Tag Archive for: social media

POLL: Majorities Of Both Parties Say The Media Isn’t Trustworthy

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Huge majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents say the U.S. media is biased and its main goal is to advance its own agenda, according to a Thursday poll from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States.

More than 76% of poll respondents stated that the media is primarily focused on advancing their own political opinions and agenda, with 62.7% of Democrats, 76.1% of Independents and 90.3% of Republicans agreeing.

The poll surveyed 1,084 likely general election voters between Dec. 4 and Dec. 7. and reported a 3% margin of error. Trafalgar employs a number of methods for conducting its polls, including live phone calls, automated calls, emails, text messages, and two other proprietary methods it does not share publicly.

“Thanks to the decentralization of the news through the internet and social media, the mainstream press outlets no longer have a monopoly on controlling the news,” Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States Action, said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller. “Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been slow to adjust to this reality and don’t seem to realize that the average American can now see in real time the difference between the actual facts of a story versus what the mainstream media says. People are realizing the open bias and partisanship of the press, and it is making them increasingly cynical.”

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CHART ON MAINSTREAM MEDIA FOCUS BY THE TRAFALGER GROUP

The Trafalgar Group was one of only two polling firms that accurately predicted Trump’s victory in the presidential election of 2016. The firm was also among the few that predicted Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ win in 2018, as well as Republican victories in Virginia in November.

The poll is only the latest indicator of Americans’ loss of trust in the media. A June survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that the U.S. ranked the lowest in trust for the media among 46 nations with developed media industries.

“This is an extraordinary (though unsurprising) finding,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said after the report’s release. “Most amazing is that the corporate sector of the US media is failing in every respect: financially, culturally, collapsing trust.”

The poll also shows a dramatic drop from the “new low” for trust in the media established in January 2021, when just 46% of Americans stated the media was trustworthy. The Trafalgar poll now puts that number at 23.7%.

COLUMN BY

ANDERS HAGSTROM

White House correspondent.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Twitter Suspends Conservative Satire Site

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In case you hadn’t heard, Twitter recently suspended our account. In an email to us, they claimed we violated their rules against “platform manipulation and spam.” The email included a warning that that if we tried to open another account, that new account would be suspended, too.

We published screenshots of the email and our suspended Twitter page, and called on our followers to make some noise. We started trending almost immediately and Twitter responded by reinstating us, saying we’d been suspended “by mistake.” So we’re back on Twitter, at least for the time being. But we share the concerns of others who’ve rightly observed that these “mistakes” tend to work in one direction.

We’re grateful to have followers who aren’t afraid to speak up and hold these big tech companies accountable. But there are no guarantees. We couldn’t be sure they’d reinstate our account. And we can’t know if they will the next time they make a “mistake.” But we can do our best to prepare for a worst-case scenario. At least we can if we have your help.

When we first launched our subscription service, the primary reason we gave for supporting us was to help us become less dependent on big tech companies. We explained:

We depend on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic, and Google Ads to monetize it. Without these networks, we’d have no revenue to cover our expenses. And as you’re probably aware, none of these companies are friendly to Christians or conservatives. In fact, that’s a severe understatement. The control these companies exercise—and the outright hostility they display toward those with more traditional views and values—has us deeply concerned about our future as a publisher of Christian satire. But here’s the thing: If just a small fraction of our readers become paid subscribers, we’d have enough funding to survive without running ads, effectively eliminating our dependence on these big tech companies.

The more subscribers we have, the less we have to worry about our dependence on Twitter and the other big tech companies. If you want to see us prevail against Twitter, Snopes, and anyone else who might seek to discredit or deplatform us, please consider becoming a subscriber. Your support will make a difference.

From our whole team, thank you for your consideration and support.

Seth Dillon
CEO

Subscribe and Support The Babylon Bee

©The Babylon Bee. All rights reserved.

FLORIDA: Congressional Candidate Conducts Massive ‘Sting Operation’ on Leftist Run Media Companies Protecting Pedophiles

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STUART, Florida /PRNewswire/ — KW Miller, the high profile conservative congressional candidate running for office in Florida’s 18th Congressional District Conducted a Massive “Sting Operation” on Leftist Run Media Companies Protecting Pedophiles.

Mr. Miller began experiencing heavy censorship of his congressional campaign accounts when he began exposing the Entertainment and Media Industry’s deep ties to pedophilia on his social platforms.

