In November of 2016, Democrats could not believe that Trump had been elected President. They completely controlled the media and the Hollywood/TV entertainment industry. More than 90% of their “news”, and virtually all of their late night comedy and other entertainment programs attacked and ridiculed Trump and Republicans.
When Trump seemed to get more votes than Hilary Clinton in spite of this, Democrats were in complete denial. At first they insisted on recounts. Then they spent the next four months falsely blaming “Russians” for “rigging” the election.
However, on March 2, 2017, Democrats learned the truth. The above study by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society and MIT’s Center for Civic Media explained how ordinary citizens like us had used Twitter and Facebook to reach more voters than all the mainstream media and Hollywood and TV entertainment industry combined.
During March of 2017, the executives of Twitter, Facebook Microsoft and Google and openly and repeatedly promised to fundamentally change Twitter, Facebook, and the whole internet, so this could never happen again. Since March of 2017, we repeately urged Republicans and President Trump to take immediate action. Sadly, they did nothing until AFTER the 2020 election when the damage was done.
Chart created by Harvard’s Berman-Klein Media Center shows how conservatives like us created our own “distinct and insulated media system, using Twitter and Facebook as a backbone”. They said we gathered our own news from conservative sources like Breitbart, Fox, Rush Limbaugh, Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller, and Washington Examiner. We then shared, liked, and forwarded their posts on Facebook and Twitter “to transmit our perspective to the world”.
According to the experts at Harvard and MIT, we did far more than “successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere”. We also strongly influenced the “mainstream” media, by forcing them to cover stories they had ignored in the past.
When that study came out, the top executives of Google, Facebook, and Twitter worked hard for the next three years to develop dirty tricks designed to stop us from doing that again this year.
Click here for March 3, 2017 summary of this study in Columbia Journalism Review.
Those dirty tricks by Facebook and Twitter include the following:
During the week ending October 18, 2019, our @LibertyAndProsperity Facebook Page posts “reached” 106,303 people. Many of our posts, especially those by Basia Brown “went viral”.
During November or December of last year, Facebook changed its algorithms to “throttle” us and other conservative sites. By January 13, 2020, and posts only “reached” 5,902 people each week. Facebook no longer permitted any of our posts to “go viral”. Twitter did something similar called “shadow banning”. Although we had nearly a thousand Twitter “followers” at @landp1776, hardly any of them rarely receive our tweets.
We tried moving to other platforms like Parler and Gab. However, they were also restricted! Here is how they did it.
- “Throttling” or “shadow banning” of conservative sites like ours: This is when people who “friend” or “follow” our Facebook page see only a handful of our posts. Six months ago, our posts “reached” about 60,000 people each week. Today, we only “reach” about 6,000. Facebook took away roughly 90% of our audience. Twitter took away about half. We also get posts from only a handful of the people we “friend” or “follow”. This makes it almost impossible to create our own media network like we did in 2016.
- “Spamming” us with “woke” Democrat posts: Last week we all started getting posts from CNN or ABC News multiple times each hour, even though we never subscribed, friended, liked, or followed those sites. Although they pretend to be news sites, they report little but negative stories about Republicans and President Trump, and positive stories about Democrats. We also get posts from leftist groups that target us. For example, since I am Jewish, I suddenly started getting posts from Jewish leftist organizations. Since I am a lawyer, I suddenly started getting posts from leftist lawyer groups.
3. Biased and fake “fact checking”: If our posts disagree with the “progressive” Democrat positions on certain topics such as climate change, vote by mail, coronavirus lockdowns, Islam black lives matter, etc., Facebook posts a notice on those posts stating that “fact checkers” have found our post to be “false news” or “partly false news”. Last January, we shared truthful articles stating that some bushfires in Australia six months ago were started by arson or human carelessness. We also shared truthful articles stating that there had been droughts or dry spells in Australia for hundreds of thousands of years. Facebook punished us by falsely claiming those articles were “partly false news” because we did not falsely claim that “climate change” caused the fires to spread.
- Banning or deleting posts that are not “politically correct”. During the past six months, several of our posts were deleted by Facebook because they violated “community standards”. Such posts included posts truthfully identifying attacks and calls for violence by followers of the Prophet. (We can’t even mention words like Islam, Muslim, or Jihad in our Facebook or Twitter posts. That is why we use words like “Followers of the Prophet” or “Holy War” instead.
Before the 2020 Elections, we tried to post our views in the “comments” sections of online newspapers. However, most mainstream online news sites either blocked us, or removed their “comments” sections completely!
Above is one example of Facebook spamming me with a post from The Atlantic, a left-wing media site. I never subscribed to Atlantic. I never friended, liked, or followed its site. Posts from this “magazine” just started showing up in my timeline several times a day. The same thing happened with posts from equally left-wing biased CNN, ABCNews, Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. I am also being spammed with “targeted” left-wing post. I am Jewish, so I am getting unwanted posts from left-wing Jewish sites. I am a lawyer, so I am getting unwanted posts from left-wing lawyer groups, etc.
LibertyAndProsperity.com is a tax-exempt, non-political education organization of roughly 200 citizens who mostly live near Atlantic City, New Jersey. We formed this group in 2003. We volunteer our time and money to maintain this website. We do our best to post accurate information. However, we admit we make mistakes from time to time. If you see any mistakes or inaccurate, misleading, outdated, or incomplete information in this or any of our posts, please let us know. We will do our best to correct the problem as soon as possible. Please email us at info@libertyandprosperity.com or telephone (609) 927-7333.
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Also, because Facebook and Twitter falsely claim our posts violate their “community standards”, they greatly restrict, “throttle back” or “shadow ban” our posts. Please help us overcome that by sharing our posts wherever you can, as often as you can. Please copy and paste the URL link above or from the Twitter share button to the “comments” section of your favorite sites like Patch.com or PressofAtlanticCity.com. Please also email it to your friends. Open and use an alternate social media site like Gab.com.
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Seth Grossman, Executive Director
LibertyAndProsperity.com
info@libertyandprosperity.com
(609) 927-7333
