Posted on 11/02/2019 5:00:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
Twitter has caved to the pressure from the left and announced that it will no longer run political advertisements, including any for candidates running for president in 2020. That’s because Democrats view free speech as a threat and want to regain their iron grip over “The Narrative.”
After Donald Trump’s historic victory in the 2016 presidential election, liberals embraced all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain how Hillary Clinton lost an election that virtually everyone expected her to win. Unable to accept the election results as a repudiation of their corrupt candidate and the Democrat Party’s legacy of failed policies, they insisted that the Trump campaign must have cheated.
They ultimately settled on “collusion with Russia” as their hoax of choice, but even after spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a two-and-a-half year investigation into that “#resistance” fantasy, the best that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of Democrat lawyers could come up with was evidence that a handful of Russians had posted some memes on Facebook — which didn’t stop Democrats from going apoplectic over the supposedly grave threat to our democracy posed by the online sharing of photos with humorous captions.
Apart from exonerating President Trump of the scurrilous allegations leveled against him by vindictive Democrats, the main takeaway from Mueller’s investigation was that Democrats are extremely concerned about the power of social media to circumvent the standard media channels they control. Legacy media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times are vital to the Democrats’ political power, using their influence to create an “echo chamber” in support of liberal viewpoints.
Over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, the left has pursued this strategy more aggressively than ever before, deploying its legions of loyal liberal journalists to craft a Democrat-friendly narrative at every opportunity. The unsuccessful effort by liberal media outlets to defame Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh should have given them pause, but instead they sunk even lower by embarking on a nationwide smear campaign against a high school student, Nicholas Sandmann, demonizing him as a bigot based on nothing more than his decision to show his support for the president by wearing a MAGA hat. As these appalling cases of journalistic malpractice illustrate, today’s mainstream media act more like public relations firms on the payroll of the Democratic Party than independent seekers of truth.
President Trump’s revolutionary use of social media, however, broke the left’s stranglehold on the flow of information and allowed our campaign to fight fake news in real time.
As the president’s campaign manager, one of my most important duties is making sure that we provide potential voters with the real facts in response to the disinformation put forth day in and day out by the Democrat-controlled media. Advertising is an effective way to do that, albeit not nearly as effective as President Trump’s own Twitter account.
It’s no secret that we’ve worked hard to develop the most sophisticated digital operation in the history of American politics, and the Democrats are clearly terrified of our growing ability to communicate President Trump’s positive message of unity, prosperity, and American greatness. By preventing our access to advertising, Twitter is trying to put its thumb on the scales ahead of the 2020 presidential election, even though that means forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue.
They want to take on the role of liberal gatekeeper in the digital age, but at what cost? Their naked political bias is irresponsible to their users and shareholders, and is another sign of their ideological delusion.
Democrats aren’t used to competing against their political opponents on a level playing field, so they want social media companies, especially Twitter and Facebook, to carry water for them just like the legacy press has done for so long. Democrat presidential candidates are even calling on Twitter to ban President Trump from the platform altogether. Democrat lawmakers on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are threatening to dismantle Facebook if the company doesn’t police “hate speech” on its platforms.
By “hate speech,” of course, they really mean “conservative speech.” If you don’t think liberals will be allowed to get around restrictions against political advertising on Twitter, you’re kidding yourself. If I’ve learned anything during my time working for President Trump, it’s that liberals refuse to play by the rules they set for conservatives.
No wonder Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats are cheering Twitter’s decision to ban political advertising. Because social media executives are in bed with the Democrats and most of their employees are far-left ideological zealots, Facebook and Twitter reliably use their power and influence to undermine conservatives and advance a radical liberal agenda. This is especially true when they claim that a given decision is motivated by considerations of “fairness.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey effectively acknowledged as much in his statement defending the ban on political ads, in which he argued that “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”
In other words, Dorsey thinks that political candidates should only be able to communicate with voters if their messages are vetted by and filtered through mainstream media gatekeepers. There’s no doubt that he would gladly ban President Trump from the platform completely if he thought he could get away with it.
