A recent series of tweets by hip-hop star Kanye West has sparked a firestorm of controversy and is exposing the mind-numbing power of the two-party paradigm.
The post Kanye West Controversy Proves How Well the Left/Right Paradigm Works to Control Thought appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Online giants such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have been known to censor and suppress free speech that isn’t leftist in nature. But it’s worse than that according to The Media Research Center, it’s a war against ideas.
Obviously, that’s harmful in and of itself. It denies humans their most basic right: to be free to choose. Of course, no one is saying one shouldn’t face the consequences of a wrong decision, but making the call for someone before they may even weigh all options for themselves is the height of a controlling master; one who seeks to become an even more tyrannical authoritarian.
The Media Research Center’s stunning new report titled “Censored! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech” takes a long hard look at the pervasive and deeply unethical censorship of conservative, libertarian, or voluntaryist viewpoints by major tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Basically, if you aren’t a leftist, your ideas of liberty and freedom cannot be heard, according to those same tech giants.
Among the many findings, Media Research Center analysts describe many of the tools used as nothing less than indoctrination via censorship, aka, a war on opposing ideas. Such as, how these major tech companies work with groups that hate the right like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The report also details that 12 of the 25 United States-based members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council are liberal and just one is conservative. It also focuses on “shadow-banning” and how it affects all of us – yes, even those liberals whose ideas are not currently under attack. A Twitter engineer even bragged how about this nefarious practice could suppress and silence conservative voices.
But it isn’t only conservatives that have had concerns about censorship. It’s anyone not professing leftist or pro-government ideals such as opposing a bigger and more powerful government or survivalism suggestions. People are actually being arrested for posts that aren’t violent on social media for having a clear liberty-minded ideal toward a government-free society, but in the meantime, preparing for the worst.
All this is going on while the entire state of California is seeking full-blown online censorship and the banning free speech altogether. Meanwhile, people flee the state of California to escape the tyranny of the tax burden and a horrifying housing situation exponentially amplified by the leftists already in power there.
But of course, according to media giants, it’s “hate speech” to suggest that bigger and more government is not the solution to the problems wholly created by the government in the first place. Those who believe tyranny cannot come to the United States should take a look around because it’s already here and as of right now, has a strong hold on most of the population.
To say that censorship and free speech is a problem only conservatives have is incredibly disingenuous. Anyone who doesn’t tow the line and back up the mainstream media’s official narrative conveniently packaged and handcrafted by the government are all staring at the effects of tyranny right in the face.
President Donald Trump seemed so sure of himself yesterday when tweeting that Russia should “get ready” for a strike against Syria. He appears to now be backpedaling some, and it’s a small sign that just maybe we won’t go to war over what’s shaping up to be a false flag attack.
He did post a tweet this morning, in typical confrontational fashion, saying he “never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our “Thank you America?”
Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our “Thank you America?”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018
Trump may have missed his window for getting any “thank yous” as he almost singlehandedly stoked the fears of a third world war with his threatening tweet yesterday. The United States is said to still be considering a military response over a reported chemical weapons attack on the rebel enclave of Douma on April 7.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has been accused of being behind the purported incident, but the US said it also holds Russia responsible for failing to prevent Assad from conducting the alleged attack. White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday Trump “holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack,” and said, “all options are on the table.”
According to RT, earlier this week, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, correctly pointed out that the alleged incident was beneficial only to the militants. Russian military specialists have already visited the site and said they found no signs of a chemical attack or any victims. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the UN’s chemical weapons watchdog, said back in June 2014 that all stockpiles of such material had been removed from the country.
Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018
Russia responded to Trump’s threat by calling on common sense to prevail. “We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “We support serious approaches. We continue to believe that it is important not to take steps that could harm an already-fragile situation.“
But the beating of war drums continues, although this may be a sign that the US is willing to back off some.
Facebook has been under fire in 2018 so far. It seems week after week another shot is blown to the social media giant whether it be about how it preys on people’s weaknesses or whether it be mass data breaches that cause everyone to re-think the information they are giving up about themselves.
We often find it easy to blame Facebook, or blame the social media tool that has our attention, and it’s somewhat understandable that we do that. They are after all poking at our psychology. But then again, are we truly a victim to our psychology? Can we not be more present, aware and observant of what we use tools in our lives for?
Facebook, like other social media giants, are just tools for our lives. Ways for us to connect, learn, share and discover what’s going on around the world. Whether we choose to use it everyday, every hour or become obsessed with it is up to us. We can’t blame the companies, doing so turns the power away from us and onto them.
Reflection: Are you using SM as a tool? Or do you find yourself obsessed with it? You can tell by spending 24 hours away from it and see how you feel and react.
A poetic short film made by Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk asks the question, can tech companies bring more value to our lives vs creating more distractions? As a conscious media company, we here at Collective Evolution have strived to be on the side of creating value. News, media and education should ask us to think bigger, not distract us, pull us into political bias’ and create more divides. We believe the tool of media, and social media, can be used to create a thriving world… it’s all about what we choose to support, and how we use it.
Check out the film.
The post This Unsettling 4-Min Film Will Make You Re-Think Your Use of Social Media (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Censorship continues to run rampant through all social media platforms. YouTube and Twitter have now completely banned a conservative comedian for daring to suggest children should not be subjected to the horrific bodily changes that come with hormone therapy.
Mike Adams, the founder of Natural News and known as The Health Ranger has already experienced a YouTube ban for not towing the government’s line when it comes to vaccines or politics. An article on his website made sure to get the point across loudly and clearly for all those who haven’t quite woken up just yet.
If you’re a conservative and you are in the public square — as a publisher, an entertainer, a writer, or part of the academic commentariat — you’re going to be banned at some point from all of your social media accounts.
That’s because at some point you’re going to drop a massive truth bomb that the Marxist snowflakes don’t like and they’re just going to ban you out of spite, hatred, disgust, etc. -Natural News
Conservative comedian and actor Owen Benjamin, who has recently been suspended permanently from YouTube and Twitter, found out just how far the left is willing to go to silence those they disagree with. As The Gateway Pundit reports, “when attempting to access his [Twitter] account, which boasted over 120,000 followers, users are met with this message: ‘This account has been suspended.’ Benjamin was considered ‘controversial’ by some for his belief that children should not be subjected to hormone therapy.”’
