Posted on 01/12/2018 9:15:28 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
Today, as you read this, my website Right Wing News is shutting down operations. It has been around since 2001, but became massive a few years ago because of Facebook.
Remember the mainstream media liberals going out of their minds because the Russians reached almost 150 million people with their $100,000 Facebook ad buy? In July of 2015, in just a week, the Right Wing News Facebook page reached 133 million people. Because conservatives were sharing content they were interested in, little ol’ Right Wing News (well, I guess nearly 3.6 million Facebook likes isn’t so little) was driving the same amount of web traffic as some of the biggest newspapers in America. Barack Obama’s Facebook page was 36 times bigger than our page; yet we had 7 times as many people talking about our content.
Ironically, that’s a big part of what killed the website.
You see, what Facebook giveth, Facebook can take away. So, why would Facebook want to kill extremely successful Facebook pages that its users enjoyed?
One of the reasons goes back to something I told multiple reporters during the 2016 election. I believe that all of the thriving right wing Facebook pages activated large numbers of what I like to think of as “instinctive conservatives.” You know, the sort of people who love God, guns and America, but who don’t follow politics day to day, read National Review or consume any of Milton Friedman’s books. From what I could see on Facebook, that group of people LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Donald Trump and I believe they were responsible for getting him the GOP nomination and probably even got him over the hump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I think the liberals that run Facebook came to that same conclusion.
Before the election season got into full swing, Facebook had already made some mild downgrades to reach. Afterwards, when liberal mainstream media outlets were screaming about Russian ad buys and “fake news,” Facebook systematically, methodically reduced the reach of all its pages with each algorithm change. By then, most of us understood where it was going long-term. If Facebook killed every conservative page overnight, there would be a huge outcry. On the other hand, if Facebook slowly strangled us to death, we’d fade away and would people even notice?
Yes, non-political pages were affected, too, although conservative pages got it worse and, yes, there is a business incentive to do this. When people click on a news story, they leave Facebook. On the other hand, conservative pages like Right Wing News were able to become so massive because we are putting out content an awful lot of people on Facebook want to read. That’s no longer going to be allowed in part because we’re putting out a message that the liberals who run the company don’t want out there.
In addition to that, as someone who has been working for a living in this business since 2005, let me drop a little truth bomb on you. We are now in a very oversaturated, corporation-dominated media environment. If you don’t already have a legacy website that captured traffic years ago and held onto it, huge traffic you can bring in from elsewhere, or millions of dollars to spend, your chances of getting a political website off the ground today are infinitesimal.
That gets to the heart of the biggest problem conservatives don’t realize that they have.
Social media IS the new public square. It’s the place you go when you want to reach out and find an audience.
…….Except Facebook has for all intents and purposes announced that it’s killing off pages. So much for having a conservative voice there.
As James O’Keefe just revealed in his latest sting, Twitter felt comfortable banning pro-Trump accounts and one of his unwitting sources said, “Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” Charles Johnson, who’s a conservative gadfly, is currently suing Twitter because it admitted that he didn’t violate Twitter’s policies; Twitter just wanted to get rid of him. It’s good to know that if you’re conservative, you can spend years building up an audience on Twitter and the liberals at Twitter can arbitrarily throw you off their service because they decide they don’t like your views.
Speaking of building up an audience on a platform for years and then getting screwed, YouTube is also doing that to conservatives. YouTube arbitrarily decided that many conservative videos should be demonetized. Yes, there were profane or gross liberals demonetized as well, but just presenting a conservative point of view was enough to have YouTube cut people off. Dennis Prager’s PragerU is suing YouTube for exactly that reason. Just to give you an example of the sort of content YouTube thinks is over-the-line, here are some of the videos it demonetized: Why America Must Lead, The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder, Why Did America Fight the Korean War, and The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians. Of course, YouTube would claim that it’s not censoring the videos because it didn’t take them down. However, people are not going to spend large amounts of time and money putting together high-production-value videos if they’re not going to be allowed to make money on those videos because of their political beliefs.