In June, Mr. Miller’s media team decided to launch a “Sting Operation” on several of these media companies including Twitter, Facebook, Google which had been censoring Mr. Miller’s Congressional Campaign social media accounts.  The goal of the “Sting Operation” was to expose and break the censoring of his Campaign’s accounts and to expose Pedophilia and Child Sex Trafficking within the Media and Entertainment Industry.

As part of the “Sting Operation” Mr. Miller utilized his Congressional Campaign’s Twitter account to openly attacked the rampant Pedophilia in the Media and Entertainment industry by calling out numerous suspected offenders within the industry.

Mr. Miller’s account went viral, racking up over one hundred (100) million views/hits on his Congressional Twitter page within a three (3) week time period. Twitter fought back, locked the number of followers of Mr. Miller’s account at 36,000 and “openly shadow banned”.

Mr. Miller’s account was being openly suppressed by Twitter the further his media team dug into the Media and Entertainment industry ties to child sex trafficking and rampant pedophilia. Many of the suspected offenders named included prominent members of Democratic Party led support to the rumors that Twitter is “Leftist Run”.

The deeper Mr. Miller’s media team dug, the more these “leftist run” media companies “openly covered up” for the Pedophilia ravaged Entertainment Industry, Democratic Politicians and other high-profile individuals allegedly involved in the “Cabal”.

Mr. Miller’s media team struck a nerve, a very deep nerve that goes all the way to the top leadership of the “leftist run” media companies, deep into the Democratic Party and to their dark money donors.

Mr. Miller and his media team plan to continue the investigation tying in information made public by Ghislaine Maxwell and the Jeffery Epstein records uncovered by Federal Investigators.

There are thousands of Child Sex Trafficking rings in the U.S. and Internationally.  KW Miller is committed to eradicating Child Sex Trafficking in the United States and working with other global authorities to stop these despicable and depraved acts.

Website: www.florida18thdistrict.com

These Start-Up Companies Are Looking To Take Down Big Tech

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The companies that make up the world of Big Tech have some competition coming with the creation and rising popularity of new apps Parler and Triller.

As the push for fairness in Big Tech continues from President Donald Trump and others, companies such as Parler and Triller are looking to topple social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and TikTok from the top.

Parler was launched in 2018 as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook by University of Denver graduates John Matze and Jared Thomson. The point of the app? Free speech.

“There are going to be no fact checkers,” Matze told Forbes in an interview published in June. “You’re not going to be told what to think and what to say. A police officer isn’t going to arrest you if you say the wrong opinion. I think that’s all people want. That’s what they like.”

Parler reportedly has two million users compared to Twitter’s 330 million monthly active users and Facebook’s 2.6 billion monthly active users, according to Statista. The app is free and allows users to share posts containing 1,000 characters.

Triller was created in 2015 and is similar to TikTok, but not quite the same. Triller is marketed as a music-video creator and uses AI technology to edit users’ footage together. On Aug. 2, Triller was ranked as the number one app in all categories in the App store in 50 countries, according to a press release shared by the company.

The app has been downloaded over 250 million times and saw a 20x increase in downloads over the last week of July, the press release stated.

The increase in downloads comes as TikTok has come into President Trump’s focus over the past weeks. National security experts have warned TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could be a risk to the U.S. due to its ties to China.

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, CNN Business reported on Aug. 1. “Well, I have that authority.”

A spokesperson claimed U.S. users’ data is not stored in China and TikTok would resist any attempts by Beijing to obtain the data.

“TikTok US user data is stored in the US, with strict controls on employee access,” spokesperson Hilary McQuaide told CNN Business. “TikTok’s biggest investors come from the US. We are committed to protecting our users’ privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform.”

Most recently, Trump signed a pair of executive orders banning individuals from communicating with TikTok’s parent company for the next 45 days as of Aug. 6.

As previously reported, Trump’s executive orders bar “any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” with ByteDance and Tencent Holdings, parent companies of TikTok and WeChat, respectively. The orders ban individuals from communicating with the parent companies for 45 days.

Before Trump set his sights on banning TikTok and the alleged national security threat, he was focused on the issues plaguing the other Big Tech companies including censorship and fairness.

The president signed an executive order in May to roll back Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects “interactive computer services” from being treated as a publisher of a third party after two of his tweets were fact-checked by Twitter.

“Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see,” the executive order stated.

“Immunity should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech, but in reality use their power over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints,” it continued.

Trump claimed Twitter has had “unchecked power” to censor and called the fact-checking “political activism.”

