By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

It’s not clear whether Facebook was truly conceived by an innocent genius with noble intent, but one fact has become abundantly clear: Facebook is now a mouthpiece and tool for the proliferation of mainstream perception. This is specifically designed to enrich the global elite and continue to disenfranchise ordinary citizens and any attempts to bring important truths to light that would threaten the elite. And, of course, Mark Zuckerberg is now a ‘junior partner’ in this global elite.

The episode of the Jimmy Dore show found in the video below, which is worth watching to get the full context of the discussion, introduces whistleblower Vikram Kumar, a former promoter of third-party videos on Facebook. Dore brings interesting insights into Facebook’s latest strategies in terms of controlling the news commentary. He explains how Facebook is proliferating the establishment’s narrative while limiting and blocking alternative voices which, of course, Facebook characterizes as ‘Fake News’. Here, Kumar discusses Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in Congress to this effect:

Back in 2017 there was that TechCrunch report that said that Facebook was taking measures to stop the spread of ‘Fake News’ by banning certain political accounts from promoting their videos on their newsfeed. So when I heard Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 telling Congress that he would be doing the same thing, I thought, what changed between 2017 and 2018? Are they taking new measures, are they re-taking the measures?  And it wasn’t until a week later that I realized that Variety Magazine reported that Facebook Watch, which is Facebook’s media platform, had reached a multi-million dollar deal with CNN, Fox News, ABC, and large media outlets.

The congressional testimony was the perfect opportunity for the political establishment, the media establishment, and the tech companies to form an alliance against small media outlets.

One of the biggest issues to remedy was the lack of viewership that traditional mainstream media was getting from young people, which is really the target market not only for advertisers but the social engineering wing of the global elite as well. Here’s how Kumar describes it:

As you know, young people, they don’t watch cable… the viewership of Fox News, CNN, and ABC are dying off, they’re getting older and older, and so what Facebook is, is access to young people, right, and so they viewed small anti-establishment media outlets such as yourself as an existential threat to their next generation of revenue.

Tech companies view media companies extremely valuably, you could go back to 1996, there was that merger between Microsoft, General Electric and NBC to create MSNBC.com. A lot of people don’t know that the ‘MS’ in MSNBC stands for Microsoft, and the reason why media companies and tech companies are so intertwined with each other is ’cause you can influence young people so much when you have the distribution network of something like Facebook, and with Facebook Watch, and their media platform, and their deal with CNN, Fox News, and ABC, they’re able to indoctrinate the next generation of young people. And so they want to take viewership away from shows like yours, and put those young people that haven’t been paying attention with cable news back into the pockets of companies like Fox News, ABC, and CNN.

Every media company wants some of that Facebook Watch dough. And so the companies that have coverage that Facebook doesn’t like are out of there, and new companies that have coverage that Facebook likes are back into the deal. And so Facebook is already taking steps to craft the political landscape in the framing that they find positively. And so you get that whole thing where Facebook shuts down over 800 political pages and accounts, and even legitimate political pages that expose things like police brutality… you’re already seeing a coordinated effort from the establishment media and tech companies to kind of craft the narrative for young people.

This is how that Variety Magazine article Kumar talked about characterizes the deal between Facebook and Mainstream Media:

After going through the fake-news wringer, Facebook is shelling out money on original news content. The strategy is partly aimed at driving up viewing on its Facebook Watch platform — but it also is supposed to demonstrate the social-media giant’s commitment to funding trustworthy journalism.

A corporate conglomerate now giving itself the authority to judge what is and isn’t trustworthy journalism. What could possibly go wrong?

Is Facebook Still Just A Tech Company?

The slippery slope that Facebook is trying to anchor itself to is as clear as the nose on Mark Zuckerberg’s face. He continues to want us to think about Facebook as a social media platform whose objective is still ‘to make the world more open and connected,’ yet at the same time he wants Facebook to become the prime arbiter of the ‘news that is fit to print,’ or in this case, to decide which sources of news will benefit and not benefit from Facebook’s tremendous reach. The same Variety article reinforces the idea that Facebook is trying to have things both ways, gaining the advantages of defining itself as a tech company, and not taking on the liabilities inherent in being a media company:

In the past, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has remarked that Facebook is a technology company — not a media company. Asked whether Facebook is now in fact a media company, given that it’s paying for a growing slate of content, Brown responded, “Having worked for big media companies, I don’t think Facebook is a media company. But are we responsible for the media on Facebook? Yes.”

The fact is that we have entered into somewhat uncharted territory in terms of what defines a media company since the rise of the Internet. We can only hope that we will collectively awaken to the fact that Facebook has clearly gone beyond being a platform that provides equal access to all voices and commentaries, and has given in to the temptation to control the flow and proliferation of information. As this Wired article starts off,

FACEBOOK STEADFASTLY RESISTS categorization as a traditional media company. Instead, CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists on calling the social network a technology platform—even though nearly half of all American adults get their news on Facebook. These old arguments no longer work, especially as Facebook starts making its own video content.

It is incumbent upon the awakening community to clearly grasp what is happening here and to act accordingly in terms of our future engagement with social media sites like Facebook. It is important to see how Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed media cross-ownership that led to mergers between tech companies and media companies, was a seed that has already started to bear the fruit of an Orwellian dystopia, where the global elite are permitted to continue to proliferate mainstream propaganda and limit exposure to alternative views that are a threat to their agenda.