FINALLY! After Most Major Conservative Sites Are Completely Throttled by Facebook — GOP Leaders Speak Out (VIDEO)

Since January 2017 top conservative voices on Facebook and social media have been targeted and silenced by tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter.

On Thursday RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale wrote Facebook and Twitter and demanded answers on targeting of conservative publishers.

McDaniel and Parscale joined FOX and Friends this morning.

RNC CHAIRWOMAN RONNA MCDANIEL: It’s a legitimate fear. Brad and I hear it all the time as we’re traveling the country. People are very concerned that conservative voices are going to be suppressed on social media. Of course, many of their users are conservatives and so Brad and I feel preemptively, we have to get out ahead of this, talk to Facebook, talk to Twitter, ask them for transparency, let us know what you’re going to do to make sure that every voice has a say on these social media platforms especially before this critical midterm.

BRAD PARSCALE: Well I mean, main thing about the letter is we’ve had so much incoming about Diamond and Silk being blocked, other conservative voices. Every day I receive thousands of messages saying, “I’m being shadow-banned.” And what we want to do in this letter is make sure that we understand what’s happening. We want to ask them for transparency. I think the public deserves that transparency and we need to know that conservative voices have a chance to get their message out. This is a big problem.

Here is a copy of the GOP letter sent to Facebook and Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook Headquarters
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Jack Dorsey
Twitter, Inc.
1355 Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Dorsey,

We are writing on behalf of the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign to request information about efforts by Facebook and Twitter to prevent political bias on the social media platforms.

Concerns have been raised in recent years about suppression of conservative speech on Facebook and Twitter, including censorship of conservative news stories from news feeds and “trending” news sections. We are alarmed by numerous allegations that Facebook has blocked content from conservative journalists and groups, and Twitter has hidden such content from conservative users’ followers.

In 2016, former Facebook workers reported that they manipulated the “trending” section to exclude news tailored to conservative users, despite those topics trending on their own. A former trending news curator admitted in an interview that nearly all members of the trending news teams identified as liberal – and had the authority to approve topics. Moreover, some Facebook employees in 2016 reportedly pushed to ban then-candidate Donald Trump’s Facebook posts and label them as hate speech.

During congressional testimony, Facebook apologized for suppression of content from conservative bloggers and personalities, notably “Diamond & Silk,” entertainers who were deemed “unsafe to the community” for no reason. In response to these revelations, Facebook said it will use a new system that ranks news organizations by level of user trust, promoting the highly scored outlets on users’ news feeds while suppressing those with lower scores. We are concerned about potential misuse of this system.

Meanwhile, conservative Twitter users have accused the company of unfairly targeting them, purging thousands of their followers in an attempt to stem “fake news” content, and unnecessarily prompting them to confirm their identity. Twitter claims its tools are free from political bias, but has allegedly targeted predominantly Republicans as part of a “shadow banning” practice, which covertly limits those accounts’ visibility on the platform.

We recognize that Facebook and Twitter operate in liberal corporate cultures. However, rampant political bias is inappropriate for a widely used public forum. What’s more, the consequences to our democratic society are profound. This is why special attention is necessary to address issues such as Facebook’s use of liberal organizations to fact-check content, the access to user profiles it gives to some employees, and Twitter’s manipulation of content that appears for the site’s users.

It has also come to our attention that Facebook is working with a third party to encourage voter registration. Though we agree that this is an admirable task in theory, we ask for transparency over how Facebook determines who sees these advertisements in their news feeds. This is to make sure that the new feature does not become essentially an in-kind contribution to liberal candidates.

Since Facebook and Twitter are platforms used widely by the majority of voters, we request an explanation about how you will ensure all content is managed equally and fairly. How will you safeguard voters’ access to fair content on your platform? How will you guarantee that conservative voices are no longer censored, and conservative news no longer buried or otherwise hidden?

As you conduct reviews to assess bias against conservative content, we ask for your assurances that transparency, neutrality, and protection of all speech will be core tenets of Facebook and Twitter operations, now and in the future.