“Both my Twitter accounts suspended and now my ability to make an income has been revoked,” he wrote, inviting his fans to join him on the social media site Patreon. “This is disgusting. I have a two-year-old [sic] and a pregnant wife and they just set my life back to 0 with on [sic] big swoop. I just worked tirelessly for the last 5 months building my online ability to make a living and it’s all gone. You will be next. Fight it now,” Benjamin warned his followers.
No specific tweet has been cited by Twitter as a reason for Benjamin’s suspension from the social media platform. However, there is speculation that the suspension is not only based on his belief that children should not undergo hormone therapy. There is an inkling that it could be the result of him also calling out far left poster-child David Hogg; the kid who is demanding the government take away the rights of everyone because of the actions of one psycho.
Owen Benjamin has been banned from Twitter. pic.twitter.com/vb92HmnGzf
— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) April 5, 2018
Because saying this repeatedly doesn’t seem like it’s really getting through:
“The things that are going to be blocked are not going to be fake stories. The things that are going to be blocked and censored, the things they are going to keep from people is going to be stuff they just don’t want you to focus on or know about.” -Melissa Dykes
“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
Having taken a shot at The FBI on Christmas Eve Eve…
How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017
President Trump took to Twitter early on this Boxing Day with a very direct shot across the bow of all his DC-swamp adversaries…
WOW, @foxandfrlends “Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.” And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2017
As a reminder, we know three things for sure:
(1) The Steele dossier was a Clinton campaign product. If it was used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to obtain a FISA warrant, that would mean law-enforcement agencies controlled by a Democratic president fed the FISA court political campaign material produced by the Democratic candidate whom the president had endorsed to succeed him. Partisan claims of egregious scheming with an adversarial foreign power would have been presented to the court with the FBI’s imprimatur, as if they were drawn from refined U.S. intelligence reporting. The objective would have been to spy on the opposition Republican campaign.
(2) In June of this year, former FBI director James Comey testified that the dossier was “salacious and unverified.” While still director, Comey had described the dossier the same way when he briefed President-elect Trump on it in January 2017. If the dossier was still unverified as late as mid 2017, its allegations could not possibly have been verified months earlier, in the late summer or early autumn of 2016, when it appears that the FBI and DOJ used them in an application to the FISA court.
(3) The dossier appears to contain misinformation. Knowing he was a spy-for-hire trusted by Americans, Steele’s Russian-regime sources had reason to believe that misinformation could be passed into the stream of U.S. intelligence and that it would be acted on — and leaked — as if it were true, to America’s detriment. This would sow discord in our political system. If the FBI and DOJ relied on the dossier, it likely means they were played by the Putin regime.
Manifestly, the DOJ and FBI were favorably disposed toward Steele and Fusion GPS. I suspect that these good, productive prior relationships with the dossier’s source led the investigators to be less exacting about corroborating the dossier’s claims.
But that is just the beginning of the bias story.
At a high level, the DOJ and FBI were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, shortly before Steele’s reports started floating in, the FBI and DOJ announced that no charges would be brought against Mrs. Clinton despite damning evidence that she mishandled classified information, destroyed government files, obstructed congressional investigations, and lied to investigators. The irregularities in the Clinton-emails investigation are legion: President Obama making it clear in public statements that he did not want Clinton charged; the FBI, shortly afterwards, drafting an exoneration of Clinton months before the investigation ended and central witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed; investigators failing to use the grand jury to compel the production of key evidence; the DOJ restricting FBI agents in their lines of inquiry and examination of evidence; the granting of immunity to suspects who in any other case would be pressured to plead guilty and cooperate against more-culpable suspects; the distorting of criminal statutes to avoid applying them to Clinton; the sulfurous tarmac meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton shortly before Mrs. Clinton was given a peremptory interview — right before then–FBI director Comey announced that she would not be charged.
The blatant preference for Clinton over Trump smacked of politics and self-interest. Deputy FBI director McCabe’s wife had run for the Virginia state legislature as a Democrat, and her (unsuccessful) campaign was lavishly funded by groups tied to Clinton insider Terry McAuliffe. Agent Strzok told FBI lawyer Page that Trump was an “idiot” and that “Hillary should win 100 million to 0.” Page agreed that Trump was “a loathsome human.” A Clinton win would likely mean Lynch — originally raised to prominence when President Bill Clinton appointed her to a coveted U.S. attorney slot — would remain attorney general. Yates would be waiting in the wings.
The prior relationships of trust with the source; the investment in Clinton; the certitude that Clinton would win and deserved to win, signified by the mulish determination that she not be charged in the emails investigation; the sheer contempt for Trump. This concatenation led the FBI and DOJ to believe Steele — to want to believe his melodramatic account of Trump-Russia corruption. For the faithful, it was a story too good to check.
The DOJ and FBI, having dropped a criminal investigation that undeniably established Hillary Clinton’s national-security recklessness, managed simultaneously to convince themselves that Donald Trump was too much of a national-security risk to be president.
* * *
As we previously concluded, while there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign — and to fuel a pre-election media narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Trump was scheming with Russia to lift sanctions if he were elected president. Congress should continue pressing for answers, and President Trump should order the Justice Department and FBI to cooperate rather than — what’s the word? — resist.
Via Zero Hedge
The post Trump slams ‘crooked Hillary pile of garbage bogus dossier’ appeared first on Intellihub.
(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — As non-Republicans continue their search for scapegoats to blame for Hillary Clinton’s presidential loss to Donald Trump, a major focus of Trump skepticism has been ‘fake news’ allegedly peddled by Russia to electioneer the 2016 vote. To their credit, 13 trolls thought to be working for the Russian government were recently uncovered in a […]
Is there an Internet purge of conservative voices or voices of dissension online? Some say yes, and that the purge is being pushed by YouTube (owned by Google) and Facebook and Twitter.
