That the Tech World and its many mega-companies loathe anything and anyone to the Right of Karl Marx – is not breaking news.
That the Tech World and its many mega-companies are incessantly blocking, censoring and otherwise stuffing down digital holes anything and anyone to the Right of Karl Marx – is not breaking news.
Study: Conservatives Losing in Social Media Bias Battle
What’s news is: The Tech World mega-companies’ ability to do all of this – in such new, creative and innovative ways.
What’s news is: The Tech World mega-companies’ getting increasingly called out on the carpet – yet continuing unabated to abuse their nigh-limitless power.
What’s news is: It seems, finally, the Valley’s nigh-limitless power – and thus its ability to abuse the daylight out of anyone they wish, which they seem to revel in doing – is rubbing more and more people the wrong way.
And it’s beginning to affect their bottom lines.
Facebook’s market cap is a massive $504 billion – but that’s after last week’s one-day drop of $119 billion. That massive cash hemorrhage was the result of Facebook’s way-low-addition of new members.
Perhaps people aren’t joining Facebook – because they less and less trust Facebook. Facebook has time and again proven to be quite reckless with the massive amounts of our data they collect.
Why You Shouldn’t Trust Facebook with Your Data: An Employee’s Revelations
7 Controversial Ways Facebook Has Used Your Data
Zuckerberg: If Someone Gets Fired for Data Abuse ‘It Should Be Me’
Here’s Why That Recent Abuse of Facebook Data Matters
Could Facebook’s Latest Data Collection Scandal Impact Small Business Users?
Also, Facebook portrays itself as an open platform – on which anyone can freely participate. But they have demonstrated time and again – they are a platform closed to conservatives.
And it appears average people – are beginning to not like the inherent unfairness of it all.
10 Times Facebook Censored Conservatives
That’s from 2016. Since we have Facebook’s alleged attempt to censor “fake news” – which looks almost exactly like yet another attempt to censor conservatives.
Conservatives React with Skepticism and Alarm to Facebook’s War on ‘Fake News’:
“The social media giant said Thursday it would draw on an international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school for journalism, to label and bury fake news in the News Feed. Outlets in the network include Snopes, ABC News, and The Associated Press.”
Gee, with that Murderer’s Row of Leftist bias outlets serving as Facebook’s “fake news” crew – I can’t imagine why conservatives are dubious.
Perhaps it’s also because the last time Facebook tried news – they screwed conservatives.
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
And when Facebook humans aren’t squelching conservatives – Facebook’s computer models are.
Facebook’s Algorithm Hurting Conservatives: “But recent change boosting liberal sites.”
How bad have things gotten?
Facebook Removes Post with Declaration of Independence Excerpt
Two years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tried to dig himself out from under their mountain of self-inflicted wounds.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Meets with Conservative Leaders
Two years of additional rampant bias since – any goodwill generated by that meeting…should be long gone.
Last week President Donald Trump highlighted Twitter’s “shadow banning” of we less government types.
Which of course, thankfully, raised the profile of Twitter’s obnoxious practice. But we have been aware of it since January.
Twitter Shadowbanning ‘Real and Happening Every Day’ Says Inside Source: “Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company….His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.
“According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.
“Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.”
Of course the publication editor is afraid of Twitter’s massive silencing power – he’s seen it destructively imposed upon conservatives. Don’t want to get on the wrong side of that Goliath.
But is Twitter’s anti-conservative bias just a 2018 phenomenon? Heavens no. This from 2016:
Twitter Accused of Political Bias in Right-Wing Crackdown
As with Facebook, that didn’t redound to Twitter’s economic benefit:
Twitter Stock Plunges as Conservatives Purged
Here’s a particularly amusing wrinkle. The reason we learned of Twitter’s conservative “shadow banning” – was the outstanding undercover work of James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas.
“(C)urrent and former Twitter employees are on camera explaining steps the social media giant is taking to censor political content that they don’t like….
“Abhinov Vadrevu, a former Twitter Software Engineer explains a strategy, called ‘shadow banning,’ that to his knowledge, Twitter has employed:
“‘One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.’
“Twitter is in the process of automating censorship and banning, says Twitter Software Engineer Steven Pierre on December 8th of 2017:
“‘Every single conversation is going to be rated by a machine and the machine is going to say whether or not it’s a positive thing or a negative thing.”
We knew about Twitter shadow banning conservatives – in January. But did that stop Twitter from continuing to shadow ban conservatives? Heavens no.
As with Facebook, Twitter’s institutional bias against conservatives isn’t by accident. It is company policy. There are profound proactive efforts made – to make conservatives disappear.
As with Facebook, Twitter portrays itself as an open platform – on which anyone can freely participate. But they too have demonstrated time and again – they are a platform closed to conservatives.
And it appears average people – finally – are beginning to not like the inherent unfairness of it all.
This first appeared in Red State.