Who remembers in 2012 when the Obama Administration used Facebook’s data to promote and advertise their campaign? All while the media hysterically reported these tactic as being a violation of civilian rights? And Mark Zuckerberg dramatically apologized for it?
I don’t remember that. And that’s because it never happened!
For years Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms have been gathering data on their users and selling that data to businesses for digital advertisement opportunities. This is how social media marketing is done.
In fact, in 2012, Mitt Romney and his digital analytical team were laughed at for performing so horribly on social media. Not only was Romney mocked, but Obama was praised for his strategic app to harvest non-consensual Facebook Data to promote his campaign.
If you haven’t been paying attention Mark Zuckerberg is in hot water over President Trump’s analytical team, Cambridge Analytica. They collected non-consensual data from Facebook users and used the data to campaign on social media during the primaries.
What Cambridge Analytica did was certainly shady but it is nothing out of the ordinary.
What is amiss is the fact that Mark Zuckerberg met with President Obama after the 2016 election to discuss their strategy to stop the spread of “fake news” on Facebook, or to be frank, shadowban conservative news.
Data shows – since the election of Donald Trump- notable conservative Facebook pages such as the New York Post, Breitbart, Washington Free Beacon, and the Washington Examiner have all shown decreases in traffic. Traffic to conservative news outlets has dropped a total of 14%, whereas more left-leaning outlets have actually increased 2%.
For example, well known conservative news source New York Post’s traffic has gone down close to 12% while left-leaning New York Daily News increased 25%. This all happened in the same week according to The Western Journal.
Gizmodo’s reporting showed us that Facebook employees have openly admitted to the censoring of conservative news. Human curators and algorithms have tweaked the trending topics to present left-leaning news articles, while shadow banning conservative news.
“Fact checking” news outlet known as Snopes.com has linked up with Facebook to help combat “fake news.” So, don’t ask Snopes if Facebook is shadow banning conservative accounts because their response is unclear and far from objective.
Don’t get me wrong, Conservative Reporting- especially during the 2016 election- has poured their fair share of fake news stories into the social media space. Breitbart published an article claiming scientists were caught tampering with raw data to exaggerate sea levels which ended up being an embarrassing lie. Infowars continued its conspiratorial cult following with fictitious stories about Pizza gate. The cable news network preferred by conservatives also had its fair share of fibs with The Greg Gutfeld Show. Greg cited Ted Kennedy met with KGB to beat Ronald Reagan in 1984. No Greg, that never happened.
Conservative news outlets have their reasonable amount of lies and deceit but that doesn’t deny the fact that Facebook’s so-called “objective” news outlets haven’t spread their propaganda lies as well.
While Facebook has been fighting phony right-leaning outlets, they have failed to single out popular left-leaning publications. Although Trump’s tribalist of fake news fanatics firmly believes Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and NBC to all be fake news, Facebook’s curators consider these publications to all be fact-based and represent a higher level of journalistic integrity. Therefore these news sources get a free pass from censorship. But to call any news outlet complete truth these days is apocryphal.
There is a laundry list of journalistic errors from Facebook’s so-called “objective outlets” but let’s just point out a few.
This past December three mainstream media news outlets consisting of CNN, CBS, and NBC all received information from multiple sources confirming that Don Trump Jr received an email from Wikileaks on September 4th, 2016. This was days before Wikileaks promoted Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails online. Stating they uploaded another huge file. Turns out the email between Wikileaks and Don Jr actually read September 14th, 2016, while the emails were already public.Debunking their claim that Don Jr has some special privilege with Wikileaks. But Facebook has not punished these news outlets or deemed them fake.
Let’s not forget the embarrassing false reporting the Washington Post delivered when they accused the Russians of penetrating theU.S. electoral grid,which turned out to be completely false and conspiratorial.
Other examples consist of The New York Times falsely claiming the Trump Administration had a hidden climate report and ABC’s erroneous report on the Flynn plea deal. Which ultimately lead to Brian Ross’s suspension.
And the list goes on.
Facebook is shady on many levels. They have been gathering and selling their users data for years. Recently they have shadow banned conservative news because they deem them as fake news. Regardless of the news we choose to read on Facebook, left, right or center, everyone should have the right to post what they want to their viewers and not have to worry about their privacy being violated.