We’ve heard about censorship before, but is what is happening now an all-out purge?
Let’s give it a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.
You might be a fan, you might be disgusted by him. But there is no doubt that InfoWars founder and radio host Alex Jones is a lightning rod. His YouTube channel has over 2.2 million subscribers and more than 33,000 videos.
Just days ago, Jones claimed that YouTube had begun a process of taking his channel down.
On March 3, CBS reported, “Jones tweeted that he had ‘set up a new channel’ that the ‘SPLC,’ or the Southern Poverty Law Center, wanted censored. In one of the videos on the channel called ‘InfoWars Censored,’ Jones said, ‘We’re live on Facebook, on Twitter, on Periscope, but we cannot go live on the Alex Jones channel — it’s been frozen for the third time in one week.’”
YouTube confirmed to CBS News that some advertisers had asked that their ads be pulled from Jones’ channel but there was “no plan”…“at present” to remove the channel completely.
But more than flagged, YouTube is outright banning channels. Some YouTube channels recently complained about their accounts being pulled entirely with no advance warning. In this latest case, YouTube seems to have been flagging content that was either deemed as pro-gun or conservative content.
According to The Verge, “YouTube indicated that as the platform ramps up human-powered moderation efforts, new moderators may have mistakenly removed or flagged right-wing videos and channels. Bloomberg reported the news this afternoon, quoting a YouTube spokesperson saying that ‘as we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals.’ The spokesperson said that YouTube’s policies had not changed, and that ‘we’ll reinstate any videos that were removed in error.’”
There is no question that human moderators were, in fact, pulling down “right wing” or “conservative content.”
But why? What is really happening here? Because YouTube’s push to control video content, just like Facebook is nothing new. In fact, it has been happening for some time.
Mike Cernovich tweeted that a video he has posted of Antifa protesters chanting death threats at a protest in DC was taken down by YouTube because it violated community guidelines.
To be clear, the video was about 30 seconds of an actual protest in DC. And the language of the protesters violated community guidelines? That is called news, YouTube. But it was not allowed.
Mike Adams, the founding editor of NaturalNews.com, announced March 3:
“YouTube has now deleted the entire Health Ranger video channel, wiping out over 1,700 videos covering everything from nutrition, natural medicine, history, science and current events.”
There is, in fact, a very coordinated effort by a number of organizations, like Media Matters for America and the Southern Poverty Law Center to silence voices with which it does not agree.
I know this first hand, as these organizations have attacked me personally trying to silence my voice.
Full disclosure here, I am ideologically a libertarian, neither on the left or the right. But according to these groups, I am “alt-right”—a dog whistle which means white nationalist. I am not, not at all. But that doesn’t stop them from slandering me.
The goal of these organizations is to silence dissent. Not just from the right, but from the left as well.
Facebook is going through a very similar process right now, with increased pressure to control voices on its platform.
Remember in 2016 it was widely reported by several outlets, including Gizmodo:
“Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.”
Twitter does the same thing. In December, Twitter announced strict enforcement of new rules on “hateful conduct and abusive behavior.”
According to Politico, “That provoked the first objections from some on the right who called the steps a ‘#twitterpurge.’ The company conceded at the time that ‘we may make some mistakes and are working on a robust appeals process.”
Mainstream media networks and newspapers have routinely pushed narratives in their newsrooms for decades. We all know that.
Yet, for some reason, Facebook and YouTube, which have far more influence than those networks, have chosen to bend to pressure and try to control the narratives on their platforms.
YouTube says its mission is, “to give everyone a voice and show them the world.” But the truth is, they are not.
The problem for any dissenting voice is that if you are using your voice on someone else’s property, i.e., YouTube or Facebook, you will never have control of it. Which is why the next frontier must be decentralized platforms.
Platforms like Dtube and Steemit, built on blockchain, will be future of how content, the good the bad and ugly, will be stored. And the efforts to silence dissenting voices, will actually be the undoing of YouTube and Facebook.
Because if you are silent now, it may soon be the voices you do agree with that will also be silenced. And who then will be left to come to that defense?
The post Reality Check: Internet Purge of Dissenting Voices? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
This list of banned and censored YouTube channels shows exactly what the Establishment doesn’t want you to be investigating, exploring, discussing and thinking about.
The list of banned and censored YouTube channels is rapidly increasing, as Google-owned YouTube has been carrying out a censorship blitz to strike many long-standing, hugely popular channels from its platform. Alphabet-Google-YouTube is a giant corporation, and corporations are run for one purpose (profit), so from one perspective, this censorship spree seems self-defeating, since they are deleting many popular channels. Some of these had huge followings of between 100,000 and 500,000 (or more), which may cost YouTube money in the short term. However, to understand this censorship purge you need to understand that the Hidden Hand or the dark force which controls the New World Order also controls Alphabet-Google-Youtube, and is clearly using its reach and power to suppress alternative thought.
At first glance, it may seem fair that social media giants like YouTube get to censor people, because they are private companies not public/government companies, right? It’s their platform, right? Not exactly. These social media companies are more like private-public partnerships. They would never have gotten off the ground were it not for the government’s seed money, especially through MIC agencies like DARPA and the CIA. Additionally, these companies are given massive tax breaks every year. Alphabet-Google in particular has a very close relationship with the US Government. In fact, Google just got caught collaborating with the Department of Defense to use AI in analyzing drone footage, according to this Activist Post article by Jake Anderson.
Is it fair for these companies to take so much public help and support, then turn around and disregard the right to free speech as enshrined in the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution and elsewhere?
Make no mistake about their actions; this is censorship, pure and simple. The censored YouTube channels were all given fake pretexts and false reasons, but the pattern of censorship is undeniable. Alphabet-Google-YouTube found ways to delete entire channels on the basis that they were breaking YouTube’s nebulous “community guidelines”, or that they were in breach of copyright (relying on allegations of accusers). For some or many of these, YouTube even went back 3+ years to find some piece of supposedly incriminating evidence in a video that had previously been perfectly fine. Any excuse will do.
