Is ours becoming a government of big tech, by big tech, and for big tech? This is a good question given that through its suppression of perhaps more than two billion conservative pages, Facebook alone might have “stolen” the 2018 midterm election for Democrats — and itself.
Oh, this isn’t to say Facebook literally tampered with voting machines or ballots any more than the Russians did in 2016. But note that many Democrats have been saying that Putin “stole” the election for President Trump. Yet as Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted a while back, “If a few Russians buying Facebook ads threatens our democracy, and that’s what they’re telling us, how about the threat of Facebook itself?”
So whose “theft” was greater? The Russians’?
Or Facebook’s?
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“What big tech has done to conservative and other undesirable publishers is nothing short of a digital Kristallnacht.” — filmmaker Andrew Marcus.
When all the midterm votes are counted, the Democrats may end up with 40 extra House seats — the worst lower-chamber rout of the GOP since Watergate. Explaining big tech’s role in this, Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft writes:
Democrats have a huge advantage over Republicans with their partners in the media complex, Hollywood, and academia.
And, unlike 2016, this year Democrats can also can give a huge amount of credit to Tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Suburban voters and women no longer were reading conservative articles on Facebook. Facebook eliminated at least 1.5 billion links to conservative articles since 2017. If you add additional websites like The Gateway Pundit, Infowars, Young Cons, Right Wing News, etc. the number tops 2 billion easy. And it likely made a difference on Tuesday night. 80% of women age 18-49 have Facebook accounts. These are the women who get their news from Facebook. Facebook knows this and eliminated conservative content on their platform so there would be no repeat of 2016.
With undecided midterm races, angry Mad Max faces, and Florida folderol and fraud dominating the headlines, the big-tech story has flown under the radar. Yet conservatives have increasingly been hobbled the last two years by Facebook suppression, Twitter “shadowbanning,” and Google’s burying of conservative search results.
Such censorship is nothing new, but the establishment’s 2016 election defeat kicked it into high gear. Under the pretext of eliminating the “fake news” that allegedly swayed voters toward Trump, tech companies have effected their anti-conservative digital Kristallnacht.
The results are striking, too. As Hoft reports (quotations are his):
• Successful conservative site Western Journal, and its umbrella sites, have lost 75 percent of their Facebook traffic since 2016.
• “Klicked Media, which hosts over 60 conservative websites, lost 400 million page views from Facebook in the last six months if you compare the traffic to a year ago,” and 70 to 80 percent of its traffic between May 2017 and May 2018.
• After being ranked the fourth most influential 2016-election publisher, Gateway Pundit’s Facebook traffic “has been effectively eliminated.”
• A June Gateway Pundit study of a number of top conservative sites, including Breitbart, Conservative Tribune, Independent Journal Review, and the Daily Caller, “found that Facebook has eliminated 93%” of their traffic.
The New American has also experienced a precipitous drop in Facebook traffic; of course, this led to a significant decline in its traffic ranking.
This is no small matter. Like it or not, Google and social media — GoogTwitFace — are now the town square; they are the conduit that literally controls information’s flow. Banishment from them is relegation to Internet Siberia, where, as in the old Soviet Union, dissident voices are quarantined and effectively silenced.
Realize that traffic means “customers”; choke off this lifeblood and a website dies. For little traffic means little exposure and thus little advertising revenue; this inhibits a conservative publisher’s ability to pay writers, conduct investigations, and spread the truth. It could even be driven out of business.
Of course, this is precisely what GoogTwitFace wants: to eliminate dissident voices and cement leftist power.
Yet aside from its ideological bent — big tech is notoriously left-wing — it also had a more immediate goal this election. With GoogTwitFace approaching monopoly status, there had been Republican murmurings about using anti-trust laws to break the giants up. But with the Democrats’ impending House takeover, this idea is essentially dead. Mission accomplished.
The bottom line: As I wrote in August, “Google Is Not a Search Engine; Twitter and Facebook Aren’t Social Media” — they’re now propaganda tools masquerading as such.
By the way, Hoft focused on women voters because they favored Democrats this election by 19 points, whereas men broke for the GOP 51-49. As I recently pointed out, however, this reflects the sexes’ voting patterns in recent elections and is no anomaly. Actually in question here is how much GoogTwitFace influenced both sexes’ votes.
As to this, psychologist Robert Epstein — who emphasizes that he’s “not a conservative” — warned in August that Google and Facebook alone had the power to shift “upwards of 12 million votes” in November’s midterm elections (video below). So did big tech account for most or all of the Democrats’ 13-million Senate “popular vote” advantage? We’ll never know for sure.
Here’s what we do know. As Hoft puts it about Facebook’s censorship,
Facebook wants to pretend this was not a political decision. Yet, several top liberal activist groups: Media Matters, Share Blue, CREW and American Bridge, made it a priority in early 2017 to work with the liberal tech giants to undermine President Trump and ensure that liberals gain control of Congress and the presidency in 2020.
The tech giants did just that.
It’s perhaps the greatest under-the-radar campaign contribution of all time.
Photo: stuartmiles99/iStock/Getty Images Plus
