Survey suggests a third of right-leaning Americans have already left or are considering leaving the social media platform

I left Facebook because they censored me. Facebook is biased against conservative viewpoints. Evidence in media reports indicate this is true beyond doubt.

“…A third of conservatives surveyed have ditched Facebook or are thinking about doing so, according to a poll released Wednesday.

Commissioned by the Media Research Center (MRC), which tracks liberal bias in news coverage, the survey of 1,000 likely voters has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent and of 5.2 percent for conservatives.

In addition to the 32 percent of self-described conservatives who said they have left or are considering leaving Facebook due to political censorship, 66 percent agreed they do not trust the social media platform, according to the poll.

Another 65 percent of those surveyed said they believe Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are purposely censoring conservatives and conservative voices.

“These numbers are devastating to any CEO responsible for addressing the concerns of his customer base,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a statement. “According to this survey, 7 percent of conservatives have already left Facebook and another 25 percent are seriously considering it.”…”

https://www.lifezette.com/2018/08/heres-why-ditching-facebook-is-becoming-a-thing-among-conservatives/

“…The U.S. economy grew at a rate of 4.2% in the second quarter — more than the initial estimate of 4.1%, according to the Commerce Department.

Why it matters: The upward revision marks the economy’s best performance in four years, as Reuters reports, thanks to a boost in corporate spending and a decline in imports…”

https://www.axios.com/us-gdp-second-quarter-42-e297c718-bb48-41e9-a59b-6e0b459dfa80.html

What could go wrong?

“…California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on Tuesday which will eliminate bail for suspects arrested on all but the most violent felonies, reports the Sacramento Bee. Eligible suspects will be let go within 12 hours of booking, according to the new legislation, which can be extended another 12 hours if officials need more time to determine whether suspects should be held for other reasons…”

Jim Brown was a champion as a football player. He is a champion as a man.

South Africa is going authoritarian. Disarming the population is the next step to forcing citizens to follow the government line, or else.

“…Though South Africa witnessed rising levels of economic freedom shortly after Apartheid ended in 1994, the country has taken a more interventionist path to economic development in recent years.

This situation is becoming more pronounced with the South African National Assembly recently voting 241-83 to amend the South African constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation.

The socialist-leaning African National Congress (ANC) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) parties are leading the charge for expropriation under the banner of fixing racial disparities that have supposedly remained intact since Apartheid’s conclusion.

While land confiscation has not been officially finalized, South Africans should worry about the direction their country is going…”

And how does gun control fit into this equation?

https://www.gunpowdermagazine.com/south-africa-calls-for-300-000-gun-owners-to-turn-over-their-weapons/

“…Tuesday brought endless commentary and reporting on how President Trump was being utterly ridiculous and conspiratorial to accuse Google of bias in its search algorithms. Funny: Just over a year ago, in June 2017, the European Union fined the company $2.7 billion for … bias in its search algorithms.

Yes, Trump’s off-the-cuff charge focused on political bias, whereas the EU verdict (after a seven-year investigation) was about the company “systematically favoring” its own Google Shopping feature. But all the Trump-bashers who were suggesting Google would never, ever put its thumb on the scale seem to have ignored at least one elephant in the room.

As we write, the top headlines on Google News include two CNN stories: “Trump slams Google search as ‘rigged’ — but it’s not” and “Debunking Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory on Google.” How is the average Web surfer to trust that Google isn’t weighting those stories?

The layman has plenty of reasons to worry about political bias to which the company could be blind: Silicon Valley is a notorious progressive place (except on issues that touch its own interests, anyway), and the internal Google discussion over “dissident” engineer James Damore showed a shocking intolerance for the merest questioning of certain left-liberal pieties.

On the commercial front, Google’s power is obvious: Its algorithms can literally make or break a company — perhaps a whole industry. Google says, “We respectfully disagree with” the EU ruling that it “abused its market dominance,” but that’s not exactly a rebuttal.

We’re no fans of heavy-handed government intervention, but any free democratic society is going to frown on enormous unchecked power. It certainly seems like some kind of independent oversight is called for here…”

https://nypost.com/2018/08/28/we-should-all-be-worried-about-googles-power/

Lefty lawfare on domestic and international political issues.

