Wednesday, October 7, 2020

THE PATRIOT POST - ALEXANDER'S COLUMN 10/07/2020

 

Social Media Election Riggers — The Demos' BFF

The Demo/Social Media monopoly on ideas has rigged the 2020 election.

Mark Alexander

"We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections." —John Adams (1797)

The Democrats' House Antitrust Subcommittee released a summary report on its 16-month "inquiry" into BIG Tech companies — including search and social media giants Google and Facebook, and online retailers Amazon and Apple. Antitrust laws are federal and state statutes designed to prevent market-crushing concentration of economic monopolies. There is no question that these companies are marketplace monopolies.

But the first question about this Demo-controlled House investigation: Why would the Democrat Party take on companies that are headed by their wealthiest leftist benefactors? Fact is, if Demos are biting the hand that feeds them, then the "bite" is a nibble intended to head off any action that might really interrupt the feeding.

The real feeding is not in campaign donations, but in election rigging.

While Democrat Party principals spent much of President Donald Trump's first term pretending the Russians rigged the 2016 election, the real existential threat to free and fair elections — one almost as influential as the Demos' Leftmedia propagandists — emerged in 2016 virtually unnoticed. It will be one of the biggest election determinants of 2020.

Don't confuse economic monopolies with monopolies on the marketplace of ideas — particularly the search and social media opinion shapers.

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, controlled by billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have a virtual market lock on opinion-shaping manipulation — and they are using that lock to suppress conservative speech and promote leftist ideologues and ideologies. Their monopoly on ideas is a huge threat to the future of American Liberty.

In August, when Barack Obama told his Democratic National Convention lemmings, "Do not let them take away your power — don't let them take away your democracy," he was referring to Republicans. More specifically, he was referring to Republican efforts to thwart the Demos' voter fraud plans, which include carpet-bombing their own mailboxes with ballots and refusing to require voter IDs.

In other words, fighting back against Demo voter fraud constitutes "taking away your power," and insisting on free and fair elections is tantamount to "taking away your democracy."

Behind the curtain of all this rancor, though, is a subtler yet much greater threat to our elections than systemic Demo voter fraud. In fact, it's a threat designed to give socialist Democrats perpetual control of government.

Leftist BIG Tech social media bias manifests primarily as selective censoring of conservative content with algorithms that actively suppress whatever the leftist tech giants want to suppress — at the proverbial turn of a data-selection switch.

An algorithm is a deliberate data-management process that is designed to solve a problem. In this case, the "problem" is conservative content itself — including news, commentary, and imagery. Big Tech's leftist search and social media switches have emerged as the most effective way to manage that problem, and they are thus a powerful determinant in national elections.

Recall last year's congressional testimony of Dr. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and a Harvard-educated senior research psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (IBRTA). In his testimony about search media, primarily Google, Dr. Epstein admitted, "I am not a conservative," but he advocates for "a free and fair election more than I have any kind of allegiance to a candidate or a party."

Epstein was asked by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) if "Google is, through biased search results, manipulating voters in a way they are not aware of."

Epstein replied, "On a massive scale."

IBRTA's research, said Epstein, revealed that Google's biased search results provided 2.6 million votes to Clinton in 2016, but clarified, "That 2.6 million is a rock-bottom minimum. The range is between 2.6 and 10.4 million."

He also concluded that in the crucial 2018 midterm elections, Google's "Go Vote" reminder shifted "between 800,000 and 4.6 million more votes."

Regarding this year's election, he concluded: "All of these companies are going to go all out. And the methods that they're using are invisible, they're subliminal, they're more powerful than most any effects I've ever seen in the behavioral sciences, and I've been in the behavioral sciences for almost 40 years. In 2020 — if all these companies are supporting the same candidate — there are 15 million votes on the line that can be shifted without people's knowledge and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace."

Put another way, the Hispanic voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election was estimated to be between 13.1 and 14.7 million. Imagine doubling that number with only Democrats. But it's actually worse than that. The 15 million votes that Epstein is talking about aren't merely being added to the vote total; many are being manipulated to move from one side to the other, from Republican to Democrat, so the effect is even more powerful.

As for Facebook, Cruz asked, "A handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and giant corporations are able to spend millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars collectively, massively influencing the results of elections?"

Epstein replied, "Senator, with respect, I must correct you. If Mark Zuckerberg chooses to send out a 'Go Vote' reminder just to Democrats on Election Day, that doesn't cost him a dime."

Regarding Facebook's use of algorithms to ensure bias, Epstein wrote, "The dangers in allowing big technology companies to decide which news stories are legitimate" gives them the ability to silence conservative media.