In a similar vein, the Facebook account of David Icke (with 700,000+ followers) mysteriously disappeared and was taken down for over a week before being magically reinstated. Facebook later said it was a “mistake.” Sure it was. Everyone in the Alternative Media / Independent Media is now fully aware that if they haven’t already been censored, they are about to be. It’s only a matter of time as the Establishment, via its Establishment platforms, purges any anti-Establishment view.
Censored YouTube channels: JFK spoke out against censors.
Every crisis has an opportunity, and although this censorship purge will affect the Independent Media in the short term, there are good things to come from it. Firstly, it will force alternative content creators to migrate away from the giant corporate platforms to other places where their views, writing, speech, art and content will never be censored. Many great platforms already exist which are trying to find ways to reward content creators, such as Minds and Steemit. Secondly, as we shall see below, the NWO censors are overplaying their hand by purging so much; the list of censored YouTube channels reveals a pattern of content. So now we can see what they don’t want us to know …
Thanks to Reddit, we have this list of censored YouTube channels that was posted on March 1st, 2018. However, it is an incomplete list and does not include some big YouTube channels that were censored recently, such as those of Waking Times and Activist Post (where I also write as a contributor). Since march 1st, other YouTube channels have been deleted (such as Natural News / Mike Adams). Some of the channels have been reinstated, but the writing is on the wall; it’s only a matter of time before they get permanently scrapped. Here is the list:
As soon as I saw this list, I immediately recognized many of these channels as superb content providers. The owners of these channels are undoubtedly free thinkers willing to push the boundary of what is known and question everything.
Some very interesting themes emerge. Apparently, these are the topics that the NWO manipulators would rather you didn’t think about (topics in bold, censored YouTube channels in parentheses):
– False Flag shootings, including False Flag Hoaxes (Free Radio Revolution Revived, Peekay, Peekay Boston, The Paulstaul Service)
– Flat Earth (Eric Dubai, aplaintruth)
– Nanotechnology/Bioweapons, Directed Energy Weapons (aplaintruth)
– Gematria (Gematrianator) (Gematria is the art of assigning or decoding a system of numerical values to words in the belief that words with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other)
– Space fakery / Moon as a Hologram (Crow777 [whom I interviewed here], Russian vids)
– Various Aspects of the Global Conspiracy, e.g. Zionism, Geopolitics, Extraterrestrials and the Hidden History of Humanity (Jim Marrs, Richie Allen show, MLordandGod, Destroying the Illusion)
– Fake News (FAKE NEWS REPORT)
– Satanism, Hollywood, Pedophilia (Jay Myers, who process quality conspiracy analysis)
[Many of these topics are covered on The Freedom Articles: here are some links for those that want to research them further:
http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/category/false-flag-staged-terror-events/
http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/category/zionism/
http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/category/geopolitics/
http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/category/ets-ufos-and-the-alien-agenda/
http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/category/satanism/
http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/category/pedophilia/]
Yes, Alphabet-Google-YouTube has a distinct leftwing bias, due to its own ideology (as exposed in the incident where Google fired James Damore), and has been employing the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center, Rothschild connected) to purge rightwing channels. However, this censorship blitz is far beyond left vs. right. It’s all about limiting the possible range of human thought to keep the Control System in place.
Censored YouTube channels: a tweet by Paul Watson. What are the legal implications?
Let’s use this purge of censored YouTube channels to find better platforms that decentralize power, reward content creators and pledge to support free speech no matter what. One solution is the launch of Real.Video as announced by Mike Adams. There are many others out there.
There is no reason we have to let the unlimited diversity of the internet – and the unlimited diversity of humanity – be stymied and controlled, or funneled into giant megalithic platforms that only seek to serve the Establishment.
*https://www.activistpost.com/2018/03/government-conscripts-google-military-industrial-complex.html
*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/dissolving-old-description-of-reality/
The post List of Banned and Censored YouTube Channels – Various Themes Emerge appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Ben Swann has done it again. A new video that he just released about the stunning purge of conservative voices that we are now witnessing has already been viewed more than 24,000 times on YouTube alone. I have been writing about all of this censorship quite a bit recently as well, but up until now I have not revealed the true extent to which it has hit me personally. Like President Trump and other prominent conservatives, engagement on my personal Facebook profile has fallen dramatically. We are working like mad to keep engagement up on our official Facebook campaign page, but it has been a real battle, and today Facebook just banned me again from posting to groups for a few days. The funny thing is that I had barely shared anything recently. On Twitter, I have been told by a social media expert that my account has been “shadowbanned”, and that probably explains why engagement on Twitter is only a small fraction of what it once was. Of course dozens of other prominent conservatives are suffering the same kind of censorship, and it is absolutely imperative that we stand up against this unprecedented assault on our ability to communicate with one another.
It has become quite obvious that the big social media giants want to systematically exclude any voices that they do not like from the marketplace of ideas. In his new video, Ben Swann points a finger at the biggest offenders…
“Is there an Internet purge of conservative voices or voices of dissension online?” Swann begins in a recent “Reality Check” report on the issue. “Some say yes, and the purge is being pushed by YouTube, owned by Google, by Facebook, and by Twitter.”
They don’t call them “the thought police”, but that is precisely what the small armies of “moderators” that the social media giants are hiring are turning out to be. For example, late last year YouTube announced that it would bring on “10,000 new moderators” to “flag content”…
“Of course, all of this comes after YouTube announced in December that it would hire some 10,000 new moderators to flag content,” Swann reported. “And those moderators have been flagging at a stunning rate.”
He noted further that in several cases the moderators were pulling entire channels “without any advance warning” whatsoever, and that most of those channels were deemed “either pro-gun or conservative.”
If you have not seen Swann’s new video yet, you can watch it here. Following the video, other content creators commented on how they have been affected by the recent social media censorship…
-“Hey Ben, just thought I would share my story. I have now been removed from YouTube 6 times in the past few years. I am non-violent, don’t cuss, don’t show blood or gore, and I use mainstream media news clips that usually talk about these large shootings that are being used as a reason to change gun laws. I built my old channels to 10 thousand subscribers and 2.5 Million views twice, only to have my accounts removed.”
