En Garde In The Bunker
The idea that the internet was going to break information monopolies and lead to democracy, which is just mob rule, has always been a myth. Joseph Goebbels would have loved the internet. Without the internet it would be harder, if not impossible, for Ben Rhodes to create his echo chamber to spread disinformation about the Iran deal and if you think that the Rhodes operation was unique and only limited to foreign news you are sadly naïve. You can guarantee that there are “conservative” blogs that are run by Democratic Party operatives to spread disinformation in conservative channels to demoralize Republican voters. I suggest everyone read up on Felix Dzerzhinsky’s operation called “The Trust”.
Who knows who in the conservative blogosphere is actually working with the White House. I have long wondered if the entire Republican leadership is in league with Obama, or whether the meme is actually manufactured by Democrat operatives and spread through the conservative blogosphere. After the Rhodes revelation, I’m pretty sure it was and I think Ted Cruz knew that and played along because he thought it was in his interest. Maybe.
I can’t muster up a lot of sympathy for people who ever thought they were getting real news through Facebook. For solid information content, Facebook is on about the same level as your daily horoscope. Of course the content selection is biased! I can’t think of a single media platform that does not have a detectable bias one way or another. Readers/listeners simply need to factor that in up front, and read across the spectrum in order to sift out the facts from all the spin. It’s probably a good thing that the left-wing manipulations at Facebook have been publicly exposed, but their platform is mostly a silly waste of time for the fatuous and self-absorbed. Don’t use it! Problem solved.
George Orwell “1984”…
On the other hand, why worry about Facebook? Yesterday the local conservative station in the Dallas area – again: Conservative, Texas – reported on the Carolina law as “law restricting the rights of LGBT’s”, and the rest was no better. Once you have framed the issue, you’ve already won half of the battle. If Conservative sources are going to just repeat the Left’s propaganda, we are doing the brainwashing for them.
In retrospect, I don’t believe that it is in anyone’s best interest to put the details of their lives on permanent display, thereby granting carte blanche access to the entire known universe. In our vainglorious efforts to garner as much attention as we can, all too often we do it to the detriment of our privacy, and foolishly sacrifice our security in the process. Like I constantly remind the people near and dearest to me, George Orwell’s 1984 was not originally written as a manual, but it is fast becoming one!
Now on to Roger L. Simon and his piece in PJMedia – “Facebook – More Dangerous Than The NSA” …
A while back, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on our National Security Agency. They’re spying on all our digital devices, have been for years. Our privacy has vanished.
True enough, but the NSA is looking for terrorists and, unless I’m missing something, hasn’t come after anyone who isn’t one, at least not yet. Still, the agency is something to be concerned about, though somewhat less, I would imagine, than a repeat of San Bernardino, or Paris, or Brussels, etc., etc.
But if you’re looking for something to really worry about, how about an equally large computer-based organization with the genuine power to invade our privacy, warp our minds and distort our culture that is actually in the process of doing it — Facebook?
In a media world where print journalism is disappearing and young (and many older) people gather the vast percentage of their information online, its dominance is overwhelming and its effect pernicious, maybe poisonous.
Evidence has been in the news lately. Gizmodo reports: “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.”
In an educated society, that information should be of interest to all readers, not just conservatives. Nevertheless, this suppression is no revelation to those of us who write from the right side of the ledger. I have never seen my work or those of my colleagues in the “trending” section of Facebook, although our bylines appear frequently on RealClearPolitics (usually juxtaposed with a liberal on the same issue) and even on Yahoo’s homepage. Facebook is exclusionary to the extent it even censors conservatives of the greatest popularity like Matt Drudge.
This is especially disturbing because Facebook feigns objectivity, yet it is no more objective than its owner Mark Zuckerberg, a progressive plutocrat whose views often make Bernie Sanders sound like Bob Dole. Drudge never feigned such objectivity. Anyone with the slightest interest knows he leans right with a libertarian tinge. Zuckerberg, who has more extensive online domination and aspires to still more, pretends to be merely an aggregator, when he is no such thing.