Facebook rebuffed assertions about its abject bias with an internal "bias audit" that, laughably, determined it was not biased.

Even more laughably, one of Zuckerberg's emissaries declared that Facebook favors "right-wing populism" because it appeals to "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion." Actually, emotionally incontinent white-privileged suburbanites advocating leftist statism are the primary benefactors of the Democrat Party.

Zuckerberg's apologist added, "If you're a far-left partisan, then why can't you fight fire with fire? ... All center-left campaigners and politicians always ask themselves, 'Why can't [we] seem to rile their supporters as much as right-wing populists have?'"

That "fight fire with fire" assertion coincided with months of leftist burning, looting, and murdering in major urban centers — and the anarchists use social media to organize their "peaceful protests."

In the same breath, he declared that Facebook is neutral in its use of algorithms to suppress speech. That is a lie and our internal social media data proves that beyond any reasonable doubt.

Here is my question for Zuckerberg: Why, after record growth in recent years, has our Patriot Post traffic on Facebook suddenly and precipitously dropped by more than 80%? We can tie this drop to the day Facebook's manipulation of algorithms began suppressing the organic reach of our content, also known as "shadow banning." This isn't a matter of speculation; it's a matter of fact. We were on a trajectory to have millions of followers on Facebook, but that trajectory has stalled because one of Zuckerberg's minions flipped a political-preference switch.

This is happening to grassroots conservative sites every day with impunity. The most recent case being our friend Mark Levin, but at least Facebook had the courtesy of notifying him that his content was being shadow banned for "false news" — in other words commentary that does not fit with Zuckerberg's political views.

The chorus of whistleblowers emerging from these Orwellian tech giants is growing. Former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee insists that Google is preparing to "make sure Trump loses in 2020."

A devastating documentary exposé, primarily about Facebook, has just been released. A host of former Silicon Valley executive defectors are featured in "The Social Dilemma" (see the Netflix trailer). The film provides a brutal peek at the disgusting underbelly of social and search media manipulation. It reveals how social media platforms are undermining our elections, and, moreover, our American culture.

Predictably, Facebook responded to the documentary with a slick list of dezinformatsiya, but Zuckerberg knows their gross manipulation in the marketplace of ideas has been exposed.

The last frontier of free speech is the web — but Zuckerberg and other leftists are effectively suppressing free speech on every search and social media platform.

However, there are solutions — if not legislative, then legal. And that begins with limiting what these platforms aggregate in terms of user profiles. If a user can't be profiled, then it greatly reduces that user's vulnerability to manipulation.

Beyond the Demos' antitrust ruse, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are contemplating antitrust actions against Google, Facebook, and other tech giants. But in the unlikely event any meaningful action is taken to diminish social media platform monopolies, addressing the user privacy and profiling issue is a much more direct path to undoing Zuckerberg's monopoly on ideological profiling.

How to get that done?

Two years ago, I noted what Congress should do.

After Zuckerberg's congressional testimony exposing his company's unmitigated violation of user privacy, it became clear that when it comes to these violations — the collecting and marketing of individual profiles — a ubiquitous blanket "user agreement" is completely insufficient.

If Congress is serious about curbing the unmitigated power of social media platforms to influence elections, it must start with the violation of user privacy.

Congress has the authority to protect consumer privacy through legislation, and in the case of Facebook and other aggregators of private data (which should be classified as private property), that legislation should include explicit conditions regarding the collection and dissemination of such data. Congress should enact legislation requiring that social media and other aggregators of individual data be required to obtain specific and explicit user permissions for each and every collection and transfer of such data, prior to such collection or transfer. Violations of those conditions warrant enormously expensive fines.

The aggregators will, of course, argue about what constitutes "private" — and that the data they collect is not actually private. But by any reasonable definition, the individual data in question most certainly is private.

Will Congress take any action?

In his closing testimony regarding the political influence of search and social medial platforms, Robert Epstein declared, "If you were to examine the data I have been collecting over the past six and a half years, every one of you would put partisanship aside and collaborate to rein in the extraordinary power that Google and Facebook now wield with unabashed arrogance."

Of course, leftist Democrats have no intention of putting aside the political windfall benefits of social media partisanship.

Imagine, if you will, what the American political landscape would look like if the mass and social media platforms were actually politically neutral. That landscape would take a seismic shift to the right.

That being said, if Democrats take the presidency and the Senate in 2020, all bets are off. Hidden by the shadow of their SCOTUS-packing plan is another insidious power-grabbing scheme: to pack the Senate by admitting both Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico as states. Doing so will provide Democrats with four additional Senate seats — and an assurance of perpetual control of the country for the foreseeable future, which will be solidified by search and social media manipulation.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776


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