Townhall.com
John Hawkins
January 13, 2018

Today, as you read this, my website Right Wing News is shutting down operations. It has been around since 2001, but became massive a few years ago because of Facebook.

Remember the mainstream media liberals going out of their minds because the Russians reached almost 150 million people with their $100,000 Facebook ad buy? In July of 2015, in just a week, the Right Wing News Facebook page reached 133 million people. Because conservatives were sharing content they were interested in, little ol’ Right Wing News (well, I guess nearly 3.6 million Facebook likes isn’t so little) was driving the same amount of web traffic as some of the biggest newspapers in America. Barack Obama’s Facebook page was 36 times bigger than our page; yet we had 7 times as many people talking about our content.

Ironically, that’s a big part of what killed the website.

You see, what Facebook giveth, Facebook can take away. So, why would Facebook want to kill extremely successful Facebook pages that its users enjoyed?

One of the reasons goes back to something I told multiple reporters during the 2016 election. I believe that all of the thriving right wing Facebook pages activated large numbers of what I like to think of as “instinctive conservatives.” You know, the sort of people who love God, guns and America, but who don’t follow politics day to day, read National Review or consume any of Milton Friedman’s books. From what I could see on Facebook, that group of people LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Donald Trump and I believe they were responsible for getting him the GOP nomination and probably even got him over the hump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I think the liberals that run Facebook came to that same conclusion.

Before the election season got into full swing, Facebook had already made some mild downgrades to reach. Afterwards, when liberal mainstream media outlets were screaming about Russian ad buys and “fake news,” Facebook systematically, methodically reduced the reach of all its pages with each algorithm change. By then, most of us understood where it was going long-term. If Facebook killed every conservative page overnight, there would be a huge outcry. On the other hand, if Facebook slowly strangled us to death, we’d fade away and would people even notice?

Yes, non-political pages were affected, too, although conservative pages got it worse and, yes, there is a business incentive to do this. When people click on a news story, they leave Facebook. On the other hand, conservative pages like Right Wing News were able to become so massive because we are putting out content an awful lot of people on Facebook want to read. That’s no longer going to be allowed in part because we’re putting out a message that the liberals who run the company don’t want out there.

In addition to that, as someone who has been working for a living in this business since 2005, let me drop a little truth bomb on you. We are now in a very oversaturated, corporation-dominated media environment. If you don’t already have a legacy website that captured traffic years ago and held onto it, huge traffic you can bring in from elsewhere, or millions of dollars to spend, your chances of getting a political website off the ground today are infinitesimal.

That gets to the heart of the biggest problem conservatives don’t realize that they have.

Social media IS the new public square. It’s the place you go when you want to reach out and find an audience.

…….Except Facebook has for all intents and purposes announced that it’s killing off pages. So much for having a conservative voice there.

As James O’Keefe just revealed in his latest sting, Twitter felt comfortable banning pro-Trump accounts and one of his unwitting sources said, “Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” Charles Johnson, who’s a conservative gadfly, is currently suing Twitter because it admitted that he didn’t violate Twitter’s policies; Twitter just wanted to get rid of him. It’s good to know that if you’re conservative, you can spend years building up an audience on Twitter and the liberals at Twitter can arbitrarily throw you off their service because they decide they don’t like your views.

Speaking of building up an audience on a platform for years and then getting screwed, YouTube is also doing that to conservatives. YouTube arbitrarily decided that many conservative videos should be demonetized. Yes, there were profane or gross liberals demonetized as well, but just presenting a conservative point of view was enough to have YouTube cut people off. Dennis Prager’s PragerU is suing YouTube for exactly that reason. Just to give you an example of the sort of content YouTube thinks is over-the-line, here are some of the videos it demonetized: Why America Must Lead, The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder, Why Did America Fight the Korean War, and The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians. Of course, YouTube would claim that it’s not censoring the videos because it didn’t take them down. However, people are not going to spend large amounts of time and money putting together high-production-value videos if they’re not going to be allowed to make money on those videos because of their political beliefs.

Furthermore, YouTube’s radically liberal parent company Google is being sued by James Damore for targeting white men and conservatives. Incidentally, Damore was fired from Google after he wrote an internal memo for other employees to read (something that is common at Google) called, Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion. Don’t kid yourself because if you are conservative, “diversity” and “inclusion” don’t include you. If you want a more concrete example of that besides its heavily biased search engine which pretty clearly prefers liberal sources over conservative ones, the latest controversy with Google is that if you search for many prominent conservative websites, it has a “fact checking section” next to them while many sketchy liberal websites don’t.

Many of these companies effectively became monopolies because they worked hard to serve ALL of their users. Now that they completely dominate their spaces in the marketplace, their liberal political views are impacting their services. As Robert Conquest once said, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing” and that is a much bigger threat than most conservatives realize.

It’s easy to say, “Build your own social media website and compete with them,” but we’re talking about companies with billions of dollars and monopolistic control of their markets. The obvious solution would be to break these companies up or to at least acknowledge their importance to modern society and regulate them heavily, but conservatives don’t seem to be interested enough in either solution to even THREATEN to do this.

We’ve already lost the schools, Hollywood and the mainstream media. What happens when you can’t get out conservative opinion via social media because they block, shadow ban and demonetize everyone who gets any traction? What happens if they put rules in place that essentially make expressing conservative opinions something that gets you kicked off their service? You’re pro-gun? Sorry, not allowed. You don’t like gay marriage? Get out of here. Criticizing Black Lives Matter? Out of bounds! We can hope for the best, but that seems like the future we’re headed toward and it’s one that will leave conservatism weaker than ever.