“…GET YOUR GLOBAL WARMING LAW ENFORCEMENT HERE! A new report compiled by the indefatigable Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) exposes a previously secret $50 million fund used to pay for global warming litigation by Democratic state attorneys general and their staffs.

“This is political. We have a policymaking process. They tried it and failed. So their stance is, ‘It’s not working, so we’re going to use law enforcement,’” Horner says in the report, according to LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby.

Horner uncovered, among much else, an email from a staffer to California’s Governor Moonbeam pitching the fund to staffers of the governors of Washington state and New York. The Brown aide wrote “before you gasp, please note that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”…”

https://www.lifezette.com/2018/08/new-report-exposes-global-warming-law-enforcement-for-rent/

I believe it is time for the federal government to evaluate regulations on the tech giants.

“…He’d been a talented researcher, an academic, until his friend started a small technology company. He had joined the company and helped it to grow. It eventually became so big that the company had been acquired by one of the tech giants. And so, then, was he.

He was now paid a fortune to help design the algorithms that were central to what the tech giant did. And he had signed solemn legal documents prohibiting him from speaking to me, or to anyone, about his work. But as the years passed, his concern – indeed his guilt – grew. “It’s power without responsibility.” He paused. “There’s so much power, and so little responsibility. This is not notional abstract power. This is real power about day-to-day lives. It’s both material and cultural and financial. The world has to know that this is how it works . . . There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark,” he said, quoting Hamlet a little melodramatically.”…”

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/ridiculously-complicated-algorithms/

More on the Facebook engineer that admits company bias against conservatives and Trump.

“…On Tuesday morning, President Trump lashed out at Google, with his remarks later broadening to include Twitter and Facebook, accusing it of “rigging” search results by presenting only results “from National Left-Wing Media” and accused “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”

Those companies “better be careful because you can’t do that to people,” Trump said later in the Oval Office. “I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It is not fair to large portions of the population.”

Google immediately responded, condemning Trump’s charge, and claiming that “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”

And yet, as so often happens, in Trump’s crude delivery, the politically incorrect truth was once again be found.

According to a memo posted on Facebook’s internal message board titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity”, and which was published by the New York Times, senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige confirmed Trump’s allegation writing that “we are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views” and shockingly admitted that “we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.”

The scathing indictment of Facebook’s liberal “mono-culture” continues:

We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them  politically.​ HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity”, and “equality.” On this issues, you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.

“These are not fears without cause” Amerige writes, and continues the stunning disclosure of the company’s biased culture, “Because we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose removing Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots. We have made “All Lives Matter” a fireable offense. We put Palmer Luckey through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc feedback in the PSC tool for having “offensive” ideas. We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a “non inclusive environment.” And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical…”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-29/facebook-engineers-stunning-admission-we-tear-down-posters-welcoming-trump

Top Google News Story: CNN Claiming Google News Isn’t ‘Rigged’

Not the ‘fair and balanced arbiter of facts’ it claims to be

“…An indepth study of Google search results found that despite the tech giant’s claim to be “a fair and balanced arbiter of facts,” 40 percent more searches produce material that leans politically either to the “left” or the “far left” rather than the “right.”

The researchers for CanIRank concluded Google’s “ranking algorithms aren’t designed to provide a fairly balanced or completely honest representation of controversial issues.”

To assess how fairly search engine results portray political candidates and controversial issues, the study collected more than 1,200 URLs ranking highly in Google.com for politically-charged keywords such as “gun control,” “abortion” and “Black Lives Matter.”

To assess the “political slant,” the researchers used politically active individuals from both the left and right as well as special software.

Along with finding 40 percent of search results are more likely to lean left, 16 percent of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results.

The analysis concluded “factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.”…”

Original Here

“…Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.

War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.

It’s the new battleground of media bias. But it’s worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It’s a war against ideas. It’s a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation…”

Original Here

It is time for the federal government to evaluate regulation of the social media giants.

“…SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social network.

“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”

Since the post went up, more than 100 Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called FB’ers for Political Diversity, according to two people who viewed the group’s page and who were not authorized to speak publicly. The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.

The new group has upset other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to minorities. One engineer, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had lodged complaints with their managers about FB’ers for Political Diversity and were told that it had not broken any company rules.

Another employee said the group appeared to be constructive and inclusive of different political viewpoints. Mr. Amerige did not respond to requests for comment.

