Facebook, Twitter and Google outrageously censored scientists and doctors for asking questions about challenging issues in the pandemic. Today, we are recognizing that these discussions were important – but silenced by the unethical billionaires of social media.
Propagandists share a poster on social media allegedly comparing the growth in worker compensation to the overall productivity of the U.S. The implication of the poster is that wages have stayed flat for almost 50 years while overall economic productivity has soared. That means workers are being shafted. Except for one detail – the chart compares a subset of labor compensation to total economic output – when all labor is included, both grow at the same rate. Typical of propaganda, it presents data – so it must be true – and highlights the comparison in a simple chart. Very persuasive. Propagandists know that most viewers will not engage their critical thinking skills – and hence, they allow themselves to be intentionally misled.
Link to an essay on the role that “technical authority”, media propaganda, and how “consensus of experts” are used to influence the public and to exert control over us. This essay is an eye opener.
The sole purpose of social media is to serve as a frictionless platform for the spread of propaganda, in order to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
“Tear gas” and “Pepper spray” have been redefined by riot enthusiasts as “chemical munitions” and “chemical weapons” as they seek to ban the use of crowd control measures by police, when employed at “mostly peaceful protests”. Changing the language is one of the first steps taken in a propaganda campaign. Language redefinition goes on all the time, and lately, with increasing frequency.
Al Jazeera runs a column by a professor of philosophy who says capitalism is a failure and that only government can deliver the “innovation” necessary to deliver vaccines for Covid-19. Al Jazeera fails to note his background as an avid socialist member of groups opposed to the “neoliberal capitalist model”. Failing to disclose this background context turns this into a propaganda piece versus not legitimate analysis of issues.
The media has done a spectacular job of fake news reporting on Covid-19. The news does not understand that Covid-19 daily body counts have nothing to do with the number of people who died in the past 24 hours. Instead, they report on the number of death reports received in the past 24 hours – the actual deaths occurred days, weeks even months earlier. Thus, the daily body count is a measure of data collection inefficiency – and has little to do with the disease itself. Today, this resulted in KOIN-TV running a completely fake news story about the post holiday surge.
38 of the 54 deaths reported yesterday were diagnosed BEFORE Christmas. Up through the 3rd week of December, the majority of deaths reported were diagnosed or occurred before the Thanksgiving weekend. The peak day of deaths in the state was Dec 9th, and the 2nd highest day was Nov 25th. But the media morons are too lazy to look at the actual data – instead, they just reprint the press releases without even bothering to think.
Social media content companies actively engage in censorship using a wide variety of approaches. Their censorship regimes are vastly larger and more powerful than most realize.
Blast from the past: the social media propaganda poster that led to the birth of this blog and web site.
The Associated Press runs a “fact check” on a slightly misleading statement from Trump and concludes his statement is false. Except, once you read the last sentence of the fact check and give a moments thought it turns out Trump’s statement is mostly true – and that’s according to the fact check that is claiming he was wrong. Pretty funny. Trump says a lot of stupid things but occasionally makes dumb statements that accidentally turn out to be correct – hah hah.