-“THEY DELETED MY 300K VIEWS VIDEO SHOWING HOW CNN LIED ABOUT THE CHEMICAL ATTACK IN SYRIA. IT’S HAPPENING, I GOT A STRIKE FOR IT.”
-“They even hit vdeos I had set to private that weren’t even viewable by the public. To keep my channel I deleted over 300 videos spanning back 2 years and that is lot counting the half dozen plus that YouTube yanked.”
-“I received 2 strikes in 48 hours on videos exposing crimes of the US government (that had been up for 2-3 years), which is what all my videos do. I deleted the videos from my channel to save this account for contact reasons but, It still might get deleted anyways.”
-“I deactivated my Facebook. They were instantly removing my comments. My comments had nothing to do with anything, but I did try to post a conservative video in a comment box and after that ALL of my every day comments were instantly removed and marked as spam. I am also Libertarian. I can’t believe Health Ranger’s channel was removed. I think it is awful what they are doing. Taking away support is fine, but don’t take down the channel!”
I believe that it is fundamentally un-American for social media giants to try to use their power to silence conservative voices.
These big tech companies built empires by allowing everyone to have a voice, but now they are systematically attempting to exclude conservatives from the conversation, and we should all find that extremely offensive.
If you want someone in Washington that will fight as hard as he possibly can against this kind of censorship, I hope that you will help us win our race for Congress on May 15th…
Donate By Credit Card Online: https://secure.anedot.com/michaelsnyderforcongress/donate
Donate By Paypal: https://donorbox.org/michael-snyder-for-congress
Donate By Check: Make your check out to “Michael Snyder For Congress” and send it to the following address…
Michael Snyder For Congress
PO Box 1136
Bonners Ferry, ID 83805
We are in the middle of the final money bomb of the 2018 primary campaign, and you will be able to track the progress of the money bomb on Swampbomb.com.
If you live in north Idaho, I hope that you will come out for the kickoff event for the last 60 days of our campaign in Sandpoint on the evening of March 15th. And you can see the remainder of my speaking schedule for the month of March right here.
We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and the left is fighting dirty.
All throughout history the left has always sought to silence dissenting voices when they have taken power, and now they are trying it in this country.
Of course we are not about to let that happen, and the left is in for a very rude awakening during the 2018 mid-term elections.
The post Independent Journalist Exposes How Social Media Companies Are Systematically Silencing Conservative Voices appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Nobody is disputing the fact that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants are censoring conservative material. In fact, this is probably the largest purge of conservative voices in the history of the Internet. Obviously this is going to cause large numbers of people to stop using their platforms, so why would they do this? Well, to some conservatives the answer is obvious. These social media giants watched Donald Trump use their platforms extremely effectively in 2016, and many believe that they are absolutely determined to never let that happen again. In fact, Mike Adams of Natural News is completely convinced that there is a concerted effort by these social media giants to steal the 2018 elections…
The realization is suddenly obvious: The Google / YouTube selective “censorship rampage” that has targeted conservative websites and content creators is a brazen, illegal scheme to interfere with U.S. elections and steal the 2018 mid-terms.
The systematic silencing of conservative views is necessary, of course, for Democrats to win enough seats to gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives after the mid-term elections. Once control is established, Democrats will immediately move to impeach President Trump. Although the Senate would not likely prosecute that impeachment, the mere achievement of the U.S. House declaring “impeachment” would be enough to convince most brainwashed news consumers that Trump is somehow a guilty criminal (nobody will remember that Bill Clinton was also impeached by the House). From there, the 2020 presidential election is also stolen, and Democrats land their selected tyrant in the White House just in time for Ginsberg’s retirement from SCOTUS.
If voices on the left were being censored to the same degree as conservative voices, it would be really hard to make such an argument.
But the truth is that the numbers show that conservative voices are being hit extremely hard by the censorship while liberal publishers have been mostly “unaffected”…
Facebook’s January 12 announcement that it would begin to de-prioritize news publishers and their posts in users’ News Feeds has had a surprisingly profound and partisan impact. According to The Outline’s analysis of Facebook engagement data obtained from research tool BuzzSumo, conservative and right-wing publishers (such as Breitbart, Fox News, and Gateway Pundit) were hit the hardest in the weeks following the announcement, with Facebook engagement totals for February dropping as much as 55 percent for some, while the engagement numbers of most predominantly liberal publishers remained unaffected.
And this even applies to politicians as well. For example, President Trump’s engagement on Facebook has fallen 45 percent since the algorithm change…
The algorithm change caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.
In contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) do not appear to have suffered a comparable decline in Facebook engagement.
Top conservative Facebook pages with daily traffic in the millions have seen 75% to 95% drop in traffic.
Young Cons, Western Journalism, SarahPalin.com,Independent Journal Review, Right Wing News, and several others have seen dramatic loss in traffic.
Needless to say, my website (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/) has been affected as well.
So what can we do?
We can fight back. One of the primary ways that we can do that is by electing pro-Trump candidates all over the nation in 2018. Right now I am engaged in an extremely close race with three guys that did not want Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination in 2016, and I need your help to win on May 15th.
It is fundamentally wrong for the social media giants to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. I will fight online censorship as hard as I can in Washington, and if you believe in what we are trying to do I hope that you will stand with us.
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Whenever radical leftists have taken power anywhere in the world, they have always tried to shut down free speech.
They want to follow the same formula in the United States, but we are not going to allow them to do that.
There are millions upon millions of red-blooded Americans that still greatly love this nation, and this silent majority is rising up to take our country back.
The post Are The Social Media Giants Trying To Steal The 2018 Elections By Censoring Conservative Websites? appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
It’s not breaking news that the internet censors have been hard at work to silence voices that are in opposition to the mainstream media agenda. But after the influence that social media had on the last election, things are going to a whole new level. The internet, that last bastion of truly free speech, isn’t very free anymore.
