Twitter censors the president of the United States of America for making claims media tech giants deem are “in dispute.” People on Facebook are prevented from sharing stories about election fraud because the ones-and-zeros working in “content moderation” say claims in a lawsuit aren’t true.
Everything’s racist, sexist, iffy, and off-putting for tech’s child content-moderators, who apparently believe that media is made for censoring. They believe they are the firewall protecting those dumb adults from bad information because they know what’s best.
And conservatives are responding by getting out.
More conservative Twitter, Google, YouTube and Facebook users are like businesses in California. Their signs are still up, but they expanded somewhere else.
Parler, MeWe, Rumble, and Gab are blowing up in subscriptions.
It used to be that standing against censorship was noble, but the legacy news media have now decided there’s something sinister about this wave of tech refugees seeking a better, more honest, place to call home.
A USA Today story imputes selfish and sinister motives to the sudden popularity of these new social media platforms.
Conservatives increasingly are congregating on social media outlets designed specifically for people who think like them.
Conservatives increasingly are congregating on social media outlets designed specifically for people who think like them. https://t.co/CBg1RQA11t
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 11, 2020
Without irony, people observing the exodus claim it must be because conservatives want to “stay in their own echo chambers,” and surely there’s truth to wanting to be with like-minded people. That’s why the Left loves legacy social media. They run it, contour content to their way of thinking, and censor, report, and hector people who don’t think like them. This may sound like a Leftist love-fest, and it is, but being a conservative on these social media sites is like going to dinner at your sister’s, where she thinks it’s perfectly OK to call you a ho because you disagree with her.
With no self-reflection, a reporter at USA Today constructs a narrative about the exodus claiming it’s all conservatives’ fault because they’re closed-minded and extremist.
America’s crisis of political segregation – we increasingly don’t live alongside, associate with or even marry people who think differently from us – is increasingly leading conservatives to congregate together on social media outlets designed specifically for people who think like them.
The recent rise of Parler – as well as other social media alternatives that appeal primarily to conservatives and that got their start largely by attracting the far right – raises the specter of further political polarization through digital means. Parler and others, like MeWe and Gab, are gaining momentum with a promise not to censor their users for behavior that might violate the policies of their rivals.
But, much like the social media site Gab, Parler has quickly attracted the extremist crowd in addition to self-proclaimed center-right conservatives like Read. Groups from the far-right Proud Boys, which includes large numbers of white supremacists, to heavily-armed anti-government militias have gathered on the site to spread conspiracy theories, racist memes and false claims of election fraud.
Leftists believe Donald Trump is a Russian secret agent, Hillary would have been elected but for Russian Facebook ads, the black man running Proud Boys is a white nationalist, and Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist who gave out red cups with roofies. But, sure, conservatives are the weirdos.
“I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see the rise of conservative, separate or distinct, social media,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow and U.S. political scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “It’s only a question of where and how fast it will form and how extreme and partisan it will become.”
The mainstream press and their allies in academia and think-tank-world believe Leftist beliefs are the standard by which all other thoughts are measured. That’s how far they’ve moved. All other thought is “extreme and partisan.”
Or this guy might be right. Everyone’s welcome to these newer sites.
Anyone is welcome on these sites lol if you hear free speech zone and automatically think conservatives they will take that as a compliment
Anyone is welcome on these sites lol if you hear free speech zone and automatically think conservatives they will take that as a compliment 😘
— Charlton Martin II (@CharltonII1318) November 11, 2020
USA Today reports that Parler was the most downloaded app on Tuesday. Their user base has nearly doubled in a week. A Facebook group urging people to leave the social site on November 13 has nearly half a million members.
Instead of taking this as a market clue from Facebook’s “customers” (remember, users aren’t customers, they are the product in these legacy social media sites), the tech companies believe they are right and their users are wrong.
In short, they think you’re simply too stupid, for example, to divine what President Trump says on a daily basis so they censor the leader of the free world. This galled a man, who told USA Today, “Hyperbole is where he lives and plays… It feels like they don’t believe we have the intelligence to filter through hyperbole and figure out truth from error.”
They don’t.
This isn’t hard. When a cadre of tech giants think you’re too stupid to conduct your own life and flow of information and that you dropped several IQ points when you joined their social media platforms, who’s the one with the problem? You were doing fine and then BOOM! became a Facebook user and devolved into a monster. Half the country is racist all of a sudden.
“This is America in 2020,” said Josh Pasek, an expert on political communication and misinformation and a professor at the University of Michigan. “We’re defriending people over politics. We have an urban-rural divide. We have a racial divide. At the end of the day, what do you end up with? You end up with an increasingly segmented society.”
There’s a tried and true saying from church that goes something like, “if you’re feeling distant from God, who moved?”
Not to put conservatives in the God category, but who are the people segmenting society? Who are those “defriending people over politics”? Conservatives and classical liberals were doing just fine and then all of a sudden they were Nazis?
Conservatives are sick of it. They’re voting with their feet. They’re getting out and going to a place where they won’t be called an “ist” or a “phobe” for calling Maxine Waters a horrible person because she told her constituents to mob Republicans.
Leftist social media will ignore these market tells at their peril. So be it.
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Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it at your favorite podcast outlets. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Parler @VictoriaTaft
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