Social Media Oppression

I posted this earlier on my Facebook, but figure the results should be known wider.

So, about that search engine manipulation that YouTube swears they don't do. I confirmed if you search on YouTube for "Steven Crowder" a video from his verified channel doesn't even show up until the 19th on the list (irrespective of if I'm signed in to YouTube or signed out, but most of this was done in incognito mode). Not only that, but only 6 videos from his verified channel even appeared in the top 100 results.

If you search for "StevenCrowder" (without the space, literally matching his verified channel name of "StevenCrowder") it gives 3 videos from his verified channel in the top 25 results.
Searching for "Steven Crowder Change My Mind"...no results from his verified channel until the 23rd video.

Only in searching "Louder With Crowder" do you get all but 2 results in the top 25 actually from Steven Crowder's verified channel! Remember, the verified name of his channel, again, is "StevenCrowder", not "Louder with Crowder."

Why do I point out so repeatedly that StevenCrowder (the channel) is a verified channel? Because YouTube swears in it's last update that it tweaked the algorithm to promote verified channels as opposed to non-verified channels, so you would know you're getting the content you're searching for. And it's almost true! If you search for "The Young Turks" for example, the first 11 videos are all from their verified channel. The next two aren't, and from that point on through the top 50 results, about half are from their verified channel.

If you search for Vox, 10 of the first 11 results are from their verified channel.

Even if you search for "Joe Rogan" (a center-left leaning individual), only one video out of the first 50 was NOT from his verified channel of PowerfulJRE!

But search for Red Elephants, a right-leaning channel (official verified name: The Red Elephants Vincent James), and you get 3 results out of the top 10. Search "Vincent James" and you get 0 results in the top 30, even though you get several results for James Vincent McMorrow (yes, "Vincent James" gives you multiple results for a "James Vincent" and NOT for a guy with the name "Vincent James" literally in the verified name of the channel.

Look up "Paul Joseph Watson" and you'll get lots of videos *about* him, but absolutely none *from* him in the top 50, even though his verified channel name is exactly "Paul Joseph Watson".
It's not like YouTube doesn't know who you're actually looking for. They will still give you a link to the *channel* as the first result for "Red Elephants", "Paul Joseph Watson", and even "Steven Crowder"--all right at the top of the list! But they will not return any results for video searches.
Hence why in his last show Steven Crowder mentioned he's begun certain proceedings he's not going into detail over yet. It's not an issue about what *we* want YouTube to be; it's about YouTube lying about what *they* claim they are. False advertising is false advertising. And if you're clearly a publisher refusing to publish a specific worldview you disagree with, you are not a platform. And you deserve to be sued like a publisher can be. Period.

The great dictator

In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin used two x's instead of a swastika to avoid getting demonetized on YouTube:

Thinkspot

Per the Joe Rogan podcast this week, I'm backing a new platform called thinkspot, currently in Beta. Get on the waitlist here, exciting announcements coming very soon. https://t.co/3xQ78Iqc0h

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 10, 2019

1. Amanda Prestigiacomo writes:

Thinkspot.com, the author revealed, will be a space where creators can monetize their work and users can engage in thoughtful debate without worrying about the ubiquitous Big Tech censorship plaguing conservative and right-of-center users on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Speaking to popular podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan last week, Peterson explained that Thinkspot’s terms of service will uphold free speech principles. “Once you’re on our platform, we won't take you down unless ordered to by a court of law,” he said.

The forthcoming platform, currently in beta testing, will be a subscription service where creators can monetize their work.

“We’re hoping we can really add dialogue to the podcast and YouTuber world,” explained Peterson. “We’re also gonna do the same things with books, so if you buy an e-book on the platform, you’ll be able to annotate publicly. ... We can do that with books that are in the public domain, too.”

“We’re hoping that we’ll be able to pull people who are interested in intelligent conversation, specifically, into this platform, maybe start pulling them away from YouTube and some of the less specialized channels — that, plus our anti-censorship stance,” he added.

2. I expect liberals and progressives to attack Thinkspot (if they haven't already) despite still being in beta. However, if so, then this might give Thinkspot more publicity. Just like how Jordan Peterson became a sensation.

3. I presume Thinkspot will seek to employ people who agree with their vision. Or at least who won't attempt to undermine their vision. That could create jobs for conservatives and the like-minded.