We’re watching the evolution of Newspeak right before our very eyes as the internet strives to silence any voices that oppose their carefully crafted stories of how guns are bad, there are 291 genders, and anyone who isn’t a liberal is an evil Nazi racist.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “Newspeak,” it’s from George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?” (source)
YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have all been participating in a full-on purge of not just conservative voices, but the voices of anyone who is loudly anti-establishment. Any internet personality who is pro-gun or anti-socialism can fully expect to be censored. If you go against the agenda, you will be silenced.
Apparently, we have become too discerning for their liking and we can’t be trusted to hear both sides of the story and decide what seems most accurate.
Let me preface this: It isn’t about being a fan of websites like Infowars or Natural News. It’s about being a fan of free speech. It’s about getting the truth instead of a carefully scripted narrative.
In this video, Ben Swann, who is mercifully back from a long, unexplained hiatus, gives us the facts on how the internet censors are striving to ensure we hear only one side of the story.
I’m certainly not in the same category as Mike Adams or Alex Jones, who have hundreds of thousands of followers, but even I have experienced this censorship. Facebook frequently refuses to allow me to pay to boost posts that might be controversial in nature, Back in 2016, I posted an article containing 2 videos, one of which was quickly removed from YouTube. It was about the threat of civil unrest to the Milwaukee suburbs after a cop killed a black man. The media portrayed the man’s sister as warmly trying to prevent the unrest, urging people not to burn down their own neighborhoods. But they cut her rant right before she urged people to burn down the suburbs instead. I quoted her as saying:
Burnin down sh*t ain’t going to help nothin! Y’all burnin’ down sh*t we need in our community. Take that sh*t to the suburbs. Burn that sh*t down! We need our sh*t! We need our weaves. I don’t wear it. But we need it. We need our food. We need our gas. Y’all wanna hurt somebody you take that sh*t further out! (source)
But somehow, I was the one who was in the doghouse for quoting what she said and showing both of the videos. My article was reported as “hate speech” a number of times and Facebook removed it. Not only did they remove it, they banned me from posting for a week, giving me a “warning” about hate speech. I also got put in Facebook jail once when someone asked what Godwin’s Law was and I used the word Nazi because it hurt someone’s feelings who was from Germany when I said the word “Hitler.” I could not make this stuff up.
A lot of you may be wondering why alternative media sources use social media at all, and the answer is – we have to if we want to be heard. If we want to be competitive and we want our stories to be out there, we must go where the people are. And there are millions of people on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
But purges like this are why it’s particularly important that you sign up for email lists if you want to hear the real stories. (You can sign up for mine right here.) And even then, it isn’t a guarantee you won’t be the victim of censors. During the election, for research purposes, I signed up for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s email lists. Clinton’s ended up in my inbox without fail, while Trump’s went to my spam folder, no matter how often I marked it as “not spam.”
This is something we have to stop now. We have to speak up and let these social media outlets know that we aren’t going to put up with their censorship and their control of the national narrative.
We’re watching 1984 unfold right before our very eyes.
The post Modern Newspeak: How Internet Censors Are Making Sure You Hear Only One Side of the Story appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — As non-Republicans continue their search for scapegoats to blame for Hillary Clinton’s presidential loss to Donald Trump, a major focus of Trump skepticism has been ‘fake news’ allegedly peddled by Russia to electioneer the 2016 vote. To their credit, 13 trolls thought to be working for the Russian government were recently uncovered in a […]
In a tweet about the Oscars, the Department of Defense quite literally bragged about working in Hollywood, to ensure that the military is only portrayed in a manner they see fit.
The post DoD Blatantly Admits on Twitter It Works With Hollywood to Sell You War Propaganda appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The Facebook Bubble Effect: The user reads what his friends and his ideologically related people send him, concluded a study published in the North American scientific journal PNAS, that analysed 376 million interactions among Facebook users. [image: https://www.americaherald.com/facebook-exec-feels-guilty/29858/]
To get people to stay on Facebook for a long time, you have to generate dopamine discharges.
These discharges are ephemeral instants of happiness and those moments go hand in hand with the LIKES and SHARES.
The Modus Operandi of Facebook is based on its explicit “exploitation of the vulnerability of human psychology,” confesses Sean Parker, one of the inventors of this social network.
“The inventors; me, Mark Zuckerberg, and Kevin Systrom of Instagram and all those people, we knew. Despite this, we did it.”
Parker confessed his discouragement with Facebook in a recent public intervention and declared himself an objector of social networks. He ended his speech with a disturbing phrase:
“Only God knows what is being done with the brains of children.”
There was a time when the one who DISLIKED these platforms was branded by default as resistant to change, as old.
That time passed. A real storm is being unleashed around the role played by social networks in our society.
Facebook and Twitter are accused of having become spaces that tighten the debate and contaminate it with false information.
There is already a belief that if you live in these platforms and spend as much time as possible in them, they will create addiction; the networks combined with mobile devices contaminate people to the point they’ve become addictive inventions, the new tobacco. a public health problem.
On December 12, 2017, a former vice president of Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, assured that the networks are “tearing” the social fabric apart.
“The short-term feedback cycles driven by the dopamine we have created are destroying the functioning of society,” he said in a forum at the Stanford School of Business.
On January 23, Tim Cook, CEO of the all-powerful Apple, said he did not want his 12-year-old nephew to have access to social media.
On February 7, actor Jim Carrey sold his shares of the platform and encouraged Facebook to boycott his passivity in the face of alleged Russian interference in the elections.
The perception we have of networks has mutated. They were born as an instrument to connect with friends and share ideas.
The alleged isolation generated by the Internet paled. They became a democratizing force in the heat of the Arab Spring. They seemed like a perfect tool for social change, they empowered the citizen.
“They gave voice to those who did not have a voice,” said Emily Taylor, an executive at Oxford Information Labs, who has been working on governance issues on the Web.
“In just seven years, everything has changed. These political advertising campaigns are aimed at altering the electoral processes. “
The passage through the polls of the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are two of the phenomena that pushed everyone to ask themselves questions: how did nobody see it arrive? The answer, in part, was sought and found in the networks.
Facebook was cited in October by the Justice Committee of the US Congress to explain its role in the alleged Russian interference in US elections in 2016.
