House Republicans to grill Facebook, Twitter and other social media over “shadow-banning” over political bias against conservatives
By jdheyes // 2022-01-11
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It’s something conservative and right-leaning news publishers have noticed beginning earlier this year: Referrals (clicks) from stories they post to their own social media sites have dropped considerably, sometimes by more than 80 percent, driving some out of business and others to cut back on staff. Clicks — eyeballs on websites — mean revenue for those who do not have their own stores or sell their own products, which is most of them. But even publishers with their own product lines like Alex Jones of Infowars and Mike Adams, founder/editor of the Natural News network of sites, have seen reduced sales thanks to reduced traffic from their social media pages. For months conservative publishers and Trump-supporting readers have been complaining about sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube either “shadow banning” their content or taking it down altogether.  For months they’ve been trying to get someone in Congress to listen and to bring in executives who run these vitally important sites and ask them what in the world do they think they’re doing. That’s finally going to happen.  As reported by The Daily Caller, the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday will grill executives from Facebook, Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), and Twitter over what has become very obvious political bias and censorship. The hearing comes at an explosive time: Adams, in association with Infowars, has just published an extensive report detailing how the corporate social media giants are working in tandem with the Left-wing establishment media and others to systematically suppress conservative speech ahead of the 2018 and especially the 2020 elections. The report, “The Censorship Master Plan Decoded,” otherwise known as “The Adams Report,” is a “masterful compendium on censorship that will serve as a roadmap for lawmakers and for President Trump as we begin the fight to return to the battleground of ideas to a level playing field,” writes Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars. 

Are regulations coming?

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., noted ahead of the hearing, “The advent of social media has made it possible for people to connect across continents, explore vast amounts of information, and share meaningful dialogue with friends and strangers. However, this same technology can be used to suppress a particular viewpoint and manipulate public opinion.”  And it appears as though Leftist social media giants and their co-conspirators in the “mainstream” media are attempting to do just that. (Related: Google, Facebook, YouTube censorship of conservative sites, voices just like Communist CHINA.) Think about it: Nothing they’ve tried so far in terms of ‘getting rid of’ President Trump has worked. Average, ordinary politicians and presidents would likely have withered and faded away long before now after the unrelenting attacks and negative portrayals by social and legacy media. Indeed, roughly 90 percent of coverage of this president has been negative. That’s unprecedented. In April before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Silicon Valley is an “extremely Left-leaning place,” but he tries to ensure that bias is not reflected in Facebook’s actual functionality. It’s not working. Either that, or he’s not really trying. One conservative site we are familiar with reported reaching an average of 1,500 followers with each post and receiving 10 percent of those as click-throughs to the site last winter, and with roughly one-third of its current number of followers. Today the reach, on average, is in the 250-plus range, with a 10-percent click-through rate at triple the followers. Hence, the revenue flows for the site (which depends on advertising to support itself) is a fraction of what it should be. That’s the strategy. Starve, strangle, and extinguish political competition ahead of 2020 — because the Left can’t win a straight-up debate. Read more about social media censorship at Censorship.news. J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel. Sources include: DailyCaller.com NaturalNews.com Infowars.com Breitbart.com
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