Deplatforming ex-Muslims

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2fT_PhmYBw&t=161s

How Conservative Christians can help foster competition among the Social Media as a way of limiting their influence

Source: Statistica 2018

In recent days, we’ve heard a lot about the “liberal bias” of many social media platforms, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of these seemingly have “the power to restrict free speech”, because they are private companies where leaders have liberal personal agendas, etc. They are headquartered in liberal Silicon Valley, and they are a part of the social elite.

Nevertheless, money talks, and while founders and some of the big names may have liberal agendas, it’s a sure bet that not all of the shareholders of those platforms have liberal agendas, and they are going to be more interested in profits and share prices than in “sharing the pure leftist agenda”.

The kind of money that businesses care about is the “net profit” line (or “retained earnings”, as some of the financial statements put it). It’s the money that a business owner puts in his own pocket, or that makes its way into shareholder earnings. All the rest of it is money that goes into someone else’s hands … to vendors, or utilities, or other suppliers.

But “net profit” is money in the bank. And so, if you want to send a message to the various social media, you want to focus your fire on their net profit. (I suspect this will work even in the age of social media).

Most of the social media earn huge amounts of money through advertising revenue. It’s the only real way they can monetize their platforms.

Ogilvy on Advertising Profit

Ogilvy on Advertising Profit

Back in the days before “social media” (as a way for technology companies to earn advertising revenue), there were print advertising, radio advertising, and TV advertising. And there was a rigid enough set of rules for ad agencies and clients to follow, that the advertising legend David Ogilvy could summarize them succinctly, as he did in his work “Ogilvy on Advertising” (Vintage Books, 1983).

These rules worked neatly enough for me to get jobs in advertising, first as a copywriter, then as an advertising manager, even though I had no experience or education in the field. (Back in the 1980’s, after I was graduated from college, I worked in a Christian ministry for the better part of a decade, earning neither money nor career experience.)

Ogilvy states his rule for clients (advertisers) in search of a good ad agency (and good advertising):

Ask what the agency charges. If it is 15 per cent, insist on paying 16 percent. The extra one per cent won’t kill you, but it will double the agency’s normal profit, and you will get better service (pg. 66).

Normally, agencies didn’t charge a fee in those days. They added 15% “commission” onto whatever the media outlet would charge. And that paid for the agency’s work (and their rich lifestyles). But agencies (like everyone) worked on a thin profit margin. The difference between 15% and 16% commission was the difference between 1% or 2% net profit.

That’s why Trump’s 4% economic growth is so much better than Obama’s 2% growth. It’s not just adding 2% to the bottom lines of businesses. It’s doubling the net profit (and for stockholders, it’s doubling what’s in their 401K accounts).

[This is how “trickle-down economics” works for the common person. It doesn’t increase their income. It increases net worth.]

The flip side of this can be applied to the Social Media that we are all growing to dislike, because of the “liberal bias”.

How Social Media Make Money

By opening up forms of competition, in the various media, we conservative Christians can significantly affect those bottom line numbers – at least to the kind of degree that will make a difference between 15% and 16%, or 2% and 4%.

There are ways that technology companies (and the “social media” are first of all “technology companies”). They can actually “sell” products … this is how Microsoft earned its fortunes. People were buying PCs, and there was Microsoft software to be sold on every PC. And many software companies would only write their programs for the Microsoft operating system --- because everyone was using it, and everyone wanted “interoperability”.

Microsoft’s monopoly existed insofar as everyone needed to use the same operating system and programs so that the information could be interoperable – so that everyone could read the same documents and spreadsheets.

The other way technology companies earn revenue today is to sell “advertising” on the “platforms”. “Platforms” such as Google.com (and spin-offs like gmail), Facebook, and Twitter, don’t really sell anything. They earn their money from advertising. They are paid by “views” or “eyeballs” on their various pages.

The more eyeballs, the greater the profits. The fewer the eyeballs, the less the profits. And in this regard, Ogilvy’s “pay your agency 16% instead of 15%” will work in reverse, too. If Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, lose just a couple of percentage points in terms of “eyeballs”, their bottom line net profit can be seriously affected.

And when that happens, the shareholders will notice.

