Марк Дайс - The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

Who knows what will happen when deepfake videos become more popular and carefully crafted hoax clips are spread through Twitter. The effects could be devastating beyond measure and it’s something I’ll cover in detail later in the chapter titled “The Future of Fake News.”

Spreading misinformation through Twitter isn’t just something that random idiots do online. Many mainstream media journalists regularly engage in the practice, or amplify fake news through retweets. Dave Weigel of the Washington Post tweeted a photo of the audience at a Trump event in Florida that went viral, claiming the event had a ton of empty seats, disputing the President’s statement that people had to be turned away because the stadium was over capacity. People starting calling the President a liar because the “prestigious” Washington Post said otherwise, but Weigel’s photo was taken hours before the event had actually started which is why there were rows of empty seats. 643

Just hours after President Trump was inaugurated, a Time magazine reporter claimed that he removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office, posting a photo of the table where it sat, claiming it was gone, insinuating Trump is such a racist he couldn’t stand to see the face of MLK in his new office and got rid of it on his first day as president. It turns out that someone was just standing in front of it, blocking it from view, and the bust was still there. 644But countless liberals tweeted their disgust after being duped by an “authoritative” Time magazine reporter who made the claim.

There are countless vipers who live online, glued to their phones, and derive a sense of power from the amount of likes and retweets they get. And many function as a volunteer army, ready to attack any target on demand. It’s where liberals harass companies that advertise on Fox News, and where they flood the mentions of anyone who dares speak out against garbage like corporations pandering to gays and transgenders during “Pride” month.

Twitter can suck you in, wasting hours of your time while you argue with idiots about anything and everything since your mentions can easily turn into an endless flow of responses from more and more people as those triggered by your tweets keep sharing them with their followers, rallying others to join in on the dogpile.

Twitter is often a dangerous and mind-bending place. As a New York Times columnist wrote after the Covington Catholic debacle, it is, “the epicenter of a nonstop information war, an almost comically undermanaged gladiatorial arena where activists and disinformation artists and politicians and marketers gather to target and influence the wider media world.” 645

An article in The Week went even further, warning that Twitter actually poses a threat to our democracy, saying, “Extreme partisan polarization is combining with the technology of social media, and especially Twitter, to provoke a form of recurrent political madness among members of the country’s cultural and intellectual elite.” 646

It continued, “But too little attention has been paid to what may be the most potent facet of the social media platform: its ability to feed the vanity of its users. There’s always an element of egoism to intellectual and political debate. But Twitter puts every tweeter on a massive stage, with the nastiest put-downs, insults, and provocations often receiving the most applause. That’s a huge psychological incentive to escalate the denunciation of political enemies. The more one expresses outrage at the evils of others, the more one gets to enjoy the adulation of the virtual mob.” 647

The piece concluded (accurately) that, “more and more the venom has been bleeding into the real world, with boycotts, doxings, firings, death threats, and groveling apologies offered to placate mobs wielding digital pitchforks. It increasingly feels like it’s just a matter of time before real-world violence breaks out in response to an online conflagration.” 648

After a Black Lives Matter supporter ambushed a group of police officers during one of the movement’s marches in Dallas, Texas in 2016, a surviving officer sued Twitter and Facebook for allowing the social media networks to radicalize the gunman, saying they were used “as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda.” 649

The shooter’s Facebook profile pic was him making a black power salute and he followed various black supremacist pages. 650While the tech companies are determined to ban anyone posting support for “white supremacy,” they turn a blind eye to radical black power groups and those who promote their extremist ideologies and anti-white hatred. Twitter is a known safe haven for Antifa, with countless Antifa accounts active, many of which regularly promote violence against conservatives. 651

The launch of Twitter was a carefully crafted campaign involving various celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Ashton Kutcher, and even CNN, which promoted Twitter’s “Million Followers Contest” in 2009 when the site first appeared on the public’s radar. Now practically every television show and political cause has a hashtag and everyone wants you to “follow” them on Twitter.

It’s interesting to note that the CIA actually created “Cuban Twitter” so they could monitor everyone’s online activity in the country and manage the spread of information in order to undermine the government there. 652It’s not unreasonable to think that the CIA has the same interest and control over Twitter in America (and all other major social media sites) as well.

It certainly is odd that Twitter awarded the coveted blue verified checkmark to a supposed eight-year-old Syrian refugee, despite the minimum age to be allowed on Twitter is thirteen. Starting in 2016 “Bana al-Abed” began posting photos of the civil war-torn country, urging people around the world (in English) to help. Her tweets soon began making headlines, gaining her over 322,000 followers, and she was even invited to the 2018 Academy Awards and brought on stage for a performance by Andra Day and Common for their song “Stand Up for Something.” 653

President Trump had wanted to stop intervening in foreign affairs that didn’t directly affect the United States, and what better way to undermine his efforts than showcase an eight-year-old Syrian girl using social media to beg for help?

You should never believe what you see on Twitter. In 2013 the Associated Press account was hacked and tweeted that the White House had been bombed and President Obama was injured. The tweet was also said to have caused the stock market to fall until it was discovered that it was a hoax. 654A rogue employee even took it upon himself to delete President Trump’s entire account in November 2017. If one low level employee has the administrative control to delete the President’s account, what would stop someone from hijacking the account and posting tweets as the President himself? Even if the false tweets were deleted and exposed within a few minutes, the damage they would inflict on international relations or the economy could be enormous.

While Democrats cry about “Russian bots and trolls” manipulating Twitter by tweeting out certain hashtags hoping to boost them into the trending module or mass-“liking” certain tweets to give the appearance that the message is resonating with more people than it actually is; the effect they have is often minimal. One of Twitter’s executives, Nick Pickles, testified at a Congressional hearing that just 49 Russian Twitter accounts were involved in trying to artificially boost support for Brexit [the proposal for England to leave the European Union] and those collective tweets had only been liked 637 times and retweeted just 461 times. 655

While troll farms run by foreign governments or domestic political activist organizations should be a concern, Twitter and the other major tech companies have safeguards in place to detect and prevent most of this inauthentic activity from disrupting the platforms. The biggest threat in this modern information war comes from the tech companies themselves, since they hold the power over what billions of people see and hear, and with small changes to their algorithms can hide or amplify certain issues or events in order to further their own political agendas.