By Jason Charles on 3/21/2018 (6 years 276 days ago) Science & Technology
I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg could have conceived of what a monster the social network would become in the early development stages. The effort to control the flow of information and censor content has so contorted the original algorithms that Facebook used to deliver content, that the platform has virtually been rendered useless and failing. The falling stock prices, the user data scandals, and the insider whistle blowers in recent weeks are signs of things to come. This coupled with Zuckerberg selling vast amounts of stock in Facebook this week may signal the decline of the once largest, social media network ever conceived.
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will sell up to 75 million shares of Facebook over the next 18 months, he said in a post on Friday. At the current Facebook share price of $170, that means Zuckerberg could sell up to $12.7 billion in Facebook stock.” (Business Insider)
What people don’t know is how behind the scenes an internal fight to eradicate “Fake News” on behalf of the establishment has brought the social media giant to their knees. It has become a losing battle, and they have infuriated their user-base as a result. This is bad news for the establishment because they crave their data like a drug.
Data-Addicts
Gaining access to user data and allowing average people a platform to share is one thing but compare that to the multibillion-dollar market that opened up by reselling user data is another thing all-together.
In the Independent, an article entitled The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works, reminds us that Facebook is designed to collect user info and sell it to anyone with the money to buy it.
“Three key parts of Facebook’s model come into play: gathering data from people in order to profile them, both en masse and individually, designing systems that allow that data to be used to target people for advertising and content, then allowing third parties (generally advertisers) to use the data and those targeting systems for their own purposes. The power of these systems is often underestimated, but Facebook themselves know it, and have tested it in a number of ways.
They have demonstrated, through their “emotional contagion” experiment in 2014, that they can make people happier or sadder, simply by manipulating the order things appear in people’s timelines. They have demonstrated that they can make people more likely to vote, testing it in the 2010 US congressional elections. They can profile people based on the most mundane of information – the sheer scale of Facebook’s user-base and the amount of information given to them means that “big data” analysis can make connections that might seem bizarre, revealing insights into intelligence, politics, ethnicity and religion without people actually discussing any of those things directly.” (Independent)
The Trump and Cambridge Analytica use of Facebook data is not unique though, this is business as usual. Just this week Carol Davidsen Obama’s media analytics director just blew the whistle on how Facebook literally handed them the data on a silver plater because as she put it, “they were on our side.” Meaning they were internally pushing Obama.
Politicians, corporations, marketers, and even intelligence agency literally crave this data, but the data is largely being tainted by aggressive activists and power users.
The Monkey Wrench
What Zuckerberg and his early partners couldn't have predicted is how the social media platform would quickly become overrun with activist community’s hell bent on using the platform to wake its entire user-base up to government corruption. Things the establishment labels as conspiracy theories, found fertile ground immediately on the Facebook, Twitter and Youtube platform.
I would say the 9/11 Truth community was the first community of activists that started to utilize the platform to network and spread conspiracy research and news among the Facebook user-base. The vast majority of these young savvy activists quickly discovered how to network together and utilize these platforms to amplify their voice that was largely ignored and ridiculed by the mainstream.
While the vast majority of the Facebook user-base was creating cat videos and uploading pictures of their food, 9/11 truth activists where compiling research, creating memes, editing videos of controlled demolitions, and providing whistleblower testimony. They would then inject this content into their newsfeeds. The way these early activists used social media platforms would forever change the Facebook business model. Facebook went from passivity towards all user content, to a policy of aggression and suppression of certain user content.
Another group that utilized the Social Media platforms to increasingly impact the social dialog outside of the policing of mainstream media gate-keepers was the Ron Paul movement that sprang up around the 2008 election season. All of these folks, having networked together formed the bulk of the Liberty movement.
Now, these social activist communities have grown to such a size and have affected the national dialog to such a degree that the establishment has got to be kicking themselves for allowing these platforms to even exist. As much power the purchasing of data gives a conniving politician, the knowledge and concepts that have been unleashed into the public arena are devastating to the globalist agenda. Seeing everything these activists post aims to awaken the public to a wider and wider range of globalist conspiracies and more.