It was admitted that 126 million people had been able to access content generated by alleged Russian agents (the Internet Research Agency), which also posted about a thousand videos on YouTube and 131,000 messages on Twitter.
Among all those messages were news stories that Hillary Clinton had sold arms to ISIS, during her tenance in the 8 years Barack Obama was president of the United States.
A Pew Research study published in October 2016 points out that 49% of North American users consider that political conversations on social networks are more furious than in real life.
“On Twitter,” says researcher Mari Luz Congosto,” the tone is very harsh. The sour tone has increased, before it was more jocular. The messages have become harder. “
But this has not been the only controversy.
The networks have been in focus for the purchase of fictitious followers by influencers; for the public lynching of people who are reported in the networks and are ostracized without trial.
In Myanmar, Facebook experienced one of its worst episodes: last year it was accused of becoming the fundamental vector of propaganda against the Rohingya minority, victim of a genocide.
A research report published last week by Wired magazine highlights the internal hell that the organization has lived in the last two years.
The tension over what to do once embarked on what was a reality – its status as a global information vehicle – disputes over disputes over how to deal with the avalanche of false news and the tension that was flooding its pages has mowed the reigning optimism, including Zuckerberg’s own.
Facebook is the leading platform in redirecting readers towards content since mid-2015, when it surpassed Google.
More than 2,130 million people are part of its community. There are 332 million on Twitter. Two thirds of American adults (67%) report being informed via social networks, according to an August 2017 study conducted by the Pew Research Center.
Facebook does not create content, but it filters it, hides it, censors it and ocassionally organizes it. First it decided to carry out editorial work with a team of journalists who chose the most popular news. Then, after several scandals during the campaign, they bet on the algorithms, but the decision backfired.
The problem is the business model. This is what Emily Taylor points out. The user agrees to transfer data in exchange for a free service.
The algorithms use that information to determine the interests of the user. Advertising firms pay for it.
“Not only are data extracted from what is publicly posted,” says Taylor, “but also from the location of private messages.”
The more time we spend on the platform, the more data can be extracted.
A shocking, sensational, even improbable, news calls more to reading than a calm and balanced analysis. A drift that affects both networks and traditional media.
“Facebook shows you what the algorithm wants, we do not know with what objective, whether perverse or not,” says Mari Luz Congosto, network expert and researcher at the Telematics Group.
“You lose a part of your freedom and the platform does business with that. Manipulates what people read, marks the way. “
And the problem is that the algorithm commands more and more. We have gone from an Internet that was accessed by computers, in which one sought, explored, to one that is reached through applications installed on the mobile. It is something that happens, above all, with a whole generation of young people living inside their phone.
“The Internet comes to you through an algorithm, it is not you who are going to look for something on the Internet,” said Guatemalan lawyer and digital activist Renata Ávila.
“Before we used to operate on the street, the world was ours, we entered and left the buildings. Now we are locked in a mall with strict rules that only seek to maximize the business model. “
For Ávila, the problem is not unique to Facebook, far from it. All platforms work the same: “The problem is the architecture of the mobile, of the apps. The business model. “
The user reads what his friends and his ideologically related people send him, concluded a study published in the North American scientific journal PNAS, that analyzed 376 million interactions among Facebook users. It also concluded that people tend to look for information aligned with their political and ideological ideas.
Although Zuckerberg says that he is willing to stop news, brands and memes, even if he is going to tweak the algorithm so that there is less information and more relationship between users, he will not want to lose advertising revenues that come in depending on the time spent in his network
Jonathan Taplin, entrepreneur who published the book Move Fast And Break Things: How Facebook, Google And Amazon Cornered Culture And Undermined Democracy, has all his hopes placed in the EU.
“Europe is leading the world in this,” he states.
“We should thank, for example, that Google will be fined 2,4 million euros for abuse of dominant position.”
“You have to regulate,” says Taplin. “We need laws. It is not the market that is going to solve the problem.”
Taplin advocates reducing the size of these empires by law: forcing Google to sell YouTube; Facebook to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp; apply competition laws, resize.
The Silicon Valley greats, meanwhile, have sent an army of lobbyists to Washington. They fear that the same that happened to Microsoft will happen to them: They’ll be condemned because of their abusive monopoly practices.
There are voices that demand that platforms have to respond for what is published in them, a ridiculous proposal, since social media are mere channels.
Will anyone propose that mainstream media face a court for knowingly lying to the public to advance their interests to make a profit?
There are others that demand that educational programs include practical elements that allow young people to learn to manage the addictive component of networks must be created and added to social media content.
Some people say, finally, in a clear display of anthropological optimism, that people will progressively get of with their lives without them, just as many people got rid of junk food, and that they will choose to devote their reading time to more select bites.
The post Confession: This is How Facebook Steals your Attention appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
The Facebook Bubble Effect: The user reads what his friends and his ideologically related people send him, concluded a study published in the North American scientific journal PNAS, that analysed 376 million interactions among Facebook users. [image: https://www.americaherald.com/facebook-exec-feels-guilty/29858/]
To get people to stay on Facebook for a long time, you have to generate dopamine discharges.
These discharges are ephemeral instants of happiness and those moments go hand in hand with the LIKES and SHARES.
The Modus Operandi of Facebook is based on its explicit “exploitation of the vulnerability of human psychology,” confesses Sean Parker, one of the inventors of this social network.
“The inventors; me, Mark Zuckerberg, and Kevin Systrom of Instagram and all those people, we knew. Despite this, we did it.”
Parker confessed his discouragement with Facebook in a recent public intervention and declared himself an objector of social networks. He ended his speech with a disturbing phrase:
“Only God knows what is being done with the brains of children.”
There was a time when the one who DISLIKED these platforms was branded by default as resistant to change, as old.
That time passed. A real storm is being unleashed around the role played by social networks in our society.
Facebook and Twitter are accused of having become spaces that tighten the debate and contaminate it with false information.
There is already a belief that if you live in these platforms and spend as much time as possible in them, they will create addiction; the networks combined with mobile devices contaminate people to the point they’ve become addictive inventions, the new tobacco. a public health problem.