President Trump has also gone after Big Tech for reportedly committing antitrust violations. As previously reported, he threatened to sign executive orders that would “bring fairness” to Big Tech in July.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1288506554585505793?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1288506554585505793%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdailycaller.com%2F2020%2F08%2F08%2Fstart-up-social-media-triller-parler-big-tech-twitter-tik-tok-facebook-censorship-antitrust%2F

“If Congress doesn’t bring fairness to Big Tech, which they should have done years ago, I will do it myself with Executive Orders,” Trump tweeted before the Big Tech CEOs were set to testify in front of Congress. “In Washington, it has been ALL TALK and NO ACTION for years, and the people of our Country are sick and tired of it!”

Could all of this chaos help apps like Triller and Parler climb to the top?

COLUMN BY

LAURYN OVERHULTZ

Columnist. Follow Lauryn on Twitter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Donald J. Trump. Jr. on Twitter’s Dialectical Negation of Conservatives No Matter What They Say

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Dialectical negation:

The dialectical movement involves two moments that negate each other, something and its other. As a result of the negation of the negation, “something becomes its other; this other is itself something; therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum”.

Tucker Carlson speaks with Donald J. Trump, Jr. on Twitter’s dialectical negation of conservatives no matter what they say.

This video published by on the Vlad Tepes Blog is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Video Message To President Trump: Pass Law Against Censorship & Political Discrimination

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It is impossible for most people to participate in the modern world without the internet and dominate platforms. It is the town square. Big tech and major social media platforms are banning and discriminating against those on the right. I have a message for Trump.

Help us in one of these ways:

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EDITORS NOTE: This column with video and images is republished with permission.

VIDEO: How Social Media Monopolies Silence Conservatives, How Anti-Trust Laws Could Help

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The Social Media Neutrality Panel was held on February 6th, 2018 at the Newseum in Washington D.C.

Rightside Broadcasting Network reported:

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, at 1:00 pm (ET) at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. thought leaders and prominent voices in alternative media will gather for a panel discussion on social media neutrality and the fight for diversity of voices online. The event will feature several prominent online conservative and moderate voices who have been impacted by social media bias, shadow banning and other methods meant to silence voices and limit readers and viewers access to information. Panelists will discuss political bias by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and by search engines such as Google.

A Harvard University study published on August 16, 2017, analyzed both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 election cycle. The study clearly shows that modern conservatives in America today have wholeheartedly rejected the liberal mainstream media.

The 2016 election cycle was the first election cycle where conservatives used alternative media news sources to gather information rather than turning to traditional mainstream outlets.

Conservative Americans abandoned the mainstream media in 2016 and will not be returning anytime soon. This paradigm shift forced left-wing tech-giants to take action. Tech giants today understand they have the ability to influence what information consumers see through their complex, and non-public, algorithms. Often this power is abused. Several conservative outlets, and countless individuals have been targeted, shadow-banned, and silenced by these tech giants.

By silencing these voices, big-tech is limiting information available to the American public and is a direct assault on First Amendment rights. The time for transparency is now! Tuesday’s panelists include Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, Pamela Geller of The Geller Report, Margaret Howell of Right Side Broadcasting, Oleg Atbashian from The People’s Cube, Tech entrepreneur Marlene Jaeckel and special video remarks by Michelle Malkin and James O’Keefe.

The panel included testimony from Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, Pamela Geller of The Geller Report, Margaret Howell of Rightside Broadcasting Network, Oleg Atbashian from The People’s Cube, tech entrepreneur Marlene Jaeckel. Topics all involved the current tech climate, social media bias, shadow banning and other methods meant to silence voices and limit readers and viewers access to information.

Watch the full panel discussion:

EDITORS NOTE: Pamela Geller Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She is also a regular columnist for numerous publications. Geller’s activism on behalf of human rights has won international notice. She is a foremost defender of the freedom of speech. Her First Amendment lawsuits filed nationwide have rolled back attempts to limit Americans’ free speech rights and limit speech to only one political perspective, and exposed attempts to make an end-run around the First Amendment by illegitimately restricting access to public fora.

In Geller’s statements, she discusses how major social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube have created the “new town square”, which they now have a monopoly on, and are using their platforms to erase and hide any viewpoint or person that does not conform to their pushed “progressive” values. Geller tells the audience how Google’s advertising platform went from being 70% of revenue from the Geller Report to them blacklisting her from the platform simply based on her conservatives views. She outlines how they do not just target voices they disagree with, but they make sure that those voices are unable to sustain themselves: “If they kill your ability to make a living, it’s a form of murder.”

Watch Geller’s entire statement below:

Report: 300 U.S. Muslims recruiting for Islamic State using social media

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Where are the programs in mosques and Islamic schools in the U.S. to teach young Muslims why they should reject the Islamic State’s understanding of Islam? Nowhere.

