Just two weeks after the shocking loss of Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the 2016 election, the war on “fake news” was launched as a smokescreen to suppress the reach of regular users’ social media posts and artificially boost messages from the mainstream media. The Democrats became frantic about supposed “fake news” being shared on Facebook that they claimed had cast Hillary in a false light, and that was the reason they said, why so many people didn’t trust her; and hence, didn’t vote for her.6
While there were a few viral fake news stories smearing her, all the studies show they had no influence on people’s votes and just reinforced beliefs they already held about her.7 There were also fake stories about Donald Trump that went viral during the heat of the campaign, but that fact is ignored and the “fake news” problem was framed as an issue that’s only one-sided.
In reality, the fake news scare was just an elaborate ruse to drastically alter the way social media functions by pressuring Big Tech companies to emphasize mainstream media outlets in people’s feeds instead of showing organically what should be there based on who they were following and what was being posted.8
Barack Obama was the first “social media president,” getting elected in 2008 when Facebook was first becoming a central hub in people’s lives. He was the first president to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and his senior advisor David Axelrod admitted, “If not for social media, Barack Obama would never have been elected president [because] it gave us the ability to connect to a new generation of voters.”9
At the time, social media was still kind of a novelty, but a few years later it would permeate most people’s lives when everyone had to have an iPhone and the social media companies released mobile apps so people could “stay connected” wherever they were instead of having to wait until they got home from work or school to open up their laptop to see what’s happening online.
But today, getting news online isn’t just a novelty, it’s the norm. A report from the Pew Research Center in 2018 showed that more Americans get their news from posts on social media than from newspapers.10 Social media now starts revolutions, and overnight a single video clip can turn most of the world against a nation’s leader, or galvanize members of an entire political party to rally behind a cause.
Since the barriers to entry are now so low today with anyone being able to start a YouTube channel or create a Facebook page, we are seeing the legacy media frantically trying to stop their industry (and their influence) from slipping through their fingers. Liberals’ favorite tactic today is silencing their opposition under the disguise of combating “hate speech” or stopping “right-wing extremists,” and the ability to censor and manipulate information online rests in the hands of just a few gigantic corporations whose values are completely opposed to middle America and traditional family values.
Because of the emergence of social media, billions of people around the world communicate through Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms which have largely taken the place of sending emails and talking on the phone. As you know, these social media apps can allow anyone’s message to be spread just as far as something broadcast on the national news, or printed on the front page of the New York Times, but because of this massive redistribution of power, the Liberal Media Industrial Complex is scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle.
One doesn’t even have to be a “social media star” to be a victim of the Left’s censorship because average users have their Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram pics, and YouTube videos removed all the time for “violating community standards.”
Big Tech’s increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems automatically scan every post for key words they have identified as sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, or just generically “hateful” or “offensive;” and has them removed once discovered. Just a handful of these “violations” and your entire account is shut down for good and everything you’ve ever posted there deleted. Nothing is out of the reach of their AI, and anything can be deleted at any moment by the nameless and faceless moderators, leaving the victims with no recourse or appeal.
Total control of information is what they want, and they have hijacked the technology we all use to communicate in our modern age, but thankfully you were able to get this powerful tool into your hands before they could stop it — an old fashioned book! I commend you for picking one up and tuning out the noise relentlessly trying to make its way to your ears, and turning away from the millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and video clips all competing for your attention.
In the coming pages we’ll do a deep dive into each of the major social media platforms and I’ll detail their algorithm manipulation, double standards, liberal bias, and censorship. We’ll also dissect the media’s war on President Trump, their mission to destroy our culture by undermining traditional family values, and we’ll look at the future of fake news.
While scrolling through tweets and Facebook posts is often like junk food for the brain, reading a book is a healthy and nourishing four-course meal in comparison. Sure, junk food is fine in moderation, but if it’s all you eat then you’re going to be very unhealthy. And the difference between reading through social media feeds (or watching the news) and reading a book is about the same as the difference between a good steak and eating a burger at McDonalds. One is quick, cheap, and poor quality; while the other is expensive, time consuming to make, and healthy to eat. And since we’re dealing with a very important subject, it’s best to do this right. So let’s begin by taking a look behind the curtain of the monolithic Liberal Media Industrial Complex and start dismantling it piece by piece.
Censorship
There are several classic books that highlight the dangers of censorship and depict tyrannical governments that use their endless power to snuff out any opposition in hopes of maintaining their control over society. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published in 1949, and Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, are two of the most popular examples and weren’t just written for entertainment. They were meant to serve as a warning of what giant bureaucracies could do if their growing power goes unchecked.
But today in America, it’s not the government censoring what newspapers print or what airs on the evening news. It’s the Silicon Valley titans — it’s Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Susan Wojcicki. In the marketplace of ideas they are losing, and so these industry leaders are silencing influential opponents who speak out against the Left’s attempted revolution.
They’re also trying to create a chilling effect by scaring people into not speaking out about certain issues or make us think twice before sharing certain information on social media out of fear we will be socially ostracized, or even fired from our job; so many people are self-censoring themselves in what’s been called the “Spiral of Silence.”11 The fewer people who speak out about an issue due to fear of repercussions causes others who feel they should say something to be more apprehensive about doing so because nobody else seems to be doing it, which in turn causes even more people to stay silent, causing the false impression that no one seems to be opposed to what’s happening.