Unfortunately for the left, Twitter advertisements were only a small part of our strategy for 2020, so Twitter’s ban is going to hurt them a lot more than it hurts us. We have plenty of other advantages, including a data infrastructure the Democrats simply cannot compete with, that will enable us to communicate the president’s message even more effectively than we did in 2016.
The Democrats view free speech as a threat to their political ambitions — and they’re absolutely right. But banning political ads on Twitter won’t be nearly enough to save the Democrats in 2020.
Because they want to go back to 1973 when ones like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather would serve up one hit piece after another on Nixon and/or Agnew on the evening news without any serious questions or challenges.
Social media are ready for the election. They are all set to suppress anything that is favorable to Trump and to promote anything that trashes him.
The election will be the dirtiest yet, thanks to the dems.
But you know, Commie Rats, as you have said before, diversity makes us stronger . . . diversity if thought and speech, that is.
Open and thoughtful DEBATE OF ISSUES makes us a better nation, NOT Balkanization, victim politics and deceitful narratives. The commie Rat leftists are evil to the bone
“...independent seekers of truth...”
The MSM has never sought the truth. They have always been in business for profit and as far as they are concerned, the truth is what they say it is. Thus, I haven’t read a newspaper or watched network news for the past 20 years.
There must be a way around social media censorship. For example, those who can need to write commonsense articles at their own expense and go door to door in their towns and neighborhoods distributing them. This could be effective, especially if you are well a well known resident. Also, in my neighborhood, we have ways to communicate privately with one another on our phones and computers, for all kinds of reasons.
Some communities have Neighborhood Watch groups, study groups, book clubs, bridge clubs. Get bold and start conversations because if you ever could find something to agree on, it is now, especially in fly over country. An added benefit to becoming active in a group would be of great value if suddenly the internet was lost for some reason. Think about how scary that would be. We need to think outside the box. We do not have to let these revolutionaries who have lost all common sense and morality to chart the course of our nation for us. Most people can become active in some way. Now is a great time to volunteer to work on behalf of your candidate, hopefully, a conservative, which brings you in contact with a lot of nice people and adds joy to your life. I am already a very active person, but that is what I intend to do. Some of us do not have a lot of money to give, but we can give our time and we can communicate.
They can shadow ban conservatives. They won’t be able to muzzle our free speech or our message.
All of this will backfire on Democrats in 2020.
Democrats only have low informed and idiots who listen to them.
...already a very active person, but that is what I intend to do.
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Would you keep us posted?
In my area, the progs have been doing this for over 30 years, even before internet and smart phones. I am curious if you find embedded *change agents* already within your groups and, if so, how they respond to your activism.
Another tack taken by the left is to institute small ad hoc groups ostensibly committed to innocuous activities like flowers on the boulevards or quarterly neighborhood potluck parties. These are recruiting actions that also serve as bonding experiences and a way to identify those immune to such blandishments (so as to exclude them in future). From these activities, the few true believers are identified, then invited to very exclusive get-togethers where the real objectives (electing progs/taking over boards/changing hearts and minds)are strategized.
One of our premier change agents here began a private barter list, originally mailed, that eventually served to announce esoteric meetings and workshops and traveling organizers who utilized some sort of teaching format. He is aging out and the entire enterprise is now a private FB group.
If you know professionals who are sympathetic to conservatism, they often have a private, very personal list of clients/patients identified as “one of us”. This is a good sort of secondary vetting apparatus.
This sort of activism is long overdue. Hopefully, it’s not too late for our side to participate.
This is samizdat and it works.
So the keepers of the platform want to be the controllers of the content? There will be no political ads, but they cannot restrict free speech which includes political discussion. If they do restrict the free discussion amongst users, are they then also responsible for libel, and other misdeeds carried out on the platform and not restricted?
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