Less than a year ago, a group of powerful Conservative website owners and I ventured to DC to discuss the state of social media. Put simply, the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google conspired against mostly Conservative websites.
We had grown too big. One site, Western Journalism became bigger than Fox News, CNN, and many other outlets combined. At one point, I know that site generated over 200 million views on articles, and 120 million were unique. With those numbers, the mainstream media became irrelevant. And this was before Donald Trump gave the Leftist media the moniker of fake news.
Many of the top Conservatives sites were getting tens of millions in web traffic monthly. I have no doubt that people like Zuckerberg understood the power of Conservative media. And platforms like Facebook allowed us to assemble our audiences quickly, then point them to our websites, projects, and so on.
Zuckerberg decided to remove the potential for sites like mine to profit. So he put a strangle hold on our audiences. In many cases, sites paid to build their audiences only to have Zuckerberg squeeze the life out of their reach.
I warned ALL of these large organizations that we needed pull back from Facebook and provide a back-up path. I had started Tea Party Community and it had grown faster than Facebook in the first six months. The site was actually featured on Fox News.
None listened. Everybody said things would work out. These organizations couldn’t have been more wrong.
Back to DC meeting
While we sat in the lobby of the Trump hotel, we learned that Congress cancelled our meeting. At least 10 organizations spent thousands of dollars to have our voices heard on this issue. Yet, the meeting was abruptly canceled. No explanation given.
We all headed back home to suffer our fate. We still live the future I predicted, now trying to breath through a coffee stirrer.
Like Lois Lerner with the IRS, Zuckerberg and others in the Leftist social media cabal harass conservatives routinely. Twitter finally irked the president enough personally that he acted.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”
Speaking from the Oval Office ahead of signing the order, the president commented that the move was to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”
“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States. They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences.”
Conservatives have fought these Nazis for almost a decade now. So, the president’s action is long overdue.
I’ve complained that once you purchase a URL it’s like private-property. No infringement of your rights.
I don’t like racist organizations, but if they want to spew their hatred on their website, I don’t care. I don’t have to go there. The same is true for non-controversial information, as I don’t visit sites that don’t interest me.
Nevertheless, even knowing that people have choices of what they search, Leftists social media giants believe they can engineer ideas and behaviors. However, what they merely do is suppress those behaviors. And eventually suppressed behaviors become monsters of reality.
As for the EO, the president knows he will be challenged. His EO dares to mitigate the power of large social media platforms by reinterpreting a critical 1996 law that shields websites and tech companies from lawsuits. Although some legal experts raise concerns about the president’s authority, he’s prepared to fight it out.
President Trump acknowledged that legal challenges to the order lie ahead, declaring he was “sure they’ll be doing a lawsuit.”
“I guess it’s going to be challenged in court, what isn’t? But I think we’re going to do very well.”
Again, Trump takes on the establishment; new media. Facebook, Twitter, et al have run roughshod over Conservative America specifically and America in general. It’s time they lose that gauntlet of protection, as we revisit the legality of their actions.
