08/30/2018 / By JD Heyes
This week POTUS Donald Trump took up the cause against the social media behemoths’ censorship and shadow-banning of conservative, pro-administration media and political voices by tweeting his disdain for their actions and pledging some form of action.
Whether that action comes in the form of regulations issued by a federal agency or signing off on legislation aimed at forcing the Big Tech firms to play it even and fair when it comes to political discussion isn’t yet clear.
But what has become obvious is that Big Tech’s coordinated campaign to silence conservative, libertarian, pro-POTUS Trump voices is the technological equivalent to Nazi-era book-burning or modern-day ethnic cleansing.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, many of the top Right-leaning websites are reporting substantial reductions in traffic from social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google – referral traffic that many of them depend on for their livelihood.
Referral traffic drives views, and views in turn generate ad revenue, either in the form of clicks (to help conservative publishers out you should always click on an ad or two – heck, you never know when you’ll find your next great deal, and this helps publishers a lot, like subscribing to electronic newsletters and then actually opening them daily). Without traffic, obviously, revenue falls and good reporters lose jobs while great sites often have to shut down operations – which is one of the primary objectives of the social media giants (silence opposition and run them out of business).
In talking with two top conservative publishers, The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft said they have collectively lost roughly 1.5 billion-page views since POTUS Trump stunned the world and won the November 2016 election.
“Floyd Brown is a conservative author, speaker and media commentator,” Hoft wrote. “In 2008 Floyd launched Western Journal which quickly became one of the top conservative websites in America. By 2016 Floyd’s organization of Western Journal and other conservative websites under his umbrella had more than a billion page views. Since 2016 Floyd’s organization lost 75% of its Facebook traffic.” (Related: URGENT: Sign the White House petition demanding protections for online speech.)
In addition, Hoft wrote that TGP met in June in Washington, D.C., with Jared Vallorani of Klicked Media, a hosting company that has more than 60 conservative sites, and the website owners of the site 100%FedUp, to discuss social media’s censorship efforts.
Hoft wrote that conservative sites hosted by Klicked Media lost (collectively) 400 million page views from Facebook alone over the previous six months when comparing traffic year-to-year.
“We lost 70 percent to 80 percent of our traffic if you compare January to May 2017 to January to May 2018,” he said.
Combined, Hoft wrote, just these few, though heavily-trafficked, conservative sites lost more than 1.5 billion views and an untold number of unique visitors. And again, this figure is just the loss of Facebook referral traffic alone.
“This does not include the thousands of other conservative publishers across the country,” Hoft noted.
One might conclude that readers of these sites should have just bookmarked their home pages and checked them every day once or twice. But that undermines the purpose of social media. People are busy, and when stories are posted to their social media feeds, that prompts them to go and check stories out. When they never even see the stories, however, they often don’t think to just go visit sites independently.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google all know this. That’s why the banning and censorship have been so effective.
TGP, along with us and several other conservative sites, have been reporting on this censorship “bloodbath” for months.
It’s past time for Congress and the president to make this right. It was a concerted censorship campaign and it was designed to influence the 2018 midterms on behalf of Democrats.
If that’s not an anti-trust or campaign violation, what is?
Read more about the Big Tech censorship of conservatives at Conservative.news.
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Tagged Under: anti-trust violation, Big Tech, campaign violation, Censorship, conservative media, Facebook, free speech, Google, oppression, President Donald Trump, regulations, shadow ban, Social media, thought police, traffic loss, Twitter, Tyranny