A year ago, talk of a Democratic bias in social media seemed innocuous enough; the presidential campaign was just gearing up, and much discussion of it online centered around Democrat Hillary Clinton’s battle with her archrival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Admittedly, much of today’s social media audience is made up of the demographic group known as millennials, and this crowd in particular was watching the campaign season unfold like a drawn-out prize fight, with Bernie Sanders pulling throngs of tens of thousands of people compared to mere hundreds for Hillary Clinton.
Mentions of Republican candidate Donald Trump were usually not serious and tended to focus on subjects other than his politics. However, as it became clear that Trump would likely clinch the GOP presidential nomination, the online attacks against him grew more serious.
And when it was established that it was a one-on-one race between Trump and Clinton, the gloves came off, and third-party and mainstream news outlets started to hit the GOP candidate with everything they had. A chorus of progressive millennials was all too happy to go along with this, and suddenly, Trump became an all-around whipping boy and target for liberal wrath.
Facebook and other outlets hyped up independent “news” posts from previously little-known groups such as Occupy Democrats, The Other 98% and U.S. Uncut, which disparaged Trump for his looks, his words and his family as much as they did for his politics. While it turned out that many of these groups were directly funded by deep-pocketed Democratic donors such as globalist billionaire George Soros, they were given equal power and influence by social media kings like Facebook, whose co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz collectively gave Hillary Clinton more than $40 million. To argue that Facebook and other networks were not 100 percent in favor of Clinton would be like trying to argue the Earth was flat (a fruitless exercise that nonetheless oddly re-presented itself online in the latter half of 2016).
The world of social media became heavily slanted as virtually all of Silicon Valley became a giant Hillary Clinton echo chamber. To be a Trump supporter in this environment was to subject oneself to nearly nonstop hatred, insults and social disconnection from most millennials.
Conservative news sources attempted to call out Facebook for its heavily biased stance and met with Zuckerberg and his top management about the issue. But they only succeeded in wresting minor changes, gaining more of a presence for partisan outlets such as Breitbart News, The Daily Caller and a few other right-leaning websites.
Because Facebook doesn’t release numbers of how many viewers are shown which posts, there’s no way to gauge how slanted coverage is to the site’s audience. But ad hoc research suggests the site is heavily, heavily slanted in favor of Democratic causes and candidates.
Despite all of this, Republican candidate Donald Trump was able to pull off a historic upset victory in the presidential election, to the chagrin and fury of liberal tech billionaires and other Clinton donors. That hasn’t changed the slamming of Trump online and continuous attempts to demonize anything and everything about him (such as labeling members of his cabinet racist or anti-Semitic), whether evidence justifying doing so exists or not.
In the face of this, conservatives are losing patience with Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that Facebook’s site algorithms and editorial teams present objective information with no biases to viewers.
Recently, Alex Jones of the Infowars news channel has suggested that if social media wars on populism continue, that it may be time for conservatives to start their own social network. Whether this would be an effort spearheaded by Donald Trump, the Republican Party or some other organization is unknown.
But as it stands, Facebook appears to be between a rock and a hard place; that’s because if the platform attempts to censor or slant the news any further, conservatives will likely leave its website for some new vehicle. If that were to happen, as many as half of Facebook’s users could disappear overnight; the company’s ad revenues and stock price would collapse.
Facebook is likely highly aware of this, yet at the same time, it continues to push its narrative, presenting slanted versions of the news through a selection of supposedly “objective” news content. The site draws this content from outlets such as The Huffington Post (owned by America Online, which, in turn, is owned by Verizon, a major supporter of the Clinton Foundation), the liberal New York Times, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker (owned by Democrat-aligned conglomerate Advance Publications/Conde Nast), pro-globalist magazine The Atlantic, the millennial-identified Young Turks and TV networks MSNBC and CNN (also known as the “Clinton News Network”).
Recently, Internet broadcast platform Twitter also attacked President-Elect Trump, saying that they would ban him from their network if he continued to tweet what they deem to be hateful or politically incorrect messages. As with Facebook, Infowars and other outlets have suggested establishing an alternate website that competes with Twitter that wouldn’t be held to Twitter’s constraints and policies of virtual censorship.
Knowing that it’s unlikely that Facebook and Twitter will change their tactics, conservatives need to take a stand and make these proposed competing platforms a reality. They need to threaten to leave the original networks en masse; only when that threat is taken seriously can there be hope for real reforms of the social media Goliaths.
In time, conservatives may even have to take on Search giant Google if its past attempts at distorting search results continue.
From a technology standpoint, nothing should be off the table — including remaking the Internet itself if it were to come to that.
Certainly, with Trump in control of government branches such as the FCC, it may finally be time to put the regulatory screws to Internet companies that try to slant information and news in a non-objective direction. It’s only fair and reasonable to ask for a sense of balance in the coverage of views; it’s un-American to expect anything else.
~ Conservative Zone
