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.
“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.
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.
We’re watching 1984 unfold right before our very eyes.
Facebook’s much-publicized demotion of publishers’ content in users’ news feeds has negatively impacted conservative-leaning publishers significantly more than liberal-leaning outlets, an analysis by The Western Journal has revealed.
Liberal publishers have gained about 2 percent more web traffic from Facebook than they were getting prior to the algorithm changes implemented in early February.
On the other hand, conservative publishers have lost an average of nearly 14 percent of their traffic from Facebook.
This algorithm change, intentional or not, has in effect censored conservative viewpoints on the largest social media platform in the world. This change has ramifications that, in the short-term, are causing conservative publishers to downsize or fold up completely, and in the long-term could swing elections in the United States and around the world toward liberal politicians and policies.
Example: New York Post vs. New York Daily News
Case in point: Two rival publishers in New York City, the New York Post and the New York Daily News, are similar in many ways, except for their editorial slants. The Post is well-known as a right-leaning outlet, whereas the Daily News has an established left-leaning slant. For example, the Daily News recently ran a headline after the Parkland shooting that read, “Brave Florida survivors plan day of action for gun sanity and to call out ‘blood on hands’ of NRA puppets.”
Headlines like that garnered the Daily News a 24.18 percent increase in traffic from Facebook, while the right-leaning Post’s traffic dropped 11.44 percent in the same time period.
Campbell Brown, a former anchor on NBC and CNN who now leads Facebook’s news partnerships team, told attendees at a recent technology and publishing conference that Facebook would be censoring news publishers based on its own internal biases:
“This is not us stepping back from news. This is us changing our relationship with publishers and emphasizing something that Facebook has never done before: It’s having a point of view, and it’s leaning into quality news. … We are, for the first time in the history of Facebook, taking a step to try to to define what ‘quality news’ looks like and give that a boost.” (Emphasis added.)
Based on The Western Journal’s analysis — and an overwhelming amount of insider reports from new media publishers — it is clear that Facebook’s definition of “quality news” is news with a liberal slant.
The results: Conservative publishers negatively impacted
The 25 on the liberal side of the scale averaged a 1.86 percent boost in traffic from Facebook, whereas the 25 news organizations on the conservative side averaged a 13.71 percent decrease in traffic.
Based on this analysis, it is clear that liberal news sites are being promoted in Facebook users’ news feeds more often than conservative sites.
After removing the 15 publishers with the least traffic from Facebook, the trend becomes even more clear.
Of the remaining 35 news sources, the 12 most liberal sites averaged a boost of 0.21 percent — in other words, they don’t appear to have been affected in any meaningful way.
The 11 sites in the middle — which ranged from “left-center” to “least biased” on the MBFC News scale — saw a significant increase in Facebook traffic of 12.81 percent.
The 12 most conservatives sites lost an average of 27.06 percent of their traffic from Facebook.
Of the 12 most liberal sites, six saw double-digit decreases in traffic, while four saw double-digit increases and two — The Washington Post and HuffPo — saw single-digit increases. CNN’s traffic increased 43.78 percent.
Of the 11 sites in the middle of the scale, nine saw traffic increase. Only two — CBS News and The Atlantic — saw a traffic decrease.
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