The “far-right” label is often associated with neo-Nazism and by muddying up the search results for peoples’ names with a bunch of salacious articles about them it can cause real damage for current and future employment. Headlines like “Meet Candace Owens, Kanye West’s Toxic Far-Right Consigliere,”463 and “Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, the Far Right’s Twin Trolls, Taste Their Own Bitter Medicine,”464 and “Pro-Gun Parkland Teen Kyle Kashuv Apologizes for ‘Inflammatory’ Racial Comments” are commonly deployed to digitally tar and feather conservatives.465
The Daily Beast calls YouTube a “radicalization factory” for the “far-right” and says that it’s “pulling YouTubers down the rabbit hole of extremism.”466 Like others of their ilk, they often push for more censorship of right-wing content under the smokescreen of fighting “racism” and “extremism.” Defame, demonetize, and deplatform is their M.O.
After a joke video depicting Nancy Pelosi as drunk and slurring her words went viral on Facebook, the Daily Beast doxed the person who allegedly made it, revealing his name, the city he lives in, and what he does for a living. The “reporter” (activist) who cyber-stalked the meme maker had apparently messaged his Facebook friends, including his ex-girlfriend, fishing for information about him.467
Don’t Fall for Their Tricks
If you use social media, the best thing you can do is block these Leftist clickbait accounts, and don’t share their links no matter how outrageous their articles are because these sites often rely on hate-clicks, which means they know people will share the links on their social media accounts with the intention of showing their friends how insane the articles are. Unfortunately trying to “expose” them this way just drives more traffic to their website which is what they want. They don’t care if the people clicking the articles like them or hate them, as long as they get the traffic and thus the ad revenue from it.
Oftentimes articles are purposefully inflammatory and designed to get attention because of how outlandish they are, even though the people writing them may not even believe a word of it, but are simply publishing outrageous things in hopes that people will spread them around so they can get a bunch of hate-clicks from it.
So instead of posting links to these outlets, take a screenshot of their headline and post that, along with a summary of the article and your commentary so you’re not driving any more traffic to their websites. Starve them of traffic! Or post an article from a conservative website that is covering what the Leftist sites are reporting instead of giving them any more page views directly. It may be best to just ignore them altogether sometimes and not even mention them so that you don’t inadvertently inspire anyone to visit them out of curiosity.
And be sure to bookmark and follow conservative sites like Fox News, Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Daily Caller, the Washington Times, Townhall, The Federalist, Washington Examiner, Newsbusters, PJ Media, Red State, One America News, WorldNetDaily, and National Review.
The End of Print Journalism?
In early 2018 the New York Times CEO predicted their print edition may only last another ten years before it becomes economically unsustainable to keep it going.468 Newspaper circulation has been on a steady decline since the Internet revolution, and many magazines are struggling as well. PC Magazine ceased printing a physical edition in 2009 and is now just a website. Computerworld followed suit in 2014. Teen Vogue magazine and Self did the same thing in 2017.
Newsweek, once considered to be one of the staples of the news magazine industry ever since its creation in 1933, even quit issuing a print edition at the end of 2012 due to financial problems.469 About a year later after it had been bought by another media organization (IBT Media) they re-launched the print edition, but continue to struggle.
Despite having over 3 million Twitter followers, most of Newsweek’s tweets barely get a dozen interactions, leading many people to think they bought millions of fake followers in order to appear popular.470 In 2018 Newsweek was accused of fraudulently inflating the traffic to their website in order to present advertisers with false numbers, causing numerous online ad vendors to pull their ads.471 So buying fake Twitter followers surely seems right up their alley.
CNN’s president Jeff Zucker complained at an industry conference that his network was having a difficult time monetizing their content online since so many videos are spread through social media with CNN clips being posted to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. “In a Google and Facebook world, monetization of digital and mobile continues to be more difficult than we would have expected or liked,” he said.472
What he means is, there is just too much competition from other websites and YouTube channels, and since there are so many different links being shared on social media, CNN’s web traffic has dramatically dropped and with fewer people actually watching them on cable they’re not getting the revenue from the long blocks of commercials.
Because a lot of people use ad blocker plug-ins on their browsers which automatically hide banner ads from websites, the Washington Post recently began blocking people from being able to see their articles if their browser is using an ad blocker, requiring people to turn it off or white list (allow ads on) their site in order to even see what’s on the website at all.473
The New York Times began limiting people’s ability to read free articles on their website to ten per month by either tracking their IP address or placing cookies on their computer, and later reduced it to just five articles a month.474 When that number is exceeded, the articles are blacked out and a notice pops up saying you have exceeded the allowed free articles limit and it encourages you to become a digital subscriber for $4 per month (for the first year) which then automatically changes to $15 a month from then on. The business model of displaying digital ads next to articles on their website just isn’t working anymore because there is too much competition now with countless websites all using the same ad servers.
Mainstream Asking for Donations
Things are getting so dire for the major online “news” businesses that some are now asking for donations. At the bottom of every Guardian article now there is a notice that reads, “Since you’re here… we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are failing fast. And unlike many news organizations, we haven’t put up a paywall — we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money, and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters — because it might well be your perspective too. If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $1, you can support the Guardian — and it only takes a minute. Thank you.”475