by Steve McCann
Never have so few so devastatingly impacted the well-being and future of this country.
The American left uses their dominant position in social media to manipulate the legacy media, set the agenda, browbeat the elected members of the Democrat party, and intimidate corporate America.
In order to protect their political or social status, many of the self-serving politicians in both parties, as well as corporate executives and editors and journalists, are easily intimidated by the volume and vociferousness of social media trolling. Others are willingly convinced that they are on the right side of various issues based on same criteria.
As a result, many major corporations, the legacy media, and other Democrats are committed to policies that are anathema to tradition and common sense and that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not want.
The latest example: the unfathomable reaction by these same perfidious entities to the Parental Rights in Education bill recently passed in Florida. The bill simply codifies the centuries-old and previously never questioned understanding that teaching and discussing gender identity and sexuality to preadolescents (in the case of the bill -- children four to eight years old) is solely the prerogative of the parents, not teachers working for the state.
The left immediately dubbed the legislation as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and began an unprecedented national disinformation campaign to obfuscate about the bill and denigrate Ron De Santis and all conservatives as being bigots and opposed to all gay rights.
The initial step in this process was that committed leftists with a massive social media following put out the call to their legion of mind-numbed basement dwellers seeking meaning in their otherwise spiritually empty lives while voluntarily chaining themselves to their laptops and keyboards. These foot soldiers then begin the campaign of tweeting and posting en masse the predetermined talking points to the media, politicians and major corporations.
Within hours, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC aired stories about the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the unconscionable bigotry of Ron De Santis and all conservatives. Additionally, the social media platforms endlessly featured articles published by left-wing websites and finally, succumbing to the wave of attention and threats, major corporations, most notably Disney, folded and regurgitated the same fictitious talking points about the bill.
This pattern of social media-driven feigned outrage has been repeated ad nauseum since the first inauguration of Barack Obama. Additionally, this tactic also serves to amplify and promote issues such as unverifiable long-term climate change, illegal immigration, uncontrolled spending and inflation, unfettered ballot harvesting, censorship of “unacceptable” speech, the elimination of gun ownership, the casting of gender dysphoria as an inalienable human right, and defunding the police.
A creation of the radical left-wing Silicon Valley plutocrats, the social media “Twitter Mobs” are the enforcement arm of the left. Beyond creating the Twitter Mobs these plutocrats are also aggressively censoring conservative speech. Further, they unabashedly aided and abetted in the unconstitutional and fraudulent tampering of the 2020 election to ensure the election of a senescent Joe Biden and an oblivious Kamala Harris.
The left is increasingly manipulating the legacy or corporate media, thanks to the established media outlets almost exclusively hiring young “progressive” journalists. As a result the social media platforms have evolved into the primary source of fabricated stories and copy farming for the media.
In a study to find out if journalists ascribe too much importance to Twitter, an experiment was conducted with 200 journalists. The result: a majority of journalists ranked anonymous tweets as having equal credibility or more than the actual fairly reported stories. This was particularly true for the younger, considerably less experienced journalists, who are now in the majority.
These researchers concluded that journalists oftentimes get caught up in a pack mentality in which a story is seen as important and must be published because other journalists on Twitter are talking about it, rather than because it is newsworthy and truthful. The examples are legion but among the most egregious were the mad dash by virtually the entire cadre of mainstream journalists to condemn the Covington Catholic boys based solely on a Twitter feed, the never-ending Russian collusion hoax, and now the “Don’t Say Gay” propaganda.
It is not just a reliance on Twitter for stories. Editors and publishers oftentimes react to the volume of tweets directed at their news outlets to determine what stories to publish, whether to rebuke a reporter or commentator or to tint a story with a certain (in virtually all cases left-wing) point of view.
The hierarchy of the Democrat party, in order to maintain their status, has allowed social media to set their agenda, as they have acquiesced to the inane belief that the number of posts or likes or retweets about a particular issue or individual is representative of a significant plurality of the people. Living in their Washington-New York bubble and estranged from the everyday people in fly-over country, they are terrified of alienating the Twitter Mobs. Thus, despite the very real prospect of being soundly defeated in the November mid-terms they refuse to change course. They would rather lose than face the wrath of the mob.
This same mindset of believing everything on social media represents America also permeates the boardrooms of the nation’s major corporations and financial institutions. It has become an unfortunate reality that a large number of tweets and posts directed at the marketing, product development, hiring practices, or political leanings of the executives of these companies will almost always succeed in forcing them to change course and, if necessary, pay restitution in order to be left alone -- whether that be through charitable contributions, direct payments, or publicly confessing their supposed transgressions.
Who are the army of Twitter users that are having such a disparate impact on the nation’s media, politics and business? The Pew Research Center conducted a nationally representative and comprehensive survey of nearly 3,000 Twitter users and discovered:
Twitter users are much younger, significantly more likely to identify as liberal or Democrat, more highly educated and have higher incomes than the overall population.
While 56 million Americans (17% of the total population) claim to use Twitter, just 10% of the users, or 5.6 million, are responsible for generating 80% of all the tweets in the U.S.
The Knight Foundation studied the political leaning of frequent Twitter users and their tweets, the results: 67% of frequent users identify as being extreme left or center left (i.e., liberal). Nationally 24% of American identify as extreme left or liberal. They generated 87% of all tweets about so-called white nationalism and 75% of all tweets about the Mueller investigation into the fictitious Russia-Trump collusion hoax.
In other words, 3.5 million Twitter users are essentially driving the news coverage, dictating and enforcing a radical Democrat party agenda as well as successfully intimidating much of the private corporate sector. One percent of the population is effectively governing the United States by generating directly or through bots (automated accounts) an overwhelming volume of tweets and posts in order to promote the appearance of massive support or opposition about an issue or an individual or whom to root for or against in the culture war being waged by the left.
Never have so few so devastatingly impacted the well-being and future of this country. The trajectory this nation is on cannot be reversed until these platforms and their undue influence are understood by the American electorate and brought to heel by Congress. It must be the first order of business of a Republican Congress in 2023.
Graphic credit: Blogentrepreneur CC BY 2.0 license
Steve McCann
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/social_media_the_intimidation_and_enforcement_arm_of_the_american_left.html
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