In 1 Night GOP Pundit's YouTube Video Goes from 20,000 Views Per Day to 30
The title of this article is a bit misleading because it’s about so much more than just discrimination against one GOP pundit.
Don’t get me wrong. The methodical targeting of conservatives on social media is nothing short of astonishing. But if you haven’t made the connection between shadow banning and a complete loss of your free speech, you might just be missing the bigger picture.
Doug Wead of The Federalist chronicled an excellent example of what happened to him as Google targeted him for “hate speech.” It wasn’t pretty.
In his piece, Wead gives multiple examples of the stark drop in his circulation on Youtube and Facebook.
After buying a Google ad, he found that both his ad and Google account were suspended.
“Within days, Google blocked my ad and informed my team that we had violated their policies. I called Google. The problem, they explained, was that the video had hate speech,” Wead wrote.
After spending days on the phone with Google employees he received little explanation for the banning.
“Once again my ad was blocked, and this time my Google account was suspended. I felt like Roseanne Barr. Once again I called Google and spent a day trying to figure out what was wrong. ‘This call may be monitored,’ they announced, and I announced back that I would do the same. So the discussion began. Was I too nice to President Trump? Should I have been more critical? Was it something Regan had said? She seems to fairly cover all sides of an issue. Why would they have a problem with her?”
After promising to never again run the video in question, Wead got his account back. But it there is still more to his story.
Wead had been made. Google, in this case, went to extreme measures to make sure his reach would be diminished to his or any other audience, possibly forever.
“In January, 2018 my channel was hit by shadow-banning. Sometime that month, Google allegedly hired thousands of outside actors supplied by the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center. This was the organization that attacked Ben Carson, the only African American in Donald Trump’s cabinet. They were apparently the new arbiters of decency.
My videos got hammered. But only my pro-Trump material. My interviews defending the Obama children or talking up Chelsea Clinton’s wedding went untouched.
A viral YouTube interview with me and Fox Anchor Neil Cavuto about why Hillary Clinton lost the election was penalized. The video had more than 861,000 views and was earning an average of 15,000 views a day when it suddenly went dark. On February 17, after the new censorship took hold, this video dropped to 50 views a day. That is where it has stayed ever since.”
A video of Wead on “Fox and Friends” with almost one million views and 20,000 views daily, skidded to a near halt — averaging only 30 views per day.
Google didn’t stop with Wead. They also dove deep into the accounts of bigger media personalities and scrubbed Wead’s interviews there too. His interviews with Neal Cavuto were buried more than 300 deep in his related search.
Google goes to war against Trump. #googleWarOnTrump https://t.co/4Fw2MEwsig pic.twitter.com/TVDJwIF2cU
— Doug Wead (@DougWead) August 17, 2018
“You can go 300 videos deep and still not find the interview with me that has the second-most views of any Cavuto video,” Wead wrote. “You will pass videos with 22 views and many that are nine years old. I have been censored out of the Cavuto stream.”
Wead thinks he’s cracked the Google shadow ban code. He explains that an auto-generated account was was created in his name, “Doug Wead – topic.” It’s a separate account from his own channel and has no subscribers. They choose the videos that occupy the new auto-generated account and those videos are “not chosen based on popularity, relevancy, or date of publishing.”
Pretty slick.
Of course there is a lot of talk now about shadow banning as well as the censorship of conservative voices all over the major social media platforms.
Present day millennials may never have been taught about the Eastern Bloc media of the Cold War. Those media outlets were nothing more than propaganda mills for the communist party — the party controlled and censored their content. There was no alternative news. It’s pretty clear to me, present day social media is closely mirroring those dinosaur tactics.
The president has made several comments addressing social media’s heavy-handed actions against conservatives. While he has been successful in reaching his more than 53 million followers on Twitter, at the end of the day, the powers there can pull his plug any time they want.
That’s a lot of power. And it could mean the end of free speech.
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