BIG BROTHER IS NOT COMING. HE’S ALREADY HERE

Claims of liberal bias in the media are nothing new. That has been a consistent refrain by conservatives since the 1970s. When I hear conservatives complain about “media bias” I just roll my eyes and think, “What else is new? Get over it.” Yet, lately something has changed.

Persistent bias has now been combined with data harvesting and computer algorithms to segregate the population not just by political view but also by location, age, financial status, race, sex and a hundred other variables. Surveillance has also reached unparalleled heights as everything from your email content to shopping choices to physical location to the website you view is continually monitored and aggregated into a personal profile that can practically predict what you’ll do next.

Americans seem to endorse the surveillance state by leaving their cell phones on continually, downloading numerous apps (each with its own surveillance capability) and installing two-way voice monitoring systems like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. Much of this data gathering and surveillance is used for advertising purposes so social and digital media platforms can target you with advertising tailored to your tastes based on prior purchases and private searches. But, the information has many other uses.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have shadow banned certain conservative voices. This does not involve shutting-down an account, but rather limiting the reach of the account by negating “retweets,” “likes” and other channels by which a message can be amplified and go viral.

In other cases, the platforms put “warnings” on your messages either that your material is unreliable, unverified or should be viewed with skepticism. Of course, these labels are not uniformly applied.

Conservatives suffer from biased fact-checkers who discredit their work while progressives are free to post messages that are partly invented or outright lies without any “fact check” at all. All of this was bad enough, but now Facebook and Twitter have crossed a line that may result in the loss of their most valuable legal protections or even the break-up of these companies under anti-trust laws.

Here’s what was reported in this article. On October 14, The New York Post (which was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the United States) published emails and photographs from a laptop computer once owned by Hunter Biden that revealed huge payments from China, Ukraine and Russia to buy influence from then Vice President Joe Biden, who is now running for president.

The Post is a reliable publication and the story is one of the most important of the election season. Immediately, Twitter and Facebook shut down the Post social media accounts and banned users from sending a link to the story. Of course, this censorship failed.

By trying to squash the story, the Silicon Valley tech-neo-fascists simply inflamed it and made sure it came to everyone’s attention. After a few days, the Post social media accounts were reopened and the story was allowed to circulate. By then, the damage was done both to the Biden campaign (which began dropping in the polls) and to Twitter and Facebook (which face Senate subpoenas, public testimony and likely legislation to remove some of their legal protections for damages based on their wrongful actions).

The Twitter and Facebook stock prices will suffer accordingly. It’s one more example of how the so-called geniuses of Silicon Valley are not so smart after all.

Corporate leaders and institutional fiduciaries looking to incorporate state of the art predictive analytics to their risk mitigation and strategic analysis should click the link to learn more about Raven Predictive Analytics®.