On December 12, 2017, a former vice president of Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, assured that the networks are “tearing” the social fabric apart.
“The short-term feedback cycles driven by the dopamine we have created are destroying the functioning of society,” he said in a forum at the Stanford School of Business.
On January 23, Tim Cook, CEO of the all-powerful Apple, said he did not want his 12-year-old nephew to have access to social media.
On February 7, actor Jim Carrey sold his shares of the platform and encouraged Facebook to boycott his passivity in the face of alleged Russian interference in the elections.
The perception we have of networks has mutated. They were born as an instrument to connect with friends and share ideas.
The alleged isolation generated by the Internet paled. They became a democratizing force in the heat of the Arab Spring. They seemed like a perfect tool for social change, they empowered the citizen.
“They gave voice to those who did not have a voice,” said Emily Taylor, an executive at Oxford Information Labs, who has been working on governance issues on the Web.
“In just seven years, everything has changed. These political advertising campaigns are aimed at altering the electoral processes. “
The passage through the polls of the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are two of the phenomena that pushed everyone to ask themselves questions: how did nobody see it arrive? The answer, in part, was sought and found in the networks.
Facebook was cited in October by the Justice Committee of the US Congress to explain its role in the alleged Russian interference in US elections in 2016.
It was admitted that 126 million people had been able to access content generated by alleged Russian agents (the Internet Research Agency), which also posted about a thousand videos on YouTube and 131,000 messages on Twitter.
Among all those messages were news stories that Hillary Clinton had sold arms to ISIS, during her tenance in the 8 years Barack Obama was president of the United States.
A Pew Research study published in October 2016 points out that 49% of North American users consider that political conversations on social networks are more furious than in real life.
“On Twitter,” says researcher Mari Luz Congosto,” the tone is very harsh. The sour tone has increased, before it was more jocular. The messages have become harder. “
But this has not been the only controversy.
The networks have been in focus for the purchase of fictitious followers by influencers; for the public lynching of people who are reported in the networks and are ostracized without trial.
In Myanmar, Facebook experienced one of its worst episodes: last year it was accused of becoming the fundamental vector of propaganda against the Rohingya minority, victim of a genocide.
A research report published last week by Wired magazine highlights the internal hell that the organization has lived in the last two years.
The tension over what to do once embarked on what was a reality – its status as a global information vehicle – disputes over disputes over how to deal with the avalanche of false news and the tension that was flooding its pages has mowed the reigning optimism, including Zuckerberg’s own.
Facebook is the leading platform in redirecting readers towards content since mid-2015, when it surpassed Google.
More than 2,130 million people are part of its community. There are 332 million on Twitter. Two thirds of American adults (67%) report being informed via social networks, according to an August 2017 study conducted by the Pew Research Center.
Facebook does not create content, but it filters it, hides it, censors it and ocassionally organizes it. First it decided to carry out editorial work with a team of journalists who chose the most popular news. Then, after several scandals during the campaign, they bet on the algorithms, but the decision backfired.
The problem is the business model. This is what Emily Taylor points out. The user agrees to transfer data in exchange for a free service.
The algorithms use that information to determine the interests of the user. Advertising firms pay for it.
“Not only are data extracted from what is publicly posted,” says Taylor, “but also from the location of private messages.”
The more time we spend on the platform, the more data can be extracted.
A shocking, sensational, even improbable, news calls more to reading than a calm and balanced analysis. A drift that affects both networks and traditional media.
“Facebook shows you what the algorithm wants, we do not know with what objective, whether perverse or not,” says Mari Luz Congosto, network expert and researcher at the Telematics Group.
“You lose a part of your freedom and the platform does business with that. Manipulates what people read, marks the way. “
And the problem is that the algorithm commands more and more. We have gone from an Internet that was accessed by computers, in which one sought, explored, to one that is reached through applications installed on the mobile. It is something that happens, above all, with a whole generation of young people living inside their phone.
“The Internet comes to you through an algorithm, it is not you who are going to look for something on the Internet,” said Guatemalan lawyer and digital activist Renata Ávila.
“Before we used to operate on the street, the world was ours, we entered and left the buildings. Now we are locked in a mall with strict rules that only seek to maximize the business model. “
For Ávila, the problem is not unique to Facebook, far from it. All platforms work the same: “The problem is the architecture of the mobile, of the apps. The business model. “
The user reads what his friends and his ideologically related people send him, concluded a study published in the North American scientific journal PNAS, that analyzed 376 million interactions among Facebook users. It also concluded that people tend to look for information aligned with their political and ideological ideas.
Although Zuckerberg says that he is willing to stop news, brands and memes, even if he is going to tweak the algorithm so that there is less information and more relationship between users, he will not want to lose advertising revenues that come in depending on the time spent in his network
Jonathan Taplin, entrepreneur who published the book Move Fast And Break Things: How Facebook, Google And Amazon Cornered Culture And Undermined Democracy, has all his hopes placed in the EU.
“Europe is leading the world in this,” he states.
“We should thank, for example, that Google will be fined 2,4 million euros for abuse of dominant position.”
“You have to regulate,” says Taplin. “We need laws. It is not the market that is going to solve the problem.”
Taplin advocates reducing the size of these empires by law: forcing Google to sell YouTube; Facebook to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp; apply competition laws, resize.
The Silicon Valley greats, meanwhile, have sent an army of lobbyists to Washington. They fear that the same that happened to Microsoft will happen to them: They’ll be condemned because of their abusive monopoly practices.
There are voices that demand that platforms have to respond for what is published in them, a ridiculous proposal, since social media are mere channels.
Will anyone propose that mainstream media face a court for knowingly lying to the public to advance their interests to make a profit?
There are others that demand that educational programs include practical elements that allow young people to learn to manage the addictive component of networks must be created and added to social media content.
Some people say, finally, in a clear display of anthropological optimism, that people will progressively get of with their lives without them, just as many people got rid of junk food, and that they will choose to devote their reading time to more select bites.
The post Confession: This is How Facebook Steals your Attention appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
