Photographed above: Mark Zuckerberg

Once a space for College Students to stay in touch with each other, Social media is now one of the biggest industries in the United States, and its influence on culture and politics is unavoidable. Throughout 2020, Social Media has taken a much more active role in the promotion of certain ideologies to the masses. Unlike publishing companies, newspaper and magazines, as well as television and radio broadcasters which are subject to lawsuit when unsound practices such as slanderous and libelous speech are done, social media is protected by a clause on the first amendment called article 230. 

In the fall of 2020, the CEOs of the largest social media companies, like Zuckerberg of FaceBook (Photographed above), and Dorsey of Twitter, endured a long line of questioning from many of our elected Representatives and Senators. Sadly following the long line of questioning, which happened over multiple sessions over the course of months, the case of the potential elimination of the article 230 clause on the first amendment was dismissed. After the dismissal of the case social media has become completely unhinged in their actions.

This of course is no surprise to students of history, for example In the 1960s one of the World's most prominent civil rights leaders, Malcolm X called out the media, and called attention to its power, when he said: 

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses." 

When he stated that he was referring to the dangers of the television media, and how they often manipulate facts to frame people who do good work as villains if it doesn't match the narrative of the powerful. A really scary concept, but even that, is a less dangerous notion than the manipulation of ideas and access within social media.

For example, in 2019 Nicholas Sandman was captured on video when he and his fellow high school students were met by protestors when waiting for a bus to pick them up while on a school field trip. When Sandman made the "mistake" of smirking, CNN spent over a week of covering Sandman's smirk and the narrative presented painted Sandman as some racist.

Fox News covers the aftermath of a lawsuit filed by Sandman's Lawyer, Lin Wood:

The news package presented by Fox News explains the justice system at work. CNN lost the case because it was textbook defamation. 

Sandman was awarded 270 million, and a redaction on the story that was presented was provided.

Although, justice like this is not guaranteed to all those who were marred by the media, companies profiting from media are still bound by the laws which protect average americans from such treatment.

Thanks to article 230, all social media companies are immune to such oversight. Worse yet, as we continue our technological journey into the 21st century the amount of influence social media has, is beginning to dwarf traditional media, especially for younger generations. Refer to this graph below:

Data above provided by Nielson Total Market report Q2 in 2018

As one can see from the data above, the younger the generations are shifting their media usage away from Television and radio, and towards their phones. More concerning as well, where people spend their time on their phones is also rapidly increasing annually. 

See the chart below:

Chart above by Broadband Search, 2020 

This social media take over has been predicted and forecasted by media experts since the early 2010s, and the heads of Social Media have been preparing their seat at the table of influence for many years. The huge shift from the wild west of the once totally free internet, to the now dystopian echo chambers of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which spent the latter half of 2020 outright banning people on social media indiscriminately did not happen overnight. Here's the 5 steps that were taken in this shift.

Step 1: Conditioning

For years Facebook and Twitter have been manipulating their algorithms and manually censoring pages in order to promote certain ideologies and suppress the ideologies of others. This made it so, if one posted any thing conservative in ideology, only those actively seeking conservative ideas would be able to track that down. 

According to the Gateway Pundit, in an article written in December of 2019: SHOCKING NEW STUDY Finds Twitter Censors Conservatives over Liberals at a 21:1 Ratio As the title of the article states conservatives have been vastly out censored over liberals at an extremely high amount. This was further supported when the article cited the study done by Richard Hanania, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

The Gateway Pundit also is the first publication which cited Donald Trump's Twitter Account being shadow banned, a feature on Twitter which actively hides Tweets from the general public, and even the followers of a page. The Gate Pundit even further elaborated on the evidence of Trump's Shadow ban, by pointing out that Trump had over 80 million followers, but only gets at most 20,000 retweets.

The practice of hiding conservative ideas helped influence future generations of voters, by having the impression the general public thought in a certain manner, as well as prevented dialogue and increased division among ideologies.

Step 2: Fact Checking

Fact Checkers on FaceBook have become common place among posts in 2020


According to Luis Miguel in his article Fact Checkers Staffed by Democrat Donors at the New American, Luis Details how the once "Noble" idea of preventing election theft by Russian Bots has now turned into a politically motivated machine on the platform. Fact Checking has extended into dubious territory as it now uses the term "Partly False" Check out the Fact Check Below:

PragerU correctly stated, that both Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama supported a fence along the Mexican Border. This however was "Fact Checked" by Facebook stating the information was partly false. This is something that happens far too often among Conservative pages and posts. 