Legal cases of ISIS supporters

“Alabama woman one of 300 Americans using social media to recruit for ISIS,” by Leada Gore, AL.com, December 1, 2015:

ISIS sympathizers using social media to recruit new militants are in Alabama and every state, according to a new report that looks at terrorist infiltration in the U.S.

George Washington University’s Program on Extremism developed the report to determine how militants are using social media – especially Twitter – to foster sympathy and recruit new members. The study identified as many as 300 American or U.S.-based ISIS sympathizers who are using social media to connect and disseminate information.

The ISIS sympathizers are located in every state, the report shows. Their preferred social media is an ever-changing array of Twitter accounts, though they also use Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr, as well as messaging services and the dark web.

“The spectrum of U.S.-based sympathizers actual involvement with ISIS varies significantly, ranging from those who are merely inspired by its message to those few who reached mid-level leadership positions within the group,” the study’s authors, Lorenzo Vidino and Seamus Hughes wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security has active investigations into ISIS activities in Alabama and every other state, according to the Texas representative who chairs the House committee that oversees the agency….

The latest report looks at social media accounts and legal cases against ISIS recruits. Based on the cases currently within the justice system, New York and Minnesota are the states with the most activity; other hot spots are California, Illinois and North Carolina. Texas, Ohio and Mississippi all report an increased level of activity. Alabama is on the low end of the spectrum, with no reported legal cases involving ISIS sympathizers.

That doesn’t mean they don’t exist in states like Alabama, however; it just means they aren’t in the court system.

“The indictments are the tip of the iceberg,” researchers said.

So far this year, U.S. authorities have arrested almost 70 people for supporting or plotting with ISIS. That’s the largest number of terrorism-related arrests in the county in a single year since September 2001. Social media is a big part of that communications, the researchers said.

“While some seek to join the self-declared caliphate in ISIS-controlled territory, others plan attacks within the U.S.,” Vidino said. “It’s a growing and disturbing phenomenon.”

Hoover girl’s ISIS involvement

The report showed the average age of an ISIS sympathizer is 26; 40 percent have converted to Islam; and 10 percent are women.

One of those female ISIS supporters is Hoda Muthana, a Hoover teenager who left America to join ISIS in Syria and remains an active recruiter on Twitter. Muthana’s case is one of the ones detailed in the report.

Muthana, a Yemeni-American, used Twitter to connect with other Islamic militants online before she left the U.S. It was online that she met Aqsa Mahmood, a 19-year old from Scotland who was one the first Western females to travel to Syria, researchers said. The two communicated frequently and Muthana modeled her departure from the U.S. to Syria via Turkey on Mahmood’s.

Muthana later went to Syria where she married an Australian ISIS fighter, Suhan al Rahman, who has since been killed in an airstrike. Muthana, who now lives in Raqqa, Syria, remains active on Twitter, recently posting images of four burning passports with the message “Bonfire soon, no need for these anymore.”…

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20,000 Israelis Sue Facebook for Inciting Palestinians

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The video below shows some of the incitement that led to this lawsuit. While counter-jihadists are frequently suspended or have their pages taken down altogether from Facebook, this naked incitement to hatred and murder is just fine in Zuckerbergland. No incitement to murder, no calls for violence against innocent civilians, should ever be tolerated against anyone. But when it comes to inciting violence against Israelis, it seems to be fine with almost everyone.

“20,000 Israelis sue Facebook for Palestinian incitement,” by Edna Adato, Israel Hayom, October 27, 2015:

Citing incitement against Israel, Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center on Tuesday submitted a lawsuit against Facebook in a New York court on behalf of 20,000 Israelis. The lawsuit was submitted over claims that Facebook is facilitating incitement against Israelis and encouragement to harm them.

At the onset of the current wave of terror, Shurat Hadin, which works to fight terrorism on the legal front, began a petition to recruit thousands of Israeli under the title: “Suing Facebook — Disconnecting Terror.”

The organization is asking the court in New York to issue an injunction against Facebook to remove the inciting pages, monitor the methods of incitement and block them, and hold the social networking giant responsible for allowing terrorists on its network.

“Facebook has the means to research and monitor every word that appears on its website. It cannot be that entire pages on Facebook are devoted to incitement to murder Jews and that terrorists are permitted to publish posts that become popular among their friends and encourage them to kill. It is absurd that Facebook is being transformed into a tool for supporting incitement and attacks against Jews, and we intend to put an end to it,” said Shurat Hadin.