Anybody that spends anytime on Facebook realizes that there are a good many of their own networked friends and family that have been influenced by these activist’s communities. It really isn’t hyperbole to say virtually everyone has come in contact with a wide swath of conspiracy theory related content by virtue of their friends and families sharing videos and articles.
You name the conspiracy and chances are you first became aware of it by content shared to you by a friend, co-worker, family member or acquaintance. No matter how much Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and the others tweaked their algorithms to limit conspiracy content these activist groups always found ways around them.
Fake News, Russian Bots, and Alt-Right Trolls
It was this last 2016 election season that really hammered the Facebook platform. From my perspective there was a deliberate plan by the DNC, Obama and the Hillary campaign to censor alternative voices that have found a massive following on the internet. Voices like Drudge, Alex Jones of Infowars, Brietbart, Mike Adams of Natural News, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Sharpiro, etc. All alternative voices with conservative leanings that have had to develop effective media platforms apart from the establishment media cartels. Their content was seen as widely popular on social media platforms and was swaying young and old demographics towards their conservative conspiracy minded perspectives.
When Obama and Hillary on the 2016 campaign trail started to call out these alternative media outfits by name it signaled to the tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube that it would now be okay to begin actively censoring these organizations and their content as “Fake News.”
This was the beginning of the end for Facebook and the other tech giants seeing they could not implement sufficient artificial intelligence or A.I. controls to effectively censor people on their platforms without being seen as tyrants and anti-free speech.
Here are a few examples as to how these tech-giants attempted to manipulate public opinion away from the alternative press takeover of social media.
Internet Ghettos
You may remember Matt Drudge warning against Internet Ghettos on a 2015 interview done by Alex Jones on his radio network.
“Facebook and Twitter are ‘Internet ghettos’ designed to eradicate the open range of independent thought that was once the Internet, according to media pioneer Matt Drudge.” (Infowars)
Filter Bubbles
This all was later expanded upon when we learned that Facebook and other social media platforms were working on ways to create echo-chamber like bubbles in which like-minded people could only talk to other like-minded people in hopes that would limit the amount of bleed over of content into the average users newsfeeds.
“Filter bubbles are formed by the algorithms social media sites like Facebook use to decide which information to show you, based largely on your own tastes. The idea is to keep you engaged, but the result may be a worldview skewed to fit your own preferences and biases. With 62 per cent of Americans getting their news from social media at least occasionally, the fear is that filter bubbles could affect how you make decisions in real life.
“If this window is filled with highly partisan and, in some cases, false news, then many people will be assessing political candidates and information on the basis of distorted and misleading information,” says Martin Moore at King’s College London.” (Newscientist)
Shadow Banning
This last January James O’Keefe of Project Veritas ran an undercover video showing Twitter executives talking candidly about banning conservative talk on their platform. This method is called Shadow Banning, and it effectively throttles the reach of banned users to a limited few people without their knowledge of the ban.
“Project Veritas (PV) report released this week zeroes in on Twitter's little-known practice of “shadow banning,” which turns out to be a rather surreptitious, stealth method of censorship.
“Shadow banning is a way of blocking users from a social media platform without notifying them,” “Tweets from a shadow-banned user still appear to their followers, but don’t show up in search results, or anywhere else on Twitter,” he said.
“Although Twitter presents itself as politically neutral, its culture behind closed doors is one of blatant censorship, systematic bias, and political targeting,” according to O’Keefe.” (Lifesite News)
Google Manipulating Search Results
The connections between Google and the Obama administration were deep. This relationship was also shared with the Clinton campaign. The charges that Google was manipulating their search results in favor of Clinton were right on target. It isn’t hard at all to demonstrate that top Google insiders were gaming the system on her behalf. You may remember during the campaign against Trump, after everything he said, Hillary would retort, "I hope the fact-checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard" or "Please, fact-checkers, get to work.” What this translated to was, thanks Google for burying positive alternative info on Trump, and raising content that was praising Clinton to the top in their search results. How could this be possible, well when Google insiders are a part of your campaign, pretty easy.