The activity is a rare sign of organized dissent within Facebook over the company’s largely liberal workplace culture. While the new group is just a sliver of Facebook’s work force of more than 25,000, the company’s workers have in the past appeared less inclined than their peers at other tech companies to challenge leadership, and most have been loyalists to its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg…”

Original Here

“…The Viganò testimony bears the mark of a man seething with anger and perhaps facing the mystery of death. “It is in moments of great trial that the Lord’s grace is revealed in abundance and makes His limitless mercy available to all,” the 77-year-old churchman writes near the end. “But it is granted only to those who are truly repentant.”

For American and global Catholicism, Viganò’s dark night of the soul presents a bright clarifying moment. The document portrays a church whose highest echelons are dominated by old men who apparently don’t believe, or at least don’t take all that seriously, what she has taught about human sexuality for two millennia. And others who are willing to cut corners to protect their decadent brethren.

Either Viganò’s core claims hold water, or they don’t. Either the Vatican was informed of McCarrick’s predations as early as 2000 only to turn a blind eye, or it wasn’t.

Either Pope Benedict XVI imposed private sanctions against McCarrick in 2009-10, barring him from celebrating public Masses and cavorting with seminarians, or he didn’t. Either McCarrick’s successor as cardinal-archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, was aware of the sanctions, or he wasn’t.

Either Pope Francis rehabilitated McCarrick upon taking the Petrine office, despite being warned of the abuse “dossier,” or he didn’t.

If Viganò is telling the truth about these things, then the moral catastrophe he describes is horrifyingly real.

Everything else is noise…”

https://nypost.com/2018/08/27/the-catholic-abuse-scandal-now-leads-all-the-to-way-the-vatican/

OR THE ANNALS OF 

LIBERAL HYPOCRISY

Do Obama, Biden, Schumer and Pelosi mean it now when they praise John McCain or did they actually mean it back when they were calling him a Bush toady, a corporate tool, and a peddler of despicable political smears? 

The internet never forgets!

https://www.lifezette.com/2018/08/what-democrats-said-about-mccain-that-they-now-want-you-to-forget/

All the best people told me it was the Russians!

“…A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.

The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said at a July 12 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing. He did not reveal the entity’s identity, but said it was unrelated to Russia.

Two officials with the ICIG, investigator Frank Rucker and attorney Janette McMillan, met repeatedly with FBI officials to warn them of the Chinese intrusion, according to a former intelligence officer with expertise in cybersecurity issues, who was briefed on the matter. He spoke anonymously, as he was not authorized to publicly address the Chinese’s role with Clinton’s server.

Among those FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was then the bureau’s top counterintelligence official. Strzok was fired this month following the discovery he sent anti-Trump texts to his mistress and co-worker, Lisa Page. Strzok didn’t act on the information the ICIG provided him, according to Gohmert…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/27/china-hacked-clinton-server/

Leak a story to the press, use the resulting press reports as evidence to the FISA Court to spy on American citizens. The stories of malfeasance at the FBI/DOJ continue. We need a thorough house cleaning at those agencies.

“…An FBI special agent told Congress earlier in August that the bureau has used leaked news stories as justifications to obtain surveillance warrants against American citizens, a source familiar with the testimony tells The Daily Caller News Foundation. During a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on Friday, Special Agent Jonathan Moffa told congressional investigators that the FBI and Justice Department have leaked stories to the press and then used them to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/27/source-fbi-congress-leaked-stories-spy-warrants/

I wonder how Kushner’s record compares to Hillary Clinton’s or Jon Kerry’s?

“…Kushner, married to first daughter Ivanka Trump, has been a top domestic and foreign policy adviser to the president since the 2016 election. He has been involved in several major agenda victories for the White House, among them the push for prison reform, bringing jobs to the U.S. from overseas, working up a Middle East peace timeline, nailing down the 2028 Summer Olympics, and securing soccer’s World Cup in North America in 2026.

His focus on Mexico during the 2016 presidential campaign was one of the reasons he wanted to work inside the West Wing, said an official. It was Kushner, for example, who worked out the campaign year visit by President Trump to Mexico.

“He has a close relationship with Mexico. It is just natural that he was brought into the NAFTA and other talks,” said the official, who added that Kushner has been working with U.S. officials on NAFTA reforms for a year and a half…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/nafta-another-win-for-jared-kushner