We ask for your response by June 18, 2018, and look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Ronna McDaniel
Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee

Brad Parscale
Campaign Manager for President Trump’s 2020 reelection

Most top conservative publishers have already seen their traffic eliminated or severely diminished on Facebook and Twitter.

As our loyal readers know — The Gateway Pundit has been speaking about about the elimination of conservative content on Facebook for over a year now.

In 2016 conservative Americans rejected the far left and corrupt mainstream media and fled to the internet for their information.

In 2016 The Gateway Pundit was one of the few conservative sites that supported candidate Trump – along with Breitbart, The Drudge Report, Infowars, Zero Hedge and Conservative Treehouse.

We were and still are proud of our efforts to report the truth that led to Trump’s historic win.

In 2017 Harvard and Columbia Journalism Review found that The Gateway Pundit was the 4th most influential conservative news source in the 2016 election among conservative publishers.

Because of this we were targeted and have seen our numbers related to Facebook and Twitter decline dramatically.

Tech Giants Google and Facebook are currently purging conservative content from Facebook and YouTube — They are hiding conservative stories on Google — They are shadow-banning conservative news on all social media.

In February Facebook launched a new algorithm to ensure that conservative news would not spread on the social media platform.

This was after Facebook announced it was losing 50,000,000 user hours a day in the previous quarter.

The algorithm change caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.

In contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) do not appear to have suffered a comparable decline in Facebook engagement.

Top conservative Facebook pages with daily traffic in the millions have seen 75% to 95% drop in traffic.

This is how Democrats fight back — Not with better ideas but with smash-mouth fascist tactics to ruin any threats to their total dominance.

Young Cons, Western Journalism, SarahPalin.com, Independent Journal Review, Right Wing News, and several others have seen dramatic loss in traffic.

The Gateway Pundit does not rely on Facebook for our traffic numbers but Facebook is a significant part of every major publication’s strategy today.

Still, we saw a significant drop in Facebook traffic since the beginning  of the year–  .
And in March  Facebook shut down our traffic stream from the social media platform.

Our Facebook traffic went from 33% of our total traffic to 3% of our total traffic since the beginning of 2018.

This is corrupt, if not criminal, behavior.

Meanwhile, liberal sites are doing fine.

A recent report by Outline organization confirmed the conservative publishers were hit the hardest by the recent Facebook news feed changes.

The study also found the The Gateway Pundit was hit the hardest by these changes.

Via The Outline:

Facebook’s January 12 announcement that it would begin to de-prioritize news publishers and their posts in users’ News Feeds has had a surprisingly profound and partisan impact. According to The Outline’s analysis of Facebook engagement data obtained from research tool BuzzSumo, conservative and right-wing publishers (such as Breitbart, Fox News, and Gateway Pundit) were hit the hardest in the weeks following the announcement, with Facebook engagement totals for February dropping as much as 55 percent for some, while the engagement numbers of most predominantly liberal publishers remained unaffected…

…The Outline drew these conclusions after analyzing the Facebook engagement data of 20 publishers from March 5, 2017 to February 28, 2018.

The Gateway Pundit published a report in April that shows how top conservative publishers have been targeted and their content eliminated on Facebook.

The Gateway Pundit report have over 288,000 views.

Facebook Conservative Blacklist With Traffic Graphics– UPDATED by Jim Hoft on Scribd

In March Facebook shut down our content. You cannot even share a Gateway Pundit story without getting a warning now.
And this is after we spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook.

We are not alone.

It may be too late for the GOP — They should have acted sooner.

Dear Reader - The enemies of freedom are choking off the Gateway Pundit from the resources we need to bring you the truth. Since many asked for it, we now have a way for you to support The Gateway Pundit directly - and get ad-reduced access. Plus, there are goodies like a special Gateway Pundit coffee mug for supporters at a higher level. You can see all the options by clicking here - thank you for your support!
Photo of author
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

You can email Jim Hoft here, and read more of Jim Hoft's articles here.

 

Thanks for sharing!