How Conservatives Are Being Destroyed by Facebook, Twitter and Google Without Even Realizing It

Article author: 
John Hawkins
Article publisher: 
TownHall
Article date: 
13 January 2018
Article category: 
National News
High
Article Body: 
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
- A. J. Liebling

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?...

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?...

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....

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....

 


 

Related

Project Veritas Video Shows Former Twitter Employees Discussing ‘Shadow Banning’ Users, Breitbart, January 11, 2017.

Fake News Redux courtesy of Social Media Giant Google, by Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press, January 12, 2018.
 

CAIRCO Research

Media Bias, Censorship, and Corporate Political Correctness Run Amuck