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Thanks, I needed something really depressing and true to read this Saturday morning. Another cup of coffee is not going to get me through this.

So my Leftist brother and hie more Leftist wife were right: corporations and capitalism are awful!

I note Obama says those who watch Fox News are "living on another planet". They've been trying to get rid of FNC for years.

Google is now editorializing its search results, commenting on the "accuracy" of conservative sites but not leftist ones.

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
Thanks, I needed something really depressing and true to read this Saturday morning. Another cup of coffee is not going to get me through this.

So my Leftist brother and hie more Leftist wife were right: corporations and capitalism are awful!

I note Obama says those who watch Fox News are "living on another planet". They've been trying to get rid of FNC for years.

Google is now editorializing its search results, commenting on the "accuracy" of conservative sites but not leftist ones.

Hey, doc, you have to be able to take the bitter with the sour these days.

While we watch the libtards in their frenzies.

I have particularly enjoyed the melt down over the 3rd world shit holes.

It used to be the height of bad manners and breeding to publicly discuss conversations with a President, or to refuse an invitation to the White House.

It's good that the light of day is being shined on this. Put yourself in the position of a Twitter executive watching that PV footage. Imagine the effect. It doesn't matter that this fictional executive is one of those responsible for Twitter's policies, and that they therefore fully embrace this behavior. What matters is that moving images and audio combined can make for a powerful- essentially irrefutable- testimony of the truth, and now, it's in their faces for the world to see, and now, they may feel compelled to react in some way.

Perhaps nothing will change, but before the PV expose, there was no chance of change, and now, well, something good may come of this.

While I haven't (yet) whacked the account, I don't use Twitter at all any more. I've reactivated my Facebook account, but I un-friended everybody I do not know IRL, un-followed any I do know who post primarily political stuff, and immediately hide any remaining posts I see that are political.

All that remains is the kind of stuff I'd expect to see in letters exchanged between friends and family, which is the only reason I signed up in the first place.

Someone said the first successful trial of a steam locomotive also had detractors.
The experts kept saying, “They’ll never get it going, it’ll never leave the station, it can’t get going...” When the engine chuffed out of the station, the chorus changed to, “they’ll never get it stopped.”

Now, the Dems are saying the happy goodness of the tax cut is only temporary.

Well, the tax cut may be a temporary good thing. So, let’s have a vote on making it a permanent good thing and see how many Dems have the guts to vote no again.

Can't the capitalist environment that fostered these leftist social platform corporations also spawn competing conservative voices?

I understand my question touches on a critique of mine against the current system that it has well-moved away from a perfect open market system due to first movers and big players, but I think things can't be as dire for the social voice as it sounds.

It may also be similar to trying to launch an Amish Dating Site. Most conservatives just think their views are so common sense anyone with a brain cell will be aligned to their beliefs while most liberals just like to educate the world with their views because they think they're so brilliant.


I think what applies here is "if there's a will, there's a way."

Once upon a time the gov't broke up Bell Telephone and Standard Oil because they were "too big." I wonder if we will ever see the concept applied to Google or Facebook?

quote:

Today, as you read this, my website Right Wing News is shutting down operations. It has been around since 2001, but became massive a few years ago because of Facebook.

Why is it shutting down operations? Is it losing money?
If it's "been around since 2001, but became massive a few years ago because of Facebook."... how did it survive before Facebook?

The site still seems to be up and running:



http://rightwingnews.com/

quote:

Originally posted by Sportshooter:
Someone said the first successful trial of a steam locomotive also had detractors.
The experts kept saying, “They’ll never get it going, it’ll never leave the station, it can’t get going...” When the engine chuffed out of the station, the chorus changed to, “they’ll never get it stopped.”

Now, the Dems are saying the happy goodness of the tax cut is only temporary.

Well, the tax cut may be a temporary good thing. So, let’s have a vote on making it a permanent good thing and see how many Dems have the guts to vote no again.

You should realize that it was done this way to meet the requirements of reconciliation so that Senate approval required only a majority.

Other than nominations and reconciliations, Senate approval reqiired 60 votes. Until that can happen, there is no choice.

We need a 60 vote Senate, or close enough to that to loosen the bowels of a few more conservative leaning God Damned Commies.

Maybe the success of the tax cut will have to become so obvious to the general public that it
will make them immune to spin and BS. That might loosen the bowels of a enough Dems to reach the 60 votes. Maybe not.

Well, let’s hope the success of the tax cut becomes so big and obvious that it makes the general public immune to all the liberal spin and BS. Maybe then enough Dems won’t vote against making it permanent.

Oops! Pardon me for the double. Got an error message.

Why not start new social media where there is no limits or better yet for conservatives that right off the bat says liberals not welcome or liberals enter at your own risk. Maybe it takes a while to build but then maybe it will just go crazy and catch on.

I really enjoy Facebook.

I've said this before, I have it set up so all I see is gun stuff, right wing news, and workout/exercise type things.

Pretty much all I see is right wing stuff on Facebook...to the point where I dont even see posts from my left wing friends (I thank facebook's well known algorithm for this).

I'm about as right wing/libertarian as it gets. So are my family and friends. If people can't figure out how social media works, or are too stubborn to learn how to use it, that's their problem.

I get a laugh how people on here act like its some kind of badge of honor that they don't use it, when it's in fact an fantastic news, information, and entertainment source.

Maybe this guy ran a shitty website.