Furthermore, YouTube’s radically liberal parent company Google is being sued by James Damore for targeting white men and conservatives. Incidentally, Damore was fired from Google after he wrote an internal memo for other employees to read (something that is common at Google) called, Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion. Don’t kid yourself because if you are conservative, “diversity” and “inclusion” don’t include you. If you want a more concrete example of that besides its heavily biased search engine which pretty clearly prefers liberal sources over conservative ones, the latest controversy with Google is that if you search for many prominent conservative websites, it has a “fact checking section” next to them while many sketchy liberal websites don’t.
Many of these companies effectively became monopolies because they worked hard to serve ALL of their users. Now that they completely dominate their spaces in the marketplace, their liberal political views are impacting their services. As Robert Conquest once said, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing” and that is a much bigger threat than most conservatives realize.
It’s easy to say, “Build your own social media website and compete with them,” but we’re talking about companies with billions of dollars and monopolistic control of their markets. The obvious solution would be to break these companies up or to at least acknowledge their importance to modern society and regulate them heavily, but conservatives don’t seem to be interested enough in either solution to even THREATEN to do this.
We’ve already lost the schools, Hollywood and the mainstream media. What happens when you can’t get out conservative opinion via social media because they block, shadow ban and demonetize everyone who gets any traction? What happens if they put rules in place that essentially make expressing conservative opinions something that gets you kicked off their service? You’re pro-gun? Sorry, not allowed. You don’t like gay marriage? Get out of here. Criticizing Black Lives Matter? Out of bounds! We can hope for the best, but that seems like the future we’re headed toward and it’s one that will leave conservatism weaker than ever.
So I believe Google is still indexing both FR posts and comments (Bray's post and Alas Babylon's comment containing Bray's post). Good enough for now, but worth monitoring.
Bookmark
FB is evil. They got their users to encourage me to sign up and then they demanded a “government id” to allow me to log on. No way! Now other users can post to “my” FB and I can’t. I was getting notification emails and I blocked the FB domain on both of my email clients.
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Thanks. Please add me to your ping list.
Many will be getting a tax increase, not a cut. The Republicans needed $1.4 Trillion in revenue to compensate for slashing the corporate rate from 35% to 21% - and they stuck the bill to pay for that to many middle class and upper middle class Americans.
Even Mark Levin stated on his program that this is NOT what Trump and the Republicans ran on. Raising taxes on millions of middle class Americans was not part of the campaign rhetoric - but that is precisely what they did. People that bought homes and built lives based on these assumption have been stabbed in the neck by the GOPe.
You should be complaining to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell - not to me.
This is a very interesting article. It’s been all about monetization, but now Zuck wants to turn that down. His advertisers are not happy. Should be interesting.
Young people have left Facebook. Facebook is now where old people friend other old people and post things they think are funny or to let everyone know that another classmate has died.
There was a time when you could Google your handle and free republic and find hilarious responses to your posts on liberal sites.
So, replace the offending words with Muslim and homosexual. If they continue to "dump" you it will clearly indicate that your opinions rather than your language is problematic to them.
Just being on and in any way using Facebook is empowering the enemy to do what O’Keefe demonstrated so well this week what Twitter is doing.
It is evil.
I hardly used FB until Some serious health situations happened. I became a bubble girl and found social interaction thru FB.
I do not used FB for anything political as it is for social purposes to be. However, many do post and comment on political/current events. The comments on those posts can become heated and opinions formed and relationships broken.
I also belong to private groups that are related to my health condition. That has helped me connect with others going thru a similar ordeal.
I was invited into a closed and private group. That one is political. About 25 members are a combination of every walk of life politically and most are outspoken. We challenge each other. But, it takes some thick skin at times.
What is said in there, stays there.
