Posted on 04/09/2017 6:54:39 PM PDT by Monorprise
How much face time will your news story get on Facebook? How many eyes will ogle it on Google? Too often, this is apparently determined not by whether the story is “fake” news or newsworthy, but by whether it’s politically correct. And it’s time to break up the Internet’s left-wing, information-conduit oligopoly.
If “knowledge is power” and “The pen is mightier than the sword,” entities controlling what pens you see are powerful indeed. C that Facebook and Google “account for 75% of all the referrals major news and entertainment sites now receive,” according to a Politico report in July.
ADVERTISEMENT Facebook boasts a 40 percent share of the social media market and 1.5 billion users worldwide, making this Internet “nation” more populous than any country on Earth. Upwards of 40 percent of American adults get news from the site.
Google accounts for 64 percent of all U.S. desktop search queries. In Europe, the figure is a whopping 90 percent. The company also owns YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing website.
How is this power used? Earlier this year, ex-Facebook employees admitted they routinely suppressed conservative news and were ordered to place relatively unpopular but company-favored (read: liberal) stories in their “trending” news section. And trending means mind-bending because people are influenced by what’s “popular.” Make an article appear more or less so and you can cause some readers to embrace it as “consensus” or dismiss it as a fringe view. It snowballs, too: prominent placement makes a piece more popular, which makes it more prominent, which makes it yet more popular, which makes…well, you get the idea.
Now the social-media site — dubbed “Fakebook” by many — states it will label and essentially bury “fake news,” using as fact-checkers liberal outlets such as Snopes.com, Politifact and ABC, which themselves have peddled falsehoods....
They are far too powerful and control far too much of the market. Democracy requires competition in the information buiness so let us uses the leftist tools against them.
Yes!! Years late
Great idea. Can we start tomorrow?
Saw an article recently that Youtube will hold back channels of those who make conservative views.
Yes break up the partisan tech giants.
No.
Alternatives exist. Nobody is unfairly suppressing competition. People use the sites they do because they want to.
I’ve been on the “web” ever since it started.
I’ve seen a definite life cycle to social media. Industry-dominating juggernauts take over nearly everything, then disappear with hardly a trace.
Facebook and Google are becoming posed for their natural demise, just like CompuServe and AOL and other behemoths.
Keep the government out of it.
Alternatives exist. Nobody is unfairly suppressing competition. People use the sites they do because they want to.
I’ve been on the “web” ever since it started. I’ve seen a definite life cycle to social media. Industry-dominating juggernauts take over nearly everything, then disappear with hardly a trace. Facebook and Google are becoming posed for their natural demise, just like CompuServe and AOL and other behemoths.
Keep the government out of it.
Thank you for a genuinely conservative viewpoint.
I agree since both Facebook & Google are essentially monopolies and should be compelled to offer equal access AND TREATMENT.
And I would agree even if these monopolies were conservative controlled and slanted that way.
And don’t forget Amazon. All of these have amble reasons to suggest a monopoly is the reason for their success. Google clearly has a monopoly in search and video. They have a duopoly in phone operating systems. So they are clearly leveraging their market power to increase their control in other areas like maps, mail, and Google plus.
Facebook has purchased several apps and is selling their advertising across them all as one sale using their Facebook monopoly and their Instagram duopoly to project their leverage to other platforms like news, email, and passwords etc.
Amazon has been operating at a huge loss for almost two decades building a logistics juggernaut that is now bringing in almost everything that can be sold through a catalog. Using their ability to operate at a continual loss they are taking out shopping as we know it. Amazon is a monopoly, nobody can compete with someone who is not actually operating as a business.
All three of these companies should be broken up. America would be stronger. And we would have far more choices.
I would agree except 90% of the world searches go through Google. “Google it” is becoming part of the culture. When 90% of the searches are filtered through a hard left entity that is a big problem.
Yep. All it will take is one business minded conservative. Facebook will go the way of MySpace.
Do the same with the networks. The movie studio monopolies were broken up by making the theaters independent. Do the same with the network studios and the local broadcast station. Forbid network exclusive contracts between the studios and the station. Reduce the the networks to production companies that must sell their programs to the stations individually by syndication. Forbid the production studios from owning a broadcast station: goodbye WABC, WCBS, WNBC, KABC, KCBS and KNBC.
Declare them common carriers.
Uhhhh......Amazon
Yahoo comes to mind as well.
Except we're a republic...
FREEDOM! Leave the private sector alone! Sour grapes is not a reason to use the state to punish business.
I use Bing instead of Google. Seems to me they are far less political.
After a point, trust busting is a great issue to run on.
Facebook, Google are the new robber barons.
President Trump is not an ideologue.
If it does not work, fix it
..or bomb the hell out of it.
TWB
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