The MSM, liberals and Democrats have found their culprit who was "colluding" with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, someone to finally blame for the fact that their candidate lost the election, someone to attack and destroy..... Mark Zuckerberg and his social media website, Facebook.
KARMA, BABY, KARMA!
Recently Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos admitted that Russia had "likely" used 470 fake accounts to buy about $100,000 worth of advertising promoting “divisive social and political messages” to Americans, and according to the Daily Beast, those "propaganda" ads could have reached anywhere between 23 million users to 70 million users.
As expected, the MSM, liberals across the board and Democratic politicians and Republicans to boot, have jumped on this news with brutal attacks on Facebook and it's founder Mark Zuckerberg. Headlines blaring about how Facebook was used by Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, letters from campaign finance reform group, accusing Facebook of being used as an “accomplice” in a Russian influence scheme, Yahoo reports, with Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, screeching about how "The American public has a right know how Russian ads were used on Facebook to influence the election!!!"
Anyone who has read my work over the years, knows I am no fan of Facebook, nor Mark Zuckerberg, but this outrage by some of the very same people and news outlets that protected and defended Zuckerberg and Facebook when he was "colluding" with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to censor Islamic terrorism news for political purposes and to "influence" Facebook users, by labeling it "anti-immigrant hate posts" and/or "racism," exposes their extreme double standards.
The two were overheard exchanging words on a live transmission broadcast on the United Nations website, as participants took their seats at a U.N. development summit in New York on Saturday, Bloomberg reported.
After Ms. Merkel asked Mr. Zuckerberg about offensive posts on the refugee crisis, the Facebook CEO said “we need to do some work” on the issue.
“Are you working on this?” Ms. Merkel asked in English, Bloomberg reported.
“Yeah,” Mr. Zuckerberg reportedly responded, before the transmission was disrupted.
A surge of Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Germany has spurred a spate of attacks on refugee centers and anti-immigrant sentiment, Bloomberg reported. Earlier this month, Facebook vowed to clean up racist content on its German website by partnering with a German Internet watchdog, called Voluntary Self-Monitoring of Multimedia Service Providers, to monitor suspected hate postings.
We assume that was alright with the mainstream media and liberals and Democratic politicians because Zuckerberg was using his social media platform to hide content that didn't fit with liberal ideology.
Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”
Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.
Now the very same people that truly didn't care about Zuckerberg allowing Facebook to be used to "influence" the election are now "demanding" that they reveal their internal data and the specific ads they found that were connected to Russia, yet no one cared when Zuckerberg and company refused to reveal the extent of their conservative news suppression or algorithms.
Where was the outrage on the part of the media about "influencing" a foreign election when the Obama administration gave $350,000 tax payer dollars to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israeli parliamentary elections?
Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a bipartisan staff report.
Hmmmmmmmmm..... if we had a scale here, and on one side was $100,000 worth of advertising on Facebook by entities tied to Russia, and on the other side was $350,000 spent by the Obama administration which was used to build a database, train activists and hire a firm with ties to Obama, to "influence" a foreign election..... which is worse?
Back to Facebook... there are pages dedicated to documenting Political and religious censorship and harassment by Facebook, blocking, banning, and censoring Christian and conservative news and views in favor of liberal news and views, so while the selective outrage on the part of liberals and Democratic politicians, along with the mainstream media, over Facebook allowing ads bought by Russia onto their website while being silent in regards to actual foreign election tampering, is astounding, we do find a bit of poetic justice in the fact that Facebook is now in the crosshairs of the very people Zuckerberg has been appeasing for years.
You see it isn't really the ads that has everyone acting so outraged, it is the fact that liberals, Democrats and the MSM have been howling about "Russian influence" and "propaganda" since the November elections when Trump trounced Clinton in the electoral college, and while they still haven't been able to tie Trump campaign members to Russian collusion, they now have found something to hang their hat on and they don't care if they have to take Zuckerberg down in order to scream "WE WERE RIGHT!, Russia tried to influence the election."
It doesn't even matter to them that those "Russian" ads weren't very successful, according to Gizmodo.
Karma, Baby, Karma!
'THERE'S BLOOD IN THE WATER' AND THE SHARKS ARE CIRCLING
It isn't often readers will see ANP recommending an article at BuzzFeed, but they have published an outstanding detailed article titled "There's Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley: The bad new politics of big tech," on how tech firms, to use an expression my mother used to say, has "gotten too big for its britches," and the left, right, and middle of the political spectrum, along with the media, are finally on the same page in recognizing that fact.
When you have people like former White House Chief Strategist and current Brietbart executive chairman, Steve Bannon, and a socialist like Senator Bernie Sanders, agreeing that big tech, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and others, should be treated as "public utilities," then you know big tech is definitely in the crosshairs now.
That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.
Here is a little teaser:
The tech industry has also benefited for years from its enemies, who it cast — often accurately — as Luddites who genuinely didn’t understand the series of tubes they were ranting about, or protectionist industries that didn’t want the best for consumers. That, too, is over. Opportunists and ideologues have assembled the beginnings of a real coalition against these companies, with a policy core consisting of refugees from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s least favorite think tank unit. Nationalists, accurately, see a consolidation of power over speech and ideas by social liberals and globalists; the left, accurately, sees consolidated corporate power. Those are the ascendant wings of the Republican and Democratic parties, even before Donald Trump sends the occasional spray of bile Jeff Bezos’s way — and his spokeswoman declines, as she did in June, to defend Google against European regulators.
This has led to a kind of Murder on the Orient Express alliance against big tech: Everyone wants to kill them.
I recommend reading the entire piece, because many of these groups have gotten to the point where those running them seem to think they are a law unto themselves, with no regards to privacy issues of their users, no compunction in using shadowy methods, including censorship of opinions that do not match their own ideology, in order to force their political opinions down all of our throats.
Another quote from a liberal website in regards to Facebook, but could be applied to Twitter and Google and others, that I, as a conservative, totally agree with, comes from the conclusion of Josh Marshall's piece over at Talking Points Memo, where he states "I think the political juice of the Russia story is pushing Facebook toward a bruising encounter with the reality that it’s not God, not a government, not the law. It’s just a website. It can’t happen soon enough."
BOTTOM LINE
I'll be honest here, I don't care if Russia bought ads on Facebook, if people are clicking ads that is their choice as to what to click, what to believe, what events to support. I don't care if Twitter has linked bot accounts to Russia, I have no doubt North Korea, Germany, and every other country likely has hundreds if not thousands of their own bots attempting to "influence" opinion.
As long as no one has access to and is tampering with the actual voting machines and ballots.... I simply don't care.
With that said, if the media needs some BS excuse to finally acknowledge the unregulated power, influence, and antics of these big tech giants who think nothing of attempting to control the masses simply because they can, then so be it.
Welcome to the club of people in the Independent Media that have been yelling these warnings off the rooftops for years about how dangerous these entities have become.
