Have Web giants declared war on conservatives?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may have, albeit quietly, declared war on conservatives, with new efforts to shut down their ability to get their message out.

And talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh has identified what he believes is the ideology behind it.

"These people are pure – they would never think of themselves this way – but these are pure Stalinists. While they're running around call[ing] Trump a Stalinist, they don't even know what it really is," he charged.

He pointed out that Facebook's newly announced change in its newsfeed, which aims to give greater visibility to posts from "friends and family," as Breitbart reported Tuesday, actually does much more.

"The subtext is that it will decrease visibility to pages run by publishers and news sites."

The bottom line is that "Breitbart News' 3.7 million Facebook fans will have to manually navigate to our Facebook page in order to find our articles, instead of having them automatically appear in their news feeds. They will not have a choice in the matter: Facebook will not allow users to stick with the old system, even if they prefer it," he said.

He pointed out the influence of social media platforms such as Facebook.

"Consider this: at the inauguration of President Trump, Fox News' coverage attracted the most viewers on cable news – an average of 8.8 million. But their Facebook video of the same event attracted almost twice that number: 16 million," Limbaugh said.

"Facebook now has the power to make or break publishers. If the latest newsfeed change is anything to go by, they're now keen on breaking them."

The Breitbart report said that when Facebook previously targeted "individual publishers," there were charges of political bias and a Senate-led investigation, so it now "might be trying to get around the problem by diminishing the reach of all publishers equally."

The report took the issue straight to its logical conclusion – the overwhelming power of social media companies.

"With Facebook's change threatening to rob news sites and publishers (including Breitbart News) of potentially millions of views, the change only further underscores Facebook's extraordinary influence over the media landscape."

It continued, "No other organization in history, save perhaps the politburo of the Soviet Union during the era of the Warsaw Pact, has had this much influence over so many news outlets at the same time."

Breitbart said the comparison to the Soviet Union "is relevant."

"The propaganda ministries of the USSR didn't just influence the news in Soviet Russia, but in Poland, Hungary, the GDR and even Cuba. Facebook's influence over the news is, if anything, even more extensive. And whether they like it or not, they can now choose to strengthen the political establishments of foreign countries – to the point of nearly snuffing out opposition media in Cambodia's case – or weaken them," the Breitbart report said.

In Cambodia, Facebook tested newsfeed censorship in a move that "almost killed independent content creators in Cambodia, and indisputably strengthened the authoritarian ruling party."

John Hawkins wrote Saturday at Townhall that his Right Wing News website is shutting down because of Facebook's change of rules.

"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," he reported. "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 seven times as many people talking about our content."

Then Facebook changes its rules of use.

"So, why would Facebook want to kill extremely successful Facebook pages that its users enjoyed?" he wrote. "One of the reasons goes back to something I told multiple reporters during the 2016 election. I believe that all of the thriving right wing Facebook pages activated large numbers of what I like to think of as 'instinctive conservatives.' You know, the sort of people who love God, guns and America, but who don’t follow politics day to day, read National Review or consume any of Milton Friedman's books. From what I could see on Facebook, that group of people LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Donald Trump and I believe they were responsible for getting him the GOP nomination and probably even got him over the hump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I think the liberals that run Facebook came to that same conclusion."

He started noticing, during the election season that 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?"

Breitbart explained the company's actions couldn't be attributed to pursuit of higher profits, something it ethically owes its shareholders.

Citing the most recent downgrade, Facebook "has taken a financial hit from its decision."

"The company's stock fell by 4.5 percent upon the announcement of its newsfeed changes, personally shaving $3.3 billion off Mark Zuckerberg's personal net worth. That suggests that Facebook is happy to suffer financial pain in order to step back from their de facto role as the megaphone of new publishers."

Hawkins said, however, the messages contained are messages "the liberals who run the company don't want out there."

He explained media such as Facebook are no longer optional.

"Social media IS the new public square. It's the place you go when you want to reach out and find an audience," he said.

WND has reported this week on a series of undercover videos about Twitter done by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas.

The third video reveals how Twitter workers are assigned and paid to look at the usually private direct messages that users send to one another, including graphic images.

In the second video, Twitter workers confessed they have ways to ban users of the social media platform without even letting them know.

The first video revealed Twitter employees expressing their willingness to use their access to President Trump's account to bring down the nation's commander in chief.

Employee Clay Haynes, who has worked at the company since 2016 according to his LinkedIn profile, spoke to an undercover journalist and said the company would be "more than happy to help the DOJ with their little investigation."

Haynes, a self-declared "bleeding-heart liberal," also outlined specific ways the company could help take down the president, including providing every single tweet Trump has made, even those that have been deleted, as well as any direct messages.

Direct messages are usually regarded as private.

Haynes openly declared his desire to end the Trump administration.

"He's dangerous, I don't like him and he's a terrible human being and I want to get rid of him," Haynes states in the video.

The third video (Beware of offensive language and imagery):

The second:

The first:

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The social media campaign also has affected WND, with declining revenues in recent months despite strong traffic reports.

"The dirty little secret that the social media giants are at war with the independent media is out now," said Joseph Farah, co-founder and CEO of what started out 20 years ago as WorldNetDaily.

"It's no longer a secret. It's a fact. The cabal is trying to strangle Breitbart, Daily Caller, WND and the rest. They seek to kill us all. We in the independent media have known this for a long time. We tried to play by their rules, but the rules kept changing for us. They took our money under false pretenses. They lied and deceived about how their operations worked. They have depended on our good nature not to file a class-action lawsuit against them because we're too busy or don't have the resources to take on the social media cartel. But enough is enough is enough."

Some have gone to court.

Dennis Prager's PragerU is suing YouTube for "presenting a conservative point of view."

Hawkins reported: "Just to give you an example of the sort of content YouTube thinks is over-the-line, here are some of the videos it demonetized: Why America Must Lead, The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder, Why Did America Fight the Korean War, and The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians."

He continued: "Furthermore, YouTube's radically liberal parent company Google is being sued by James Damore for targeting white men and conservatives. Incidentally, Damore was fired from Google after he wrote an internal memo for other employees to read (something that is common at Google) called, Google's Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion. Don't kid yourself because if you are conservative, 'diversity' and 'inclusion' don't include you."

He explained: "We've already lost the schools, Hollywood and the mainstream media. What happens when you can't get out conservative opinion via social media because they block, shadow ban and demonetize everyone who gets any traction? What happens if they put rules in place that essentially make expressing conservative opinions something that gets you kicked off their service? You're pro-gun? Sorry, not allowed. You don't like gay marriage? Get out of here. Criticizing Black Lives Matter? Out of bounds!"

Limbaugh, who has the resources and built his own platform, RushLimbaugh.com, said he's never been dependent on social media.

"Look, Facebook's canceling conservatism and so is Twitter and they've been doing this a long time," he said.

He noted it's become problematic for people who have become accustomed to social media, and now it's being taken away.

The progressive social media platforms "are threatened" by conservatives, Limbaugh said.

"They wouldn't say threatened. They would say it's silly, it's destructive, it's mean-spirited, it's extremist, it's bigoted, you know, all the usual 'isms' that they associate. But what really it is, they're afraid of it," he said.

"They all have these cocoons they live in, in their alternative universe, where they feel safe and protected from any opposing view. All the snowflakes gather and they're all protected. If anything gets into that, permeates the boundary, then Katie bar the door. And that's what we're looking at now. They've got to stop it because they're not interested in debate, they're not interested in discussion or any of that."

He added: "These are people who think socialism is great because they think socialism is justice, being nice to people, being fair. They have no idea what it even is. They don't realize it's one step away from murderous communism."