Марк Дайс - The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

Similarly, Tila Tequila became the most popular person on MySpace in 2006 from posting racy photos of herself, taking advantage of the new medium and getting floods of friend requests from lonely losers online who hoped to connect with her. 537Her popularity on My Space opened the door for her (bisexual) dating show A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila on MTV in 2007, which began her 15 minutes of fame.

In the early years of social media most people just saw the technology as something to use for fun, and a way to entertain themselves or reconnect with old friends, but as time went on the true power and ability to influence large numbers of people through it became apparent.

One member of the Obama administration called journalists on social media “force multipliers” (a fancy term for propagandists) and admitted, “We have our compadres, I [would] reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them.” These people were “prominent Washington reporters and columnists who [would] often tweet in sync with [Obama’s] messaging.” 538

Obama’s former campaign “mastermind” David Axelrod admitted, “over the last couple of years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found. I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run [social media] campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.” 539

Amateur video caught Hillary Clinton collapsing at the 9/11 memorial after her campaign and the mainstream media kept dismissing growing concerns that there was something wrong with her health in the final stretch of the 2016 presidential election. 540The video first went viral through social media before finally getting covered in the mainstream press because so many people were talking about it. The Washington Post, which had been calling questions about her health “conspiracy theories,” then finally admitted, “Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign.” 541

A bartender working at a fundraiser held by Mitt Romney in 2012 captured the then-presidential candidate on video talking about how 47% of the country wouldn’t vote for him because they’ll support Obama no matter what since they want free hand outs so he wasn’t going to pay much attention to them. 542Liberals pretended to be outraged and accused Mitt of not caring about half of the country, particularly lower income folks, and the video proved to be quit damaging to his campaign.

Bloggers were the ones who first debunked the fake documents CBS News anchor Dan Rather claimed were the service records of George W. Bush from his time in the National Guard. 543Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report website first broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal when other outlets were sitting on the story and refused to cover it. 544Facebook and Google now account for 25% of all advertising spending, both online and off. 545Social media has swallowed up the news business, and the power-shift has been revolutionary.

We all know kids love their devices, and virtually live their lives on them. An entire generation of children have been raised on them, and get babysat by smartphones since parents use them to keep kids occupied while seated in the shopping cart at the grocery store and even at the dinner table. It’s how they communicate with their friends, listen to music, watch movies, and so it only makes sense that’s where they get their news.

A study conducted by Internet security company Anchor Free for the Jack Meyers Knowledge Exchange reported, “When asked to identify their two primary sources of news, the majority of this cohort name Instagram (29 percent), You Tube (22 percent), and Facebook (15 percent) as the media where they are most likely to read/see the news. Fewer than a quarter of young people depend on newspaper or television news, with 8 percent reading national newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, 10 percent watching broadcast and cable network news, and 6 percent exposed regularly to local television news or newspapers… By comparison, a stunning 82 percent of Gen Z and younger millennials include among their primary news sources Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, BuzzFeed, Instagram, Snapchat and their desktop newsfeed.” 546

Media advisor Jack Myers warned, “Without the traditional filters of trusted news organizations and journalists, this new generation of potential voters may be highly susceptible to fake and biased news and may find it difficult to discern fact from fiction. Compounding this reality, Instagram — the #1 source of news for young people — is dependent almost exclusively on visual images, and none of the major social media channels invest meaningfully in original news reporting, nor do they provide user-tools for deeper investigative analysis of their content.” 547

Of course it’s not just kids who are increasingly relying on social media for their news, it’s everyone.

Because so many people are now getting their news from social media and there are millions of ways stories can be planted online and go viral governments around the world are very interested in tracking and studying the flow of information through these new channels of distribution. In 2018 the Department of Homeland Security revealed they were developing systems to monitor the social media feeds of various journalists, bloggers, and social media influencers in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.” 548

In other words there are very serious national security concerns, as well as issues and events local law enforcement need to monitor on social media because they can easily cause real-world consequences.

A report in the Chicago Sun Times notes, they were building a database “to monitor the public activities of media members and influencers” so the government would have the ability “to create unlimited data tracking, statistical breakdown, and graphical analyses on ad-hoc basis.” 549They reportedly are tracking 300,000 different accounts to create a realtime information matrix of topics that are being talked about and how they spread.

Shortly after the 2016 election I myself was contacted by the United States Special Operations Command which integrates various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces because they wanted to interview me and even send a team of researchers to observe me working so they could learn how my YouTube channel had become so popular in the final stretch of the 2016 election. I declined their request.

Around 2011 the U.S. government launched a program called Operation Earnest Voice which uses specialized software that allows military personnel to create and manage fake social media profiles of various “people” in order to use them for propaganda purposes. 550

The government claims they’re only doing this on websites outside the United States because technically (until President Obama amended it in 2012) it was a violation of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act for the military to target our own citizens with propaganda, but it’s hard to believe that such technology isn’t being used by U.S. government agencies in black ops on the major social media platforms to influence the American people.

Obviously all countries engage in cyber warfare, and in the 21st century that means flooding social media with bots and trolls to push certain agendas or to disrupt various discussions. The London Guardian surprisingly admitted in 2015 that, “Israel Defense Forces have pioneered state military engagement with social media, with dedicated teams operating since Operation Cast Lead, its war in Gaza in 2008-9. The IDF is active on 30 platforms — including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram — in six languages.” 551