The 2018 midterm election is approaching. Social media networks are engaged in a rapidly escalating scorched earth policy in order to scrub the internet of conservative views prior to the election. Social media giants have every intent - as well as the ability - to affect the political process in America.
Two recent articles offer an in-depth analysis of the quandary presented by Facebook's monopoly of social media and the resultant censoring of conservative, patriotic, and nationalist views. Action of some form is required now in order to prevent conservative views from being completely censored on social media. Presumably this action would take the form of FCC rulings or Congressional action. For example, Senator Ted Cruz has posited that Facebook should be considered a neutral public forum that may not engage in censorship. It should be neutral in order to have the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). This act prevents social networks from being held liable for illegal threats made on their platform.
Excerpts of these articles are included below. The complete articles are worth reading.
The Facebook Armageddon - The social network’s increasing threat to journalism, by Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 2018:
... Facebook’s relationship with the media has been a classic Faustian bargain: News outlets want to reach those 2 billion users, so they put as much of their content as they can on the network. ...
Facebook continues to move the goalposts when it comes to how the News Feed algorithm works. In January, the company said that it would be de-emphasizing posts from media outlets in favor of “meaningful interactions” between users, and suggested this could result in a significant decline in traffic for some publishers.
The fact that even Facebook’s closest media partners like BuzzFeed are struggling financially highlights the most obvious threat: Since many media companies still rely on advertising revenue to support their journalism, Facebook’s increasing dominance of that industry poses an existential threat to their business models....
According to a recent estimate by media investment firm GroupM, Google and Facebook will account for close to 85 percent of the global digital ad market this year and will take most of the growth in that market—meaning other players will shrink....
“Facebook is a threat not necessarily because it’s evil but because it does what it does very well, which is to target people for advertisers,” says Martin Nisenholtz, former head of digital strategy at The New York Times. The question, he says, is “has it become so dominant now that it’s become essentially a monopoly, and if so what should publishers do about it?”...
... as Facebook increases its control, “they’ll decide which brands they are going to elevate and which they will filter out,” says Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia. “There’s an ethical view that this is a terrible state of affairs, since it means that Facebook effectively decides which media outlets survive and which don’t.”....
In addition to the economic threat it represents to media companies, Facebook also arguably poses a threat to journalism itself. ...
Given the platform’s repeated misunderstanding of its role in the information ecosystem, some believe that Facebook may simply not be a great place for journalism to live. ...
Twitter suffers from a similar problem, in the sense that many users seem to see their posts as a way of displaying (or arguing for) their beliefs rather than a way of exchanging verifiable news. But Facebook’s role in the spread of misinformation is orders of magnitude larger than Twitter’s: 2 billion monthly users versus 330 million....
It’s not that Facebook doesn’t care about things like fake news, it’s that it doesn’t care enough. And the reason why is the same as it is for Google (which has a number of its own well-meaning efforts aimed at journalism)—because ultimately those issues don’t affect the central business of the company, which is to connect everyone on the planet and generate as much advertising revenue as humanly possible....
...The Beltway Right acknowledges censorship, demonization, and marginalization by tech mega companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but doesn’t want to do anything about it. Thus, even though the Republican Party controls both Congress and the White House, the conservative and nationalist online activists who won Donald Trump the presidency in an unprecedented upset are being systematically suppressed and “the Conservative movement” is saying nothing....
In Russia, the people at least know who to hold responsible if the system fails them. In America, because the actors controlling the flow of information are not technically part of the government, there is an illusion of a “marketplace of ideas,” when there is actually just one narrative being promoted....
As even Main Stream Media journalists now concede, Facebook (and its algorithm) now has the power to direct massive amounts of traffic to whatever companies it wants.... Because no one actually knows what the algorithm is and because it continually changes, Facebook essentially has the power to destroy any company it desires. Given the company’s Leftist views, this means every conservative website is on the endangered list....
The good news: at least some conservatives seem to be awakening to this reality. Thus Senator Ted Cruz, in a recent op-ed for Fox News, argued that Facebook should be considered a “neutral public forum” that cannot engage in political censorship. It must be “neutral” in order to enjoy the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which prevents social networks from being held liable for illegal threats made on their platform.
Needless to say, Facebook could not function without such protection....
As demographics continue to change because of mass immigration, the white cultural norm of freedom of speech will come under increasing pressure. If it is to be preserved, there must be action now....
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