(If there are enough conservatives to win all the elections that we won in 2016, there are certainly enough of us to affect market share. On the flip side of it, “the left” is currently making all the noise it can possibly make. They can not turn up this dial. Their method is now to limit conservative participation. This is where we need to work against them.)

Helping Google’s Competitors

In our free enterprise system, the way that these numbers are affected is simply through the addition of competition. And while it may not have been easy to add competition for Microsoft in the 1990s because of interoperability standards, we can still introduce “choice” (that magic word to which “the left” cannot object) by just simply giving our conservative eyeballs to other sources of advertising revenue.

Outside of its Android operating system, and phones (which have natural competition in the iPhone), Google doesn’t make money by charging you a nickel for each search that you make. It makes money because it charges advertisers (“clients”) for each search that you make.

So we see President Trump complaining about Google searches. This makes sense. In marketing, one of the new buzzwords is “content marketing”. The idea is to produce “content” (either written or video) that draws lots of eyeballs for you (and hence, revenue for the “platform”).

Perhaps the government can do to Google what they did to Standard Oil in the late 19th century, or to ATT in 1984 … break them into smaller components. But a government-led solution is not necessarily going to be a good one.

Here is how Google makes its money (contrary to how Microsoft gained its dominance):

When an “advertiser” (or “marketer”) gains lots of eyeballs for itself, it’s been demonstrated that those numbers can turn into “demand” (“demand generation”), “sales leads” (“lead generation”), and hopefully revenue (“top line”) and eventually “net profit” (see above).

THE way, in recent years, to gain “search engine optimization” (or “SEO”) was to look to Google’s algorithm. Google re-writes its algorithm on a regular basis – the algorithm is the set of rules that put a piece of content high or low on the Google search page. (A particular “search” may generate millions of “results”, but the only ones that really count are those on the “first page”, because most lazy people don’t continue to flip through the pages; they merely click on the first thing they see).

So for the last few years, marketers (“content marketers”) have been rushing, like lemmings (almost), to understand Google’s latest algorithm, and to write or produce “content” in such a way that is normal, natural, not repetitive, and informative.

(This perhaps is one reason why the journalistic styles of the NY Times and Washington Post may factor into the results so heavily. This may be a self-fulfilling kind of thing).

Regarding search engine market share, Statistica.com shows that Google “generated 63.5% of all core search queries in the United States“ in April of this year. However, this doesn’t take into account searches done on mobile phones. On “mobile devices”:

Despite Google's dominance of the U.S. search market, it is Microsoft's bing service that leads in terms of longer search queries. In terms of the mobile search market in the United States, Google leads again with an over 93 percent market share.

The alternative is to use other search engines. Make certain that those search engines (Bing, DuckDuckGo, Oath (formerly Yahoo), Ask, AOL, etc.) are generating higher traffic numbers.

One way to do this, even on Android phones, is to have those search engine apps handy on your phone, and to re-set some of your default settings.

It’s only a little bit of effort – maybe a lot for those of us who are technologically challenged. But the difference will be significant – Ogilvy’s 16% vs 15% for the competitors – or Trump’s 4% vs Obama’s 2% economy.

Similar tactics can be used for Facebook or Twitter. While there aren’t natural competitors for these platforms, we CAN affect the traffic … instead of shying away from “political discussions” on Facebook, we can add to them. As I noted above, “the left” is currently making all the noise it can possibly make. There are a lot of Christians simply staying away.

The response should not be to turn off social media. The response should be to turn up Christian messaging, to the point that it produces more eyeballs than those on “the left” can (in terms of noise).

Challenge your liberal friends and neighbors when they say something like “you’re a racist and a homophobe”. They are certain to lose that discussion, and you’ll generate more conservative “eyeballs” which, in turn, will persuade the shareholders that it’s in their best interests to eschew censorship and to foster free speech (“competition in messaging”).

Content police

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-the-content-police-came-for-the-babylon-bee/

Politically incorrect medicine

Check this out.

If reports are accurate, it's a blatant case of censorship.

Also, I would think the pro-abortionist Canadian and European physicians would normally advocate respect for other ethnicities and cultures and their values. However, they're apparently ramming their liberal Western values down the throats of at least some Korean physicians at this conference.

BTW, it may be worthwhile to go through the presentations from the three physicians showing the risks of abortion. See here for their presentations.

HT: Steve.