“Google’s executives and employees employed a variety of strategies to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. Google permeated Clinton’s sphere of influence on a broad scale, rivaling the influence it exerted over the Obama administration. A review found at least 57 people were affiliated with both Clinton—in her presidential campaign, in her State Department, at her family foundation—and with Google or related entities. In addition, 10 people who worked under Clinton at the State Department later joined the New America Foundation, a Google-friendly think tank where Google’s Eric Schmidt served as chairman and was one of its top donors.” (GoogleTransparencyProject)
SPLC, Snopes, and the ADL Fact Checking Fiasco
These notoriously bigoted, anti-conservative, far-left hate organizations have been tapped as “fact-checkers” and “fake news police” by all these major social platforms.
“Some of the biggest names in tech are partnering with the Anti-Defamation League to thwart online harassment.
Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They'll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies' various platforms and across the internet.
"These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. "We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together." (Cnet)
Surprise, there is not one conservative organization being considered to aid in this objective of censoring the internet. This is none other than a concerted effort by Big Data to utilize politically biased organizations to identify and censor conservative perspectives by labeling it hate speech. Limiting racist, bigoted, alt-right speech is code for conservatives. Basically, everything they slandered Trump with during the election is then layered onto conservative voices on the web, giving them all the excuse, they need to censor and destroy their social media platforms and reach.
This is just a small sampling of the multitude of ways Big Data is trying to limit the impact conservative and alternative news organizations are having on the national dialog. This is the very definition of fascism. When Big Data unveils their political stripes, actively sides with political interests, and then engages alternative voices with censorship, and suppression you know we are living in an Orwellian nightmare.
Conclusion
The pressure by the mainstream media and the establishment political class for social media platforms to react and censor these activist groups has caused the downfall of Facebook and other platforms. Even with the billions in operational budgets and software geniuses at their disposal, they couldn't limit the effect activists were having on their platforms. Everything they have tried has turned up to be a total failure.
The irony of all of this is the more they play around with their user’s news feed and experience in an attempt to censor the alternative voices that have taken of the internet, the more they infuriate their user-base. In an effort to throttle the masses of conspiracy related content being pummeled into the public arena via social networks all they have achieved is the ruination of their core software. Average users are abandoning these platforms because the algorithms that serve info to their user-base have been so thoroughly tampered with that it has severely degraded the quality of experience for the average users. The effort to censor certain people and info means you have to directly impact all the users on the platform. These changes have not been positive and people are leaving in mass. In fact, even Zuckerberg’s mentor is calling a spade a spade on mainstream news.
“Facebook is confronting a crisis of public trust "that is going to destroy the company," Mark Zuckerberg's former mentor, the venture capitalist Roger McNamee, tells CNN.
"They haven't even taken the first step of admitting there's a problem," he told Christiane Amanpour in an interview Tuesday. "If they don't do something pretty soon, people are going to realize they can't trust Facebook anymore." That, he said, could "threaten them permanently.” (CNN)
So, when you hear politicians and mainstream media personalities decrying Russian Bots or Fake News, just remember that this is code for people who are awake to every conspiracy under the sun and are using social media platforms in a way that circumvents the mainstream narrative. This truth is causing panic throughout the tech, political and intelligence world.
Now, these platforms, having been completely unsuccessful at shadow censoring their political opponents are just out-right banning and kicking conservatives off their systems.
Youtube has deleted hundreds of conservative channels. Google is actively delisting alternative websites so their content can’t be found, and twitter is shutting down accounts of popular conservatives. What we have to remember is everything they do will only make them look like the Nazi’s they are in the eyes of the average person. The war on Fake News by the politicians has ultimately signaled the downfall of these systems. The tech empires simply couldn't keep up with the political pressure being placed upon them. This is how the activist communities have broken social media giants like Facebook.
You see what these tech giants didn't like was the truth, the research, the arguments, the logic, and the principles behind Constitutional government. This is the real reason as to why they are losing this battle, they simply can't limit the truth coming out that they are engaged in a soviet style, communist color revolution to overthrow our Constitutional republic. The Truth hurt them and has hurt them bad, this is the power of the alternative meida. The genie is out of the bottle, the vast majority of people are awake to a host of issues, and there is nothing the political class can do about it. It reminds me of the verse in proverbs, talking about how evil men who lay traps for their neighbors, end up falling in it themselves to their own demise.
Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him. Proverbs 26:27
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