Since people are no longer limited to getting their information from the major news networks, and as our society rapidly moved away from newspapers and magazines to online websites, blogs, and social media pages◦— not only did these new media monopolies begin manipulating the flow of information that users were posting and viewing, but cunning individuals within the government looked for opportunities to manipulate users of this new technology as well.
An executive in the Obama administration recommended that the government pay online trolls to flood the comment sections on websites and videos in attempts to discredit certain posts deemed “conspiracy theories” or “extremist.” Cass Sunstein, who headed up the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for Obama, wrote that such a plan “will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.”389
A few years earlier a military intelligence officer and a defense analyst drew up a white paper discussing the growing popularity of blogs and independent news websites and explored, “the possibility of incorporating blogs and blogging into military information strategy, primarily as a tool for influence.”390 The paper, Blogs and Military Information Strategy, also floated the idea of hiring bloggers to attack people and promote certain causes.391 It also suggested the government hack popular blogs and make subtle changes in articles, not to just spread propaganda, but to discredit the writers.
“Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data◦— merely a few words or phrases◦— may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience,” it says.392
These tactics were proposed before the social media era, which took the information age to a whole new level of user interactions through Internet comments as people began to rely on these apps and websites to communicate with their friends, family, and total strangers. It’s now how most people interact with the outside world, slipping further away from actual interpersonal interactions and embracing parasocial relationships with YouTubers who are their virtual friends, playing hashtag games and spending hours on end scrolling through Instagram or Snapchat posts reading comments and posting replies in what amounts to a historic waste of time.
Social media is filled with fraud, posers, D-list celebrities with fake followers, and people who get paid to post about how much they supposedly like certain products in what’s called “influence marketing.” Kim Kardashian can get paid tens of thousands of dollars just to tweet something about a product or post a picture of something on Instagram.393 The Federal Trade Commission has started to crack down on these influence marketers because it is illegal to not disclose that a tweet, Instagram post, or a product endorsement in a YouTube video is a paid promotion.394 In a TV commercial, viewers know the celebrity is getting paid to talk about a product, but if someone on Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube posts about how ‘great’ a product is, nobody knows if they just want to tell their followers about something they think is cool, or if it’s a commercial.
An investigation into the official Obamacare Facebook page in 2014 found that the majority of the over 226,838 comments were from just a small handful of users who were most likely paid shills to give the false impression that everyone loved the new law.395 Barack Obama’s “nonprofit” Organizing for Action declined to comment if they were paying people to post, but it’s clear from the extraordinary number of posts from the same few accounts that this was an organized online campaign.396
The government actually paid WebMD, the popular health and medical website, $14 million dollars to promote Obamacare.397 Those payments weren’t even kept secret and were listed in the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services. A private foundation called the California Endowment even paid $500,000 to television networks to incorporate pro-Obamacare plot lines into TV sitcoms and other shows.398
All of this makes for a fascinating and complex media landscape which is difficult to navigate without getting lost in an endless maze of hyperlinks, and millions of people and countless companies and organizations all simultaneously hoping to be seen, heard, followed, and believed.
In a rare interview Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge gave to Alex Jones in 2015, he warned people not to rely on Facebook and other social media companies to communicate with their friends, get your news from, or to build a business with because, “You’re a pawn in their scheme.”399 To see what he is talking about let’s take a closer and more specific look at several of the current top social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) to see how they can, and do, manipulate and censor what people post and what users see. And then we’ll look at YouTube, Google, and Wikipedia to see how and why they do the same thing.
Facebook slowly morphed from a website people could use to look up old friends from high school or college and share photos with family members, to a place where most people now get much of their news and keep up with current events. At one time Facebook only showed users what their ‘friends’ were posting, but that changed when they added the trending module◦— and with this simple little box they harnessed the power to introduce their one billion users to news stories that their friends hadn’t posted◦— stories the company feels users should know about, and overnight Facebook transformed from just a social networking site to a news company.
With this change, combined with the algorithms which filter out certain content people post by limiting its distribution, Facebook has become a powerful gatekeeper that can decide which stories will go viral, and which ones will remain virtually unknown. Facebook also poses a danger to free speech by policing and censoring what people post, and if something is deemed ‘too politically incorrect,’ then posts are automatically deleted and users may have their accounts completely shut down.
Most news websites now rely on Facebook for the majority of their traffic from users posting links to their articles. An Internet analytics firm showed that Facebook was responsible for driving 43% of web traffic to over 400 major sites in 2016.400
According to their study, in 2014 Facebook was responsible for 20% of all traffic to news sites, and in just two years that figure more than doubled as people became accustomed to scrolling through their Facebook feeds to see what articles their friends had posted and because they were now ‘following’ news websites on Facebook instead of bookmarking the websites in their Internet browser and visiting them directly.401
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said one of his goals is, “To build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.”402 Facebook even began hosting articles from major publishers so users who clicked on a link wouldn’t leave the Facebook ecosystem and could now view the content within Facebook’s app.403
The company wants to be the primary hub of the Internet, bypassing search engines and web browsers altogether.404 For those who were using the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we recall most companies encouraging people to visit their websites at the end of their commercials, but those calls to action have been replaced by now encouraging people to follow them on Facebook instead, making Mark Zuckerberg one of the most powerful (and unnecessary) middlemen in the history of the Internet.