There is a quote attributed to Jim Morrison that says "Whoever controls the media, controls the mind," and another attributed to Allen Ginsberg that says "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."
Call them the deep state, the shadow government, the Illuminati, whatever you want to call them, but throughout history, the mainstream media has been used to control the masses by those pulling their strings, to influence what people buy, what they think, how they vote.... until now.
This is not opinion, as old congressional testimony shows conclusive proof that the CIA controls the media, as was discovered when Operation Mockingbird was exposed.
Operation Mockingbird was a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, it was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA.
The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA’s views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA.
The point here is that governments across the world have always used their media assets to control the people.
THEN CAME THE INTERNET AND THE DEEP STATE LOST 'CONTROL'
At first Alternative and Independent Media sites, bloggers and others using the internet to share their opinions, was able to be swatted away like a fly by the mainstream media and their puppet masters in the government because the MSM controlled the narrative, decided what to report, how to spin it, used their "anonymous sources" to plant suggestions, and most importantly, their number one job for the government, was to influence the public.
That all changed during the 2016 election cycle, where public distrust of the media hit record highs, more and more Internet users started obtaining their news from different sources, comparing coverage, looking for information that the MSM simply refused to give them, and against the "advice," suggestions, endorsements, and outright propaganda pumped out daily by the establishment media, the candidate the MSM by and large told everyone not to vote for, won the electoral vote.
The deep state and their media puppets lost control.
TECH GIANTS DECLARE WAR ON INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Immediately after the election, once again with the help of their media assets, the deep state went on an all out attack against Independent Media, first disseminating their "Russian propaganda" campaign, accusing hundreds of websites that supported Donald Trump as being "Russia propaganda" outlets, with the Washington Post linking to a shadowy site that labeled those Independent Media sites, calling the group "experts," and after it went viral, Washington Post then offered a disclaimer that was seen by a fraction of the original audience, saying they couldn't "vouch" for the group they previously gave authenticity to.
Then the media coordinated an effort to start label sites as "Fake News," which backfired on the MSM spectacularly when the establishment media consistently start reporting a number of "fake news" articles, were caught, were forced to offer editors notes, corrections, and in some case outright retractions and deletion of stories.
The MSM continued to see historic levels of distrust and confidence in their trustworthiness, according to polling across a variety of organizations.
That is when the tech giants started stepping in, because if the media could no longer control the masses with their propaganda, tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (owned by Google), and others, could damn well control what was and wasn't seen on the Internet.
Facebook framed it as a battling "fake news" on their platform, after denying that "fake" stories had any impact. Twitter started censoring and shadow banning conservative voices from sharing content, claiming certain content was "sensitive content." YouTube started flagging channels on restricted mode, start demonetizing videos with claims of fighting "extremism."
Google, the largest search engine on the net, they starting making sure the "results" found during searches were their preferred narrative versus items that actually ranked higher, providing higher ranking (seen on the 1st page of their search results) to leftist sites like Snopes, Wikipedia, and the mainstream media, with few exceptions.
The proof is in the pudding. Over at Reddit, they highlighted the difference between searches on Google and the results found, compared to DuckDuckGo, and the contrast is amazing.
(Click image to enlarge - opens in new tab)
While reporting it, and even showing an example or two makes the point, nothing hammers the point home more than users proving it for themselves, as was shown with hilarious results in the Google bot "Perspective" thread, so here is Google, Yahoo, DogPile, DuckDuckGo, and Bing search pages.
Go to Google, search out any specific search term you find interest in, then go to the others, one by one and search the exact same term (with DuckDuckGo, you have to lower the safe search settings to get full results) and look at how Google deliberately manipulates their search results to hide anything that isn't the "official" narrative they prefer, with very few exceptions, in comparison to the rest which most give a wide range of results so people can see all sides of an issue on that first page, and then make their own determination.
THE EFFECTS OF THIS COORDINATED CAMPAIGN CAN BE SEEN IN THE NUMBERS
Independent Media website owners can tell readers all day long how this has effected not just traffic but revenue as the deep state, the MSM, and now the tech giants have all started waging war on Independent Media, but seeing is believing, so we conducted an experiment using Alexa, which is a site that analyzes website traffic and statistics, and the results, seen in the graphs below, for a large number of Independent Media sites, provides indisputable proof of how effective their coordinated campaign has been.
Note- While any site owner will tell you, there is a significant rise right before an election and dramatic drop after every election, all around the same time frame, then traffic starts to rise again after the election fatigue wears off, as shown clearly by looking at the stats for MSM sites, such as NYT.
Washington Post shows the same rise before the election, then steep decline and steady rise after election fatigure wears off.
Now compare the graphs above showing the normal rise, the fall and the steady climb again at the MSM sites that the tech giants and Google search engine are pushing, while censoring Independent News, where the normal rise and fall occurs between January -February, but then instead of a steady rise again, the numbers continue to drop, most of which until June-July when many learned to promote their sites in a different manner, bypassing the tech giants manipulation of information.
Readers can test this on their favorite Independent Media sites for themselves here at Alexa. Just plug in the main URL of your favorite site and hit the "find" button.
ANALYSIS
What does it tell you when polling clearly shows not only does the public distrust the mainstream media, but that nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe the MSM is publishing fake news, that it is the sites that accurately predicted Donald Trump had a chance to beat Hillary Clinton, that provided information the MSM would not during the election cycle, that are seeing an extremely slow bounce back?
It tells me that once those that control the media lost control of the minds, the tech giants then stepped in and took control of the information flow on the Internet in order to control the masses.
As much as many of us dislike big government and regulations, the graphs and numbers above, along with the comparisons of the MSM numbers, all because tech giants are manipulating the flow of information, offer a little persuasion to the argument that perhaps they have gotten too much control over the Internet and should be regulated or broken up as any utility with a monopoly is.
“Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market,” University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab director emeritus Jonathan Taplin wrote in an April 22 op-ed in the New York Times.
“In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.”
High-profile journalist Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on National Security Agency spying on Americans (revealed in leaks by Edward Snowden) tweeted April 22 that a discussion on the tech firms’ market domination was “way overdue.”
“The unrestrained power amassed by the Silicon Valley monopolies is staggering,” Greenwald tweeted.
May be the first (and last!) time in history that Steve Bannon and any writer at the NYT actually agree on anything.
BOTTOM LINE
Most conservative leaning Independent Media websites united during the 2016 presidential election cycle in opposition to Hillary Clinton becoming president, bypassing adversity, attacks, and social media influence, we proved that we can overcome attempts to hide the truth from the masses, as shown by the election of President Trump.
They want control back and they are willing to destroy anyone and everyone that gets in their way.
Make no mistake, Independent Media site owners are the ones noticing it because we track analytics of our sites, but the attack is geared toward you, the reader, because they are trying to control what information you are allowed to see and find on their services.
Keep those other search links in your bookmarks and when you need to research, use multiple services so you can get unfiltered information from a wide variety of sources, seeing all the different points of view, arguments, debates and news, to make your own informed opinion.