I also signed up for cooking pages and my feed gets videos and recipes.
As you can see, there are many aspects to FB.
Privacy options can control who can see what. It can be tailored to a very detailed viewership if desired.
True. They are still in, but prefer Snapchat, instagram, etc
Have we met before somewhere on FR?
I have been preaching this for years. I even begged how cool it would be of we could simply have a 30-day moratorium on posting anything from CNN and/or the WP. In 99% of all cases, it’s not news. for CNN, I’d bump that up to 100 percent.
However, I am seeing more and more comments here about folks discussion alternative media, and possibly creating their own. I don’t know how to do PINGs on FR, but perhaps someone should start collecting similar discussions like these. I predict multiple outlets WILL become necessary someday. For some background, folks might consider reading the history of the Committees of Correspondence in the founding of our country (probably the first example of the internet [networked communication] on this continent).
From that, I’d like to reference some comments from another thread related to this topic (something to get the brains working)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3620123/posts?page=39#39
Note to all: I am currently a software engineer (18 yrs), now beginning study for my AWS credentials. Someday, somewhere, someone will want to get something off the ground. No, not trolling for business. But who ever starts this new media venue will need all the help they can get.
I hope to see more discussions like this in the future.
They shouldn't be allowed to buy up or destroy the competition. Ditto for Google , youtube , twitter , uber etc.
I guess zuckerberg and the other founders of these sites started out in the san francisco area .. So that's why they are leftists politically . but it's ironic and hypocritical that they used capitalism to become billionaires . And most of these are white males but liberals .And little do they know or care that the ideology they believe in socialism eventually leads to the destruction of privately owned businesses and wealth such as theirs.
Also the imo the current leftist ideology has an anti-white male bias (as i guess capitalistic and free America was founded and built by white males like Henry Ford, George Washington, Jefferson, ike, Edison, Carnegie etc). most of these liberal tech entrepreneurs are white males too but they follow an ideology that ironically is calling for their downfall and demonizing of the white male as well as the destruction of their business model the private corporation.
Yes, and the “anonymity” provided by the keyboard amplifies the skew.
People I know say things to each other on Facebook that they would never say in person.
I think you gave about the best summary of Facebook that I've ever heard. Characterizing it as an echo chamber is perfect.
My family and neighbors and everyone seems so wrapped up in it. I love kitties too, and *everyday* my family shows me the kitty pictures on their FB. LOL. I know more than I ever care to know or feel comfortable with knowing about the private lives of other people, not to mention everything about their kitty cats, dogs, and tweety birds. Yikes.
What irks me is the people who have time to post to FB but can't make it to the voting booth on election day. I live in Trump country, and everyone here adores our President. However a lot of the FB fans in my immediate family were to busy or lazy to vote. Arrrgh!
Zuckerburg’s latest ‘tweek’ to his precious facebook page earlier this week sent shock waves through his users.
I have to admit I am on facebook and have a business page there as well. His announcement and the changes they are going to implement have be seriously considering leaving the platform as it renders it essentially useless.
Zuckerburg’s dictate of content engagement essentially creates a one-sided and biased view of the world. The trend has been towards more video, but for a small business pulling off weekly content video isn’t cost effective, expensive, and suddenly an entrepreneur has to become a celebrity. And the idea of organic reach is dead, if you are a business you can have your page and do posts/video etc., but facebook doesn’t deliver it to the newsfeed of the very people who are fans of your brand.
His claim was he wants to better ‘community engagement’ and yet he cuts off “pages” at the knees by forcing small business to pay for engagement that was traditionally free.
Throwing a few bucks at facebook to garner new interest was fine, but to have to pay over and over to reach people who have already expressed interest in your content to be seen in their newsfeed like they requested? Yea....not so much.
I have never signed up for FakeBook. I’m convinced it will eventually be a gold-mine for the Antichrist.
But, then again, that may just be a nut-job conspiracy.
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