Worse yet, the fact checkers which were once exclusive to Social Media now exist among the search engines. When you use Google to search for something not ideal to those of a certain political persuasion, a suggestion box appears above the results of what you're looking for, always of a certain political persuasion.

This feature of course has been abused as, according to Luis Miguel, in the aforementioned article above, 50% of Facebook fact checks that include articles detailing why a post is misleading are articles written by CNN. No coincidence because Miguel further details that among the fact checkers with in Facebook, they have over 100 years of combined prior work experience at CNN.

The Fact Check feature at CNN is most synonymous with two things in 2020. One was the election fraud evidence and allegations related to election fraud. Any mention of those two words would automatically trigger a Fact Check. The other, was any mention of Covid19. 

Perhaps the most stringent use of Fact-checking was against any utterance of the word: Hydrochloriquine. The drug Trump once touted as effective for early treatment of Covid19. Something not far fetched, because it was used in the treatment of people who became infected with SARS, a predecessor to Covid19. 

Trump was mocked on the mainstream media for touting a drug that would kill you, and social media followed suit with their fact checkers by helping that narrative along and aiming to convince anyone that any support of the drug was irresponsible and dangerous.

On the contrary, although not as effective as the newer treatments for the drug, there was no evidence to suggest that hydrochlroquine was dangerous to the average adult. Worse yet as detailed by EXPOSED: WHO Admits It Used Fake Lancet Study To Stop Hydroxychloroquine – Killing Tens Of Thousands, an article written by FRM, The World Health Organization excluded hydrochloriquine from their results, results later found to show promise in the treatment of the disease, thus perhaps leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of covid19 victims.

The saddest thing about the fact checkers being complicit in the rebranding of the drug the president endorsed, is hydrochloriquine is a very affordable drug and it could have Stemmed the high number of covid deaths among the impoverished vs among the wealthy, something left leaning leadership, like the Governor of California Gavin Newsome, sees as a serious problem.

Step 3: Banning

Prior to the most famous mass media banning of all time, the most prolific social media ban was when Alex Jones. Jones was banned on YouTube for breaking their policies related to harassment and endangerment of individuals as his followers were going to the homes of Sandy Hook victims trying to prove that Sandy Hook didn't happen. For a while Jones continued to operate among other social media pages such as Facebook  by being more careful with his speech, and his other less advertiser friendly content could only be found on his own website. 

Then in 2019, Facebook did their first purge. Unexpectedly Jones as well as other figures of the less advertiser friendly variety, such as Milo Yinnapoulus, Paul Joseph Watson and Luis Farrakon were banned. Magically, the random banning of these figures became a breaking news story among cable news networks, and the story that was told was that social media pages were taking measures to remove extremists from their platform.

So, the narrative continued and for a year, if anyone was banned on Twitter or Facebook, it was because, they were an extremist who was targeting people or groups. Fast forward to January of 2021, Capital Riot occurs. Trump takes the entire blame from the media and he is immediately banned on Twitter and soon after on Facebook. Per the social media sites, it was the radical language used by Trump that led to the capital riot. 

Per these social media pages in conjunction with the television mass media, It wasn't the year of economic shut down that led to millions of jobs lost, it wasn't the carelessness of congress that sent 800 million over seas and only gave each American $600 when Trump asked for $2000, it wasn't the shady election practices in cities like Philadelphia that were broadcast all over the Internet. It was Donald Trump's tweets that were 100 percent responsible for the anger that came to the front doors for the Capital Building.

Within a week of Trump's banning on social media, thousands of other conservative pages soon followed. The following week, the likes of those not even involved in politics soon followed. Long since retired Conservative Icon Ron Paul was blocked from using Facebook, and even hard hitting left wing Journalist Tim Pool was blocked from using the platform. Now, even entire parties that aren't even on the right like The Socialist Workers Party group on Face Book. 

Private Pages were not immune to banning either. Within 2 weeks of the creation of the private group: Joe Biden is not my President, the group's membership grew to 1.6 million members, a population growth faster than any other private group in Face Book's history. Regardless of the groups popularity the page was taken down without any explanation to the groups administrators.

Facebook and Twitter has become progressively more and more of an echo chamber for the left. Now it seems, in order to use their platform as a conservative, you just have to shut your mouth or find another social media website if its servers hasn't been taken down yet. Which brings us to the next step.

