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I know what most of you thought when you read the headline. “Begun? It’s been happening for a while.” This is true. But the REAL crackdown is starting now and it is quite ugly. The evidence is clear. Conservatives are being suppressed, lied to, and even purged. It’s more common today than any time during the Big Tech Censorship Era, a time that happens to coincide with the election of Donald Trump as President.
In another life before I became engulfed by politics, I worked for and then owned companies that specialized in deciphering Big Tech algorithms. Off and on for the last couple of years, I’ve pulled out some of my old tools and tinkered with my technical tradecraft to see what I could glean. It’s a reality that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are far more likely to go after conservative accounts, pages, groups, and talking points than progressive variants. Sadly, this practice has been ramping up over the past four months and in the last week, it has accelerate to ludicrous speed.
There are two variations of crackdowns divided into three categories within each. I’ve laid out a cursory explanation of each below. The purpose is to make people aware of what’s happening. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to come up with a solution. They control their “platforms” (don’t get me started on a Section 230 rant) and therefore nothing short of viable alternatives being swarmed to en masse by patriots and those who hate Big Tech bias can solve this problem. That leaves us essentially two choices: Participate or don’t.
I discussed all of this thoroughly in the latest episode of NOQ Report, but below I have given the 30,000-foot view.
Visible Crackdowns
Bans and Suspensions
This is the one far too many of us have experienced first-hand. They’re increasing in frequency as if a hair-trigger apparatus has been specifically put in place to take down popular conservative accounts just weeks before the elections. This is intended to keep us walking on eggshells. Sadly, it’s working on many. Those who comply can survive. Those who do not are purged.
Here comes the crackdown on conservatives. @JohnTiegen banned from Instagram. @Posonaut banned from Twitter.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 12, 2020
Hashtag Manipulation
How many retweets does it take for a hashtag to trend? That depends. If the hashtag attaches to a progressive message, it can trend after a few hundred rapid retweets. If it is attached to a conservative message, forget about it unless you can get tens or even hundreds of thousands of retweets. Project Veritas has learned this many times with their attempts to make hashtags trend.
There’s another side to this. Not only is hashtag popularity contingent on political ideology, but the “news” that is manually highlighted in the trending section is invariably leftist in nature. It’s as if Big Tech, mainstream media, and Democrats meet on Zoom every morning and discuss what leftist talking points they’ll be highlighting together that day.
Biased Fact-Checkers
We’ve had posts pulled and threats made on social media over topics that Americans need to hear. Eric Ciaramella nearly got our Facebook page banned. Climate change, Hydroxychlorquine, and whether or not Kamala Harris said BLM riots should continue after the election (she did say it) are among the topics we’ve been flagged for by fact-checkers just in the last few months. Heck, we even had a very ugly month-long penalty once for rightly claiming that many of Australia’s bushfires last year were started by arsonists (they were).
How many unbiased fact-checkers are there? As a percentage, it’s probably about as low as the number of unbiased professors in American universities. The left dominates the fact-checking industry as much as they dominate Hollywood.
Hidden Crackdowns
Multiple Types of Shadowbans
Many social media users have heard the term “shadowban.” The basic definition is being essentially banned from a platform without even knowing it. Those who are shadowbanned go about their normal social media activities without realizing that nobody’s actually seeing what they’re posting.
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But what the vast majority of users on Facebook and Twitter do not realize is there are multiple types of shadowbans. There are search bans that prevent a user’s posts or even profile from appearing in searches, even for their name. On Twitter, one of President Trump’s counsels, Jenna Ellis, is currently experiencing a search ban despite being a verified account. That means that anyone who is not following her cannot find her in search whether looking for her name or her Twitter handle:
There are other types of bans such as multiple-account bans and hidden reply bans, but the worst of them all is the “ghost ban.” That’s what most people associate with the overarching term “shadowban” and it’s essentially the kiss of death. Except… it isn’t anymore. For the last few weeks, I have not found anyone who has been ghost banned. It’s as if Twitter and Facebook are going straight for the hard ban and bypassing the ghost ban altogether.
Amplifying and Suppressing
Both Facebook and Twitter have variations of a “quality filter” that amplifies “good” content while suppressing “bad” content. Twitter claims the filter is gone, but it’s not. My tools show it’s alive and well even if they no longer acknowledge it. Just like Google, the social media giants are extraordinarily biased with what they present at the top and what they push to the bottom on any particular topic.
Facebook acknowledges it, though they claim they’re not biased. This may be hard to believe, but their filter is actually closer to being unbiased than Twitter’s. On the other hand, their fact-checkers are much more draconian and clearly controlled by leftists, so I suppose it balances out.
Moderators
Behind nearly all of these methods of cracking down on conservatives are moderators. They’re called different things in different departments at different companies, but their goals are always the same: “Quality.”
I’m not going to get into the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) as described by Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Instead, I’ll explain how algorithms are invariably driven by the people who wield them and the ideology that drives them. They aren’t necessarily bad people trying to do bad things. In their eyes, they’re doing what’s right when they ban an account promoting the #SaveTheChildren hashtag because it’s associated with QAnon. They think they’re being righteous when they push down articles about Amy Coney Barrett as a caring parent while promoting stories that say she’ll take away healthcare from millions of Americans. Their ideology is skewed which makes their actions skewed as well.
The best solution, in my humble opinion, is to keep fighting on the leftist platforms while also supporting the growing free speech platforms. It’s easy to say “*%&# Twitter and Facebook,” but for now they still wield power.
For now.
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