On Wednesday Infowars founder Alex Jones traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with whoever would listen about the state of censorship of Right-leaning, pro-POTUS Trump voices by the social media behemoths.
Executives from Twitter and Facebook – Google was a no-show – were grilled by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee mostly over how they’re policing their platforms for foreign influence operations.
Outside of the committee hearing room, Jones ran into Oliver Darcy, a media reporter with CNN who has called on the social media giants to ban Infowars.
Jones lit into Darcy, calling his employer the “Criminal News Network,” claiming that CNN is a trafficker in fake news and that the network is lying when reporters and hosts state that no social media censorship of conservative pro-Trump voices is occurring (several studies have indicated otherwise).
Watch:
https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1037400229547573250
As Jones and others pointed out during the encounter, what’s ironic is that Darcy – formerly with Business Insider – first gained prominence as the deputy managing editor at The Blaze, a conservative-leaning, pro-constitution news site founded by talk radio star and former Fox News host Glenn Beck.
Now that he’s with CNN, as Jones points out, he’s been reduced to shilling for a little-watched network that essentially traffics in fake news regarding the Trump administration as the “senior media reporter” – a position that should advocate for a free and open press, not for silencing voices.
In late August, CNN published a Darcy story stating that POTUS Donald Trump was ‘propping up’ the “false claim” that Big Tech giants were censoring conservative voices.
He wrote:
President Donald Trump on Friday morning claimed in a tweet that social media companies are "silencing millions of people," exacerbating a longstanding paranoia from conservatives who have for years erroneously accused social media companies of bias and censorship.
Really? Let’s examine the veracity of this claim.
CNN can’t even be honest about THIS
In March 2017, just a few months after POTUS Trump was inaugurated, the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review released an analysis showing that “right-wing media” with Breitbart News as its center of gravity, greatly magnified its reach among news-hungry consumers by flocking to social media.
“This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton,” the CJR noted.
A few months later, in August 2017, the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University published a study showing a similar trend.
Following the Harvard study for certain, Facebook began altering its algorithms to downgrade conservative media in favor of pushing far-Left media like CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, followed by the really crazy Left like HuffPo, Vox, and the Raw Story.
There’s more. A study released in March by The Western Journal confirmed that Facebook’s algorithm changes had resulted in Left-wing media traffic increasing by nearly 2 percent, while referral traffic to conservative, pro-Trump media had fallen by more than 13 percent.
And that was just Facebook. Since then, additional studies have found that conservative referral traffic from other social media platforms like Twitter has also nosedived, as Right-leaning figures have found themselves shadow-banned and censored.
It’s just absurd at this point to claim that there is no social media censorship of conservatives and Trump-friendly media.
As for Darcy, Watson reports that he began using his status as a CNN ‘media’ reporter to lobby YouTube to ban The Alex Jones Show. The effort was not successful at the time, but it nearly was.
He then turned his attention to Facebook, beginning with a story headlined, “Facebook touts fight on fake news, but struggles to explain why InfoWars isn’t banned.”
Later, Darcy tweeted: “Facebook invited me to an event today where the company aimed to tout its commitment to fighting fake news and misinformation. I asked them why InfoWars is still allowed on the platform. I didn’t get a good answer.”
https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1017242469308788741
Clearly Darcy – and the social media giants – are working to shut down voices they find troubling, bothersome, or somehow ‘unworthy’ to be heard. You’d think a “media guy” wouldn’t be involved in something like that.
Read more about the social media censorship at Censorship.news.
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