regarded as a nut.
They were able to drive Nixon out of the White House for no reason. Reagan was only able to resist them because of his ability to speak directly to the people. They drove Marcos out of the Philippine presidency.
Of course, it’s not a yes/no thing. We still had Xlinton and Obunghole, both two-term presidents.
With the Trump campaign, though, it seemed as though the Internet was maturing as a conduit for uncensored information.
The left, the deep state, all factions of the forces of evil, know that you are right, and they are desperate to choke off our communications channels.
And then 13 more grafs of disbelief. Huh.
Ad-based, not subscriber-based; something straight out of 2009 (3-column stacked portrait boxes ugh) - clearly not a viable business model in 2018. Overreliance on FB start to finish. And I say that as the first last always to describe FB as the shithole country of the internet.
To: C19fan
"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."
magic fingers?
To: StAnDeliver
Gage: "Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?"
Mark Zuckerberg: [stares out the window] "No."
Gage: "Do you think I deserve it?"
Mark Zuckerberg: [looks at the lawyer] "What?"
Gage: "Do you think I deserve your full attention?"
Mark Zuckerberg: "I had to swear an oath before we began this deposition, and I don't want to perjure myself, so I have a legal obligation to say no."
Gage: "Okay – no. You don't think I deserve your attention."
Mark Zuckerberg: "I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try, but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention – you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing." [pauses] "Did I adequately answer your condescending question?"
Most of these companies have no or low profits. FB earned 5.16 dollars per share last yr and is expected to make $1.94 this year. That is not quiet 0.13 percent return though FB does not pay a dividend.
Yeah we’ve probably crossed paths - the problem of conservatives being unwitting tools for leftist propaganda is pretty much my pet peeve.
Where we may differ is that I don’t really think conservatives need their own alternative propaganda machines to counter the leftist ones.
I say we elect conservatives, pass conservative legislation, appoint conservative judges etc. but skip the media blitzes, the protests, the marches, the celebrity causes - that stuff is for leftists.
The best way I’ve found to make my point is with the example of local politics: in my very small suburban town, there is a mayor, a town council, various committees, chairs, officers, boards - and they all wind up being liberals even though the townsfolk are fairly conservative. Why? Because leftists like to get involved, run for office, so they can mind other people’s business.
Whenever I complain, people (both conservative and liberal) always say the same thing: “if you don’t like what’s happening, why don’t you get involved, speak up, join a committee, start a cause, run for office?”
But wait a minute - the thing I don’t like is all the people getting involved, joining committees, championing causes, running for office, minding other people’s business. So, how is it going to help if I do the same thing?
This is what I call the libertarian’s dilemma - you can’t get rid of the bully so your only choice is to become the bully.
I say screw that - and screw starting our own media outlets so we have our own set of talking heads and our own fake news that’s fake the way we want it.
I think conservatives want to be left alone to live their lives in peace - like you said - there is rarely any real news content that anyone needs to know in order to live their lives.
I would very much like to see CNN disappear, but I’m not sure I want anything to take their place.
Some the of upper levels of taxpayers will have a tax increase but the vast majority will get cuts. Do the math using the Gross Household Income as a basis.
You need to get rid of the idea that corporations pay taxes, they don’t because the alleged tax is passed on to consumers. Business taxes are just hidden individual taxes.
Yes, I agree but then blame it on the Byrd rule, not the corporate tax rate cuts.
Look at it this way: if the police catch the burglars that robbed your neighbor’s house, but not the burglars that robbed your house - you have a a legitimate complaint - namely that they should get off their ass and catch the theives that stole from you.
But if you complain that the police shouldn’t have caught the burglars that stole from your neighbor - that’s not the right complaint (IMHO).
Yes, it sucks our taxes weren’t cut but any tax cuts are a good thing.
That Byrd rule is crap - and so are all the supposedly nonpartisan scoring agencies that fail to account for the growth impact of tax cuts, and fail to account firthe fact that the government is way to big.
Blame the leftists that overtax and over spend, don’t blame the people who cut taxes.
Facebook has something for everyone. I have never had any of my political rants censored and don’t read things I am not interested in. There is a ton of information there and lots of interesting posts some of which are hilarious.
It is a tool and I make full use of it. It is true that I am on there less but that is just because I have periods where I just am not interested. Days may go by without my presence, a few hours of not being on FR is insufferable.
That would take care of 0.01% of what FB should apologize for.
Start our own social media sites, and do the same to libtards who post there. So long as Facebook, Twitter et al. want to be that way, turnabout is fair play.
The same can be said for Google.. no privacy WSE.. as I type way on my Samsung..
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