When the media colludes with government agencies instead of monitoring and exposing their abuses, truth dies. Viewers undergo media manipulation and receive official propaganda disguised as “honest” reporting and analysis. It is extremely dangerous to our democracies.
Social Media is no exception to media manipulation. Manipulation tactics include planting and/or amplifying misinformation and disinformation using human troll armies, doxxing, and bounties. These organisations create false social media accounts in order to promote, positions, government policy, attack opposition, stop opposing views even to manipulate other journalists.
The Herald Sun recently reported that Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has used $770,000 of the state’s coffers since 2014 on social media to build his on-line presence which went onto exceed the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison.
Even factcheckers have been shown to have outside interests. One of Facebook’s “fact-checking” partners, Lead Stories, is actually partly funded by money funneled in from a Chinese company called ByteDance LLC. It is the same company that owns TikTok and has been banned by the US government for use by government employees and also banned from India because it has been deemed a security risk.
There is a new “fact-checking” organization trying to take over Snope’s 25-year reign. They are called NewsGuard. For $35.50 a year, they will sell you an “Internet Trust Tool,” that you can download on your browser. Once it is installed, users receive a pop-up warning when they visit a website that NewsGuard deems to be fake news or untrustworthy.
Microsoft has recently partnered with NewsGuard as part of its iOS and Android phones. So far, they’ve “guarded” people from over 4,000 websites. NewsGuard swims under the fins of USA TODAY. Anything that USA TODAY’s fact-checkers find to be false also gets placed on NewsGuard’s list of websites to be avoided. Now we have media manipulating even your internet browsing.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-national-security-state-manipulates-news-media
https://doctordavidfriedman.com/blog/who-fact-checks-the-fact-checkers-1
