Марк Дайс - The True Story of Fake News - How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions

When President Obama did a live Q & A with Twitter in 2015 using the hashtag #AskPOTUS [POTUS is short for President of the United States], the CEO asked his team to implement an algorithm to filter out “abusive” tweets that contained the hashtag. 453A few years later they would roll out this feature for everyone, allowing people to manually input any words, phrases, usernames, and even emojis they want automatically filtered out from their feed. 454The muting is even case sensitive. For example, you can now literally put the words “President Trump” in your filter, and if someone tweets at you a message that contains those words, you won’t even see it. 455

In June of 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage had to be accepted as legal in all 50 states, the hashtag #LoveWins was instantly trending and included a rainbow heart emoji. 456Twitter automatically includes a custom emoji when certain hashtags are tweeted if the hashtag is sponsored by a company or an organization. 457It appears that President Obama was one of the first people to start using the hashtag, showing that it (along with the custom ‘gay’ emoji) was preplanned. 458Twitter even introduced a special Black Lives Matter emoji consisting of the “black power” fist the day after a Black Lives Matter activist shot twelve police officers, killing five of them in an ambush during one of the movement’s marches. 459

It’s not just the top trending topics that are manipulated, but also their associated results. When you click on one of the top 10 topics, you are brought to a page that shows what people are led to believe are the top tweets or photos using those hashtags or words in a tweet. In theory, if a tweet has 5,000 likes, then it is one of the first tweets shown in the results for the topic, but this isn’t actually the case. It has been documented that what Twitter features as the top results for various trending topics appear to be manipulated at times to cast them in a certain light.

For example when a secret service agent tackled a Time magazine photographer at a Trump campaign rally, a photo showing the photographer with his hand grabbing the throat of the agent was the top result connected to the trending topic “Secret Service,” but that photo was later replaced by another one showing the photographer lying on the ground after having been tackled by the agent. 460

A Trump rally in Chicago had to be canceled in March of 2016 because an angry mob of violent protesters were getting more out of control by the minute and local police advised the campaign to call off the event. That night “Trump Rally” was the top trend on Twitter, and when it first began trending, all of the top tweets included photos of a bloody police officer who had been smashed in the head with a bottle along with pictures of protesters blocking traffic, but those top results were soon replaced with pictures of KKK rallies and links to news articles attacking Trump. 461Many people started tweeting the hashtags #TwitterCensorship or #TwitterCensoring as a result.

While Twitter remains silent on the issue, Instagram openly admits that they delete hashtags and censor certain search results in order to, as they claim, “hide inappropriate content.” 462Sometimes they just temporarily censor hashtags when a certain topic they feel is “inappropriate” becomes associated with a benign hashtag. It’s not just NSFW (not safe for work) hashtags like #RussianMilf or #Cumfession, that they censor, it has also been hashtags like #Kansas, #AmericanGirl, and even #Brain. 463

Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of paying Twitter to inject the hashtag #BernieLostMe into the top trend hoping to erode support for Bernie Sanders during the primaries. The #BernieLostMe hashtag was number one despite having just a few thousand people tweeting it, while other topics that were ranked lower on the list had more than ten times as many people tweeting about them. 464‘Influencers’ are often chosen to simultaneously start tweeting hashtags as part of political propaganda campaigns because their fans will mindlessly follow their lead and can quickly cause certain topics to trend.

Twitter has also allowed disgusting topics to trend like, “Rape Melania,” 465and #GoldenShowers. 466The day President Trump was inaugurated, over 12,000 tweets called for his assassination and “Assassinate Trump” trended. 467The same threats flooded Twitter the day after the election when unhinged liberals couldn’t contain their violent hatred for the new president. 468

President Trump’s use of Twitter has been called the modern day equivalent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, when he used the new media of his time◦— radio◦— to speak directly to the American people. We really take for granted how amazing most of our technology is today, and before FDR’s fireside chats if someone wanted to listen to a president’s speech, they had to actually be at an event in person. Instead of Donald Trump going to a radio station, or holding a press conference in the Rose Garden in front of all the different television cameras, he can just pick up his phone and type a message directly to his 30 million Twitter followers.

“Trump’s tweets” have become legendary for their bluntness and controversial nature, but the power of him being able to get his message directly to people through Twitter instead of relying on television networks, radio stations, or newspapers to relay it, is truly remarkable. In an interview with The Financial Times , he said, “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here… I have over 100 million followers between Facebook, Twitter [and] Instagram. Over 100 million. I don’t have to go to the fake media.” 469

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams actually apologized for Twitter’s role in getting out his message, and when asked about Trump crediting Twitter with helping him win the election, Williams responded, “It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that. If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.” 470

The most popular case of someone being banned from Twitter is when Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned after teasing Saturday Night Live cast member Leslie Jones about the new all-female remake of Ghostbusters which was derided by critics for its gratuitous pro-feminist agenda. 471Milo tweeted Leslie a link to his review which was published on Breitbart, and the two went back and forth insulting each other. 472Leslie Jones had her feelings hurt by Milo’s ‘trolling’ which his followers joined in on, and tweeted, “I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause [sic] I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today… wrong.” 473

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded to her saying “Hi Leslie, following, please DM me when you have a moment,” 474trying to head off the bad PR of having another celebrity quit Twitter after getting tired of being trolled. Then, even though Milo hadn’t threatened her, or used any language that’s not commonplace on Twitter, his account was banned. Many were stunned by this because Twitter is mostly known for being a place to trash-talk others. Many saw the ban being politically motivated because Milo had become a vocal critic of social justice warriors and was becoming quite an Internet celebrity.

Even Wikileaks tweeted to CEO Jack Dorsey seeking some answers. First they called him out saying, “Cyber feudalism. @Twitter founder Jack banned conservative gay libertarian @Nero for speaking the ‘wrong’ way to actress @Lesdoggg.” 475

Jack responded, “@Wikileaks we don’t ban people for expressing their thoughts. Targeted abuse & inciting abuse against people however, that’s not allowed.” 476