Strategy includes ‘fact-checkers’ and ‘attack dogs’ to chase advertisers away
Bob Unruh
WND News Center
Elon Musk is in the process of taking over Twitter – changing it into a private company and, according to reports, re-establishing a level of speech for conservatives who essentially had been banned from the forum under its current corporate ownership.
But he’s facing a big battle, big even for the richest man in the world, as he’s estimated to be worth more than $200 billion, according to a new analysis published by Gateway Pundit, which itself was assaulted by the “gatekeepers” and “fact-checkers” in the social media world who have no tolerance for conservative thought.
The analysis noted that “Democrats are furious that conservatives may have a voice again on the platform.”
And so they’re trying their same attack on Musk, trying to persuade advertisers to abandon the site, the analysis explained.
Musk already has responded, demanding to know the source of the funding for the attacking organizations. and he’s singled out several groups like the far-left Media Matters as being behind the assaults.
The analysis explained that Musk is reacting to the open warfare from: “left-wing organizations that are pressuring companies to boycott Twitter if Musk changes the social media firm’s content moderation policies,” and “left-wing pressure groups are busy working to bankrupt Musk’s Twitter by pressuring businesses to pull their paid ads on the platform.”
The Gateway Pundit, which has had its own battles against such assaults on its platform, said “The stated mission for these left-wing groups pressuring advertisers is to enact strict ‘content moderation’ policies that stifle free speech and are usually disproportionately enforced on conservatives.”
The explanation continued, “One such group of several, NewsGuard, exists to facilitate bankrupting conservative media outlets by using ratings to generate a ‘score’ which they refer to as a media outlet’s ‘nutrition label’ – which they then hand off to groups that are the attack dogs going after advertisers using that score. The process works like this: favored left-wing ‘fact-checking’ organizations obsessively rate ‘false’ even small issues on a conservative media site. There’s no real review or appeal process, and even on issues that are highly in dispute, the left-wing fact-check groups still rate something as ‘false’ that is in reasonable dispute. Those ratings, from multiple fact-check groups, are then collectively analyzed to create a ‘score’ for so-called ‘disinformation.’
“Notably, mainstream outlets that push obvious frauds and falsehoods that fit the left-wing narrative machine, such as the Nick Sandmann incident or the Jussie Smollet hate hoax or the Bubba Wallace/NASCAR hate hoax or the Kamloops hoax among many others, are [n]ever penalized for their left-wing disinformation.”
Once that “score” is assembled from leftist websites, it is used to coerce social media organizations to suppress the links from the targets. Further, there are groups that “act like attack dogs pressuring companies that remain to drop conservative media altogether.”
“It’s a massive ecosystem that has been constructed, much deeper than people realize,” Gateway Pundit General Counsel Jon Burns explained.
The analysis explained, “Burns has studied these organizations and has been in litigation with several of them for several years.”
He pointed out examples, “Sleeping Giants and Media Matters exist as the attack dogs to enforce these fake scores.”
The analysis explained, “The Center for Countering Digital Hate is another attack dog going to advertisers to get them to drop the ad revenue.”
“This is basically a massive extortion racket. ‘Don’t pay our political enemies or we’ll hurt you with defamation, saying that you fund racism, bigotry, etc.’ – it’s no surprise that most companies quickly fall into line to protect their bottom line,” Burns explained.
Even well-known groups like the Poynter Institute and the International Fact-Check Network, “are in fact enabling censorship of outlets that dissent from mainstream narratives,” the analysis said.
“Their standards are used by social media platforms like Facebook to justify deplatforming conservative alternative media using left-wing pseudoscience.”
Further, what now is emerging is the links those groups have with governmental operations, it explains.
“In many federal agencies now have a ‘social media working group’ with a wide mandate. They develop department policies, but they also exert pressure on social media companies to do what they want. This was true for the COVID scamdemic but also for the Hunter Biden laptop story. There was a highly-coordinated effort to influence public perception and it was pressure across all of the mainstream media,” the report said.
Colleges also work on “studying so-called disinformation/misinformation across social media networks. They use highly sophisticated statistical modeling and tracking to figure out how things spread, and which sites amplify news and have the greatest reach. This allows the censorship cabal to know where to focus their attention,” it continued.
One result was that Facebook changed its algorithms in response to the 2016 election, and bankrupted dozens of conservatives sites such as The Conservative Tribune, Liberty Alliance and more.
“The Gateway Pundit lost a third of its traffic overnight,” it reported.
That particular issue already has been discussed in Congress, where then Rep. Steve King described the situation facing conservative sites as “evidence of censorship.”
The situation now is that Biden has inaugurated a “Disinformation Governance Board” to be run by an extreme leftist, Nina Jankowicz, who has joked about sleeping with people to become rich and powerful.
“It’s all about control. It all comes back to the government and the deep state within it that are actively trying to silence their political opponents,” Burns explained.
“The First Amendment isn’t just under attack, we are watching the construction of massive institutions and an entire ecosystem backed by the government to silence all dissent. Musk fired a shot against these people, but the SEC is already investigating him, likely in retaliation, and the system is going to fight back hard,” Burns said.
