Journalist Emily Bell, referencing the New York Times, writes that Facebook "has met with several media companies to discuss the possibility of its directly hosting their content – a shift that would fundamentally change how users access news articles on the site. ... Currently, when you click on a Times article via Facebook, for example, you are sent to a page hosted on the Times' website. Under the new proposed arrangement, you'd click a link that would load the article on Facebook itself, hypothetically reducing the load time for that content. But the change might also give Facebook more control over the content hosted on its platform."
That Facebook, a notoriously left-of-center social media site, would seek to exert greater control over the news you consume is not a surprise. The site has already been widely panned for a variety of control-scheme issues, from the invasive permissions demanded by its once-mandatory messenger application, to the tracking of users' browsing history even after they navigate away from Facebook, to a systematic bias against conservative groups and conservative pages. Two years ago, the site actually apologized for threatening to shut down the popular "Chicks on the Right" Facebook page for daring to post something critical of President Obama. Jason Howerton reported, "[Facebook] claims the users were 'incorrectly warned' by the site's User Operation's Team. Mockarena, one of the two women who run 'Chicks on the Right,' a conservative website with more than 100,000 fans on their official Facebook page, reportedly received a notice ... informing her that she would be locked out of not only her 'Chicks on the Right' Facebook page, but her personal page as well. Facebook accused her of violating the company's standards with one of her posts. The post in question was directed at White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. The post referred users to a website posting titled, 'You Know What? Liberal Hypocrisy is Starting to Cause Me Actual Physical Pain.' However, shortly after Fox News reported on the incident, Facebook issued an apologetic statement."
Only public revelation of this type of systemized anti-conservative bias in social media management provides any leverage against it. The people who are trying to purge the Web of conservative opinion, the liberals who are trying to silence conservative voices online, know full well that what they are doing is both hypocritical and wrong, but this is part and parcel of how progressives think. To the progressive, any opinion he or she dislikes is not just incorrect, but evil and bad. It must be eliminated. To the liberal, there is only one side of any issue: the correct side. Anyone who dares to come to an opposing conclusion is a dangerous moron whose behavior must be controlled and who should probably be jailed for various crimes, to include political incorrectness, hate speech (where hate speech is defined as the expression of any opinion a progressive does not like) and "climate change denying" (to name only a few).
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There's a reason the majority of "fake news" websites, particularly those that get cited on Facebook over and over again and are written to look like plausible news stories, are invariably biased against conservatives. It's the same reason Google recently announced plans to change how it weighs search results to factor in Google's left-leaning opinion about how "true" the websites are.
"Would you trust Google to decide what is fact and what is not?" asks David Gewirtz in ZDNet. "Facts are mutable. ... Science has ways of proving or disproving information to create a body of knowledge we call 'fact.' Many people, however, are completely immune to the reality as observed by science. This whole discussion is politically fraught. ... We ... can't fully trust any statements about 'fact' made by our government because most are carefully crafted statements created by spin doctors designed to support one agenda or another." Gerwitz rightly points out the dangers of Google appointing itself a "central facts authority," deciding what you see and don't see in a search based on its left-wing political bias. To take just one example, Google's search algorithm, if it employed these "truth based" results, would hide any results that criticize Al Gore's assertions about climate change, while promoting left-wing, anti-industrial propaganda as "true" because liberals wholeheartedly believe in it (regardless of any science for or against the matter).
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"There is no doubt that Google has tremendous power in terms of what we read and find when we're searching for answers," Gerwitz concludes. "But is there a potentially dangerous Orwellian component to Google using its interpretation of truth to weight Web pages, or is it a brilliant method that will improve search result quality for all of us? I also question whether this is a battle Google wants to get into. Once Americans start battling over belief systems, all semblance of rationality and fair play seems to go by the wayside. If Google starts delivering search results based on its determination of truth, will it find itself in the middle of a holy war?"
The answer, of course, is yes. Americans are already at war with each other. They have been at war for years. On the one side are the conservatives and libertarians who believe in the ideals expressed in the Constitution. On the other side are the left-leaning would-be tyrants who live and breathe statist domination and who despise the freedom of their fellow men. Liberals desire one thing over all else: Total control, from cradle to grave, of everything Americans think and do. To that end, they must control what can be said and what is reported. This is why liberals have long schemed to censor conservative opinion in the form of the euphemistically named "Fairness Doctrine" – and it is why liberals salivate at the prospect of controlling your news and search results.
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Whether in your search results or on social media, on the radio or on your television, liberals despise the free exchange of ideas. They will always opt to censor, censure, control and silence all expression of opinion contrary to their self-destructive ideology. This is because reality supports conservative opinions, not liberal ones. That fact, however, will never interfere with what liberals fervently believe to be true.
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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