Step 4: Severing Competition

Big tech has been saying for years, if you don’t like our platform, make your own. Well, that's exactly what John Mazte the CEO of Parler did. The app became a safe haven for Conservatives as they could post their facts and opinions without having to worry about random bannings or indiscriminate fact checks. The app exploded in popularity once Trump was banned on Facebook and Twitter, unfortunately that was a short lived victory as a vicious coordinated attack was done on Parler.

Not only was Parler being labeled a place for white supremacists to go and organize and a place where dangerous conspiracies could thrive by the mainstream media, Facebook and Twitter coordinated with the Apple store to have the app removed. After that happened, Big Tech went even further and Amazon Took Parler’s servers down, thus making Parler inoperable in any capacity.

Big tech’s excuse for going after Parler was they wanted to blame the capital riots on Parler’s lack of control over the speech of their membership. However, that was a complete fabrication by Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the FBI has found that most of most of the bad offenders that they have arrested for their violent actions at the Capital were there thanks to invitations on Facebook and Twitter.

As of writing this article, it has been weeks since Parler has been taken down and their website is still down. At bare minimum those who work at Parler are out of a job thanks to Facebook and Twitter trying to pass the blame, but much more nefarious, and what is appearing to actually be the case is Facebook and Twitter have begun collaborating with Apple and Amazon to remove their competition. 

Alternative to Twitter, Telegram as well as alternative to Facebook, MeWe were faced with threats by their competitors to police their users. Since doing so, there was a period in time where Telegram was removed from the Apple store, but soon reinstated thanks to them banning thousands of users.

The mainstream media ran with stories about racists trying to use the platform to stage more riots, but with how broad the definition has become from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, It’s hard to trust that.

It’s really hard to believe that  in the 1990s, Bill Gates was forced by the Federal Government to seize and desist certain business practices due to Microsoft breaking antitrust law. Something not well known by the public, but it’s something the Congress was able to quickly handle. Now, 30 years later, big tech is doing it unabashedly without any resistance from the mainstream media, and hardly any from Congress.

How do the Major Social Media CEOs continue to get away with this? Well, step 5 may have the answer to that.

Step 5: Political Influence

If you've made it this far, you can probably deduce that the likes of the heads these Social Media companies donated to Joe Biden's Campaign. Per Big Tech CEOs Poured Millions into the Election This Year, Here's Who They Supported, an article written by the Observer, they list all of the big tech CEO's political donations.

Surpassingly, Jack Dorsey was one of the lowest donors with a shy 600k, while Zuckerberg at Facebook was a much larger amount of 6mil, one of the largest single contributors to the Joe Biden Campaign.

There are two dangerous precedence this sets. One was plainly seen by everyone paying attention, Social Media companies abuse their users with draconian rules which support one political persuasion over the other. What's extremely dangerous about this is it gives a few people enough power to swing elections.

For example, only a few weeks prior to the 2020 Presidential election the Hunter Biden story hit the Internet. Joe Biden's Son Hunter, laptop was found to have a lot of sensitive information on it. Photographs of Hunter doing hard drugs as well as photographs of his sexual exploits. Also, and a huge concern for being so closely connected to a presidential candidate was found to be profiting from shady business deals with China, as well as the Ukraine.

Both Facebook and Twitter banned this story. In fact, Twitter went as far as blocking The New York Post, the oldest still operating Newspaper in the United States from further using their platform until they removed their article about Hunter's laptop. This absolutely swung the election because according to the MRC, 17% of Biden Voters said they would change their vote if the had known about the Hunter Biden story.

The other, perhaps more dangerous element of the power of big tech's political influence is how big tech can influence the laws that are written as well as how technology will be implemented into the general public.

Big tech already has immunity to standards the mass media has to abide by, what is exceedingly dangerous is how much big tech profits from their invasion of the privacy of their users. Not just stalking on their devices when in use, but also, stalking on their devices when not in use. For example, if you leave location tracking on in your phone, the likes of Face Book and Instagram tracks where you go to the store, where you go eat, where you go to walk your dog etc.

It may not seem like a concern now, but there is no Government agency holding these tech companies accountable to what they're doing with the information they're collecting. This is especially concerning because China has already been coordinating with their own big tech to spy on their citizens.

China has even implemented a social credit score, which, if you say the wrong things on the internet you would be barred from certain activities, even taking public transit. It is our American duty to not let this level of corruption ever make it into our borders. It is fast approaching and we must remain vigilant against the corporate overlords of big tech. Now more than ever.

Written by,
Tyler Wiest
Project GAS Writer

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