According to the plaintiffs, “The terrorists do not come on their own. They write posts and encourage their friends to kill Jews. Facebook has been transformed into an anti-Semitic incubator for murder.”

As one example, Shurat Hadin cited the case of 19-year-old terrorist Muhannad Halabi, who wrote on his Facebook page, “I want to become a martyr,” prior to carrying out a stabbing attack the following day. Halabi stabbed Aharon Bennett and Rabbi Nehemia Lavi to death.

Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat Hadin, said that “for every Israeli that is sitting now at home — there is something that can be done against terror. Join us now. This action is important in the same way as actions to increase security on the ground and its goal is to stop the terror. Today, Facebook has become a haven for terrorists: They publish their actions on their Facebook pages, garner support, receive instructions and direction to murder Jews — and all this under the sponsorship of a commercial company that has the power to stop it easily. At the time that Facebook suffices with words and tells us that it intends ‘to remove inciting pages’ — the website is filling up more and more each moment with severe incitement, and it is our task to do everything to stop this.”

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Brookings Study of ISIS Twitter Accounts Reveals U.S. among Top Targets

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A Brookings Institution examination of a complete data set of 20,000 ISIS Twitter accounts ranked Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and US as the top four locations of twitter users, The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter. The authors of the ISIS Twitter census are J.M. Berger and Jonathan Morgan.  Berger “is a non-resident fellow with the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings and the author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam (Potomac Books, 2011) and ISIS: The State of Terror (Ecco, 2015).”  Morgan “is a technologist, data scientist, and startup veteran. He runs technology and product development at CrisisNET, Ushahidi’s streaming crisis data platform, and consults on machine learning and network analysis. Morgan is also co-host of Partially Derivative, a popular data science podcast.”  The Brookings ISIS Twitter project was “commissioned by Google Ideas and published by Brookings”.

The Brookings Saban Middle East Center think tank has had a close relationship with the Obama National Security Council. Use of social media by Islamic extremist groups like ISIS figured prominently in President Obama’s recent, Summit to Counter Violent Extremism. See our March 2015 NER article, ‘Did President Obama’s Violent Extremism Conference Fail?‘

Notwithstanding the provenance of the Brookings Twitter Census report, the data and methodology are credible and revealing of  how ISIS and supporters use social media.  The authors noted three classes of Twitter users as a precaution interpreting the study results:

Covert supporters of ISIS:

Users who took medium to strong steps to conceal their support due to fear of prosecution or suspension by Twitter. Users who took only casual steps to disguise their support were generally detectable.

Pro-ISIS intelligence operatives:

Some users who follow accounts related to the enemies of ISIS, such as rival jihadists, would be coded as non-supporters under the conservative criteria we employed.

Anti-ISIS intelligence operatives:

These are accounts created to appear as ISIS supporters in order to allow ISIS’s enemies to monitor its activities, which would be coded as supporters (if done effectively).

Brookings ISIS Twitter top locations_jpg SMALL

Locations of ISIS Twitter Accounts. Source: The ISIS Twitter Census, Brookings Institution, 2015.

 Here is the  Twitter Census Data Snapshot drawn from the Brookings study:

Best estimate of total number of overt ISIS supporter accounts on Twitter: 46,000

Maximum estimate of ISIS supporter accounts on Twitter: 90,000

Number of accounts analyzed for demographics information: 20,000

Estimated percentage of overt ISIS supporters in demographics data set: 93.2 percent (+/- 2.54 percent)

Period over which data was collected: October 4 through November 27, 2014, with some seed data collected in late September 2014

Top Locations of Accounts: “Islamic State,” Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, U.S.

Most common year accounts were created: 2014

Most common month accounts were created: September 2014

Number of accounts detected using bots and deceptive spam tactics: 6,216 using bot or spam technology for some tweets; 3,301 accounts were excluded from the Demographics Dataset for primarily sending bot or spam content

Average number of tweets per day per user: 7.3 over lifetime of account, 15.5 over last 200 tweets by user

Average number of tweets per user (Over lifetime of the Account): 2,219

Average number of followers: 1,004

Smartphone usage: 69 percent Android, 30 percent iPhone, 1 percent Blackberry

Among the principal findings from the Brookings Twitter Census were:

  • From September through December 2014, the authors estimate that at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by ISIS supporters, although not all of them were active at the same time.
  • Typical ISIS supporters were located within the organization’s territories in Syria and Iraq, as well as in regions contested by ISIS. Hundreds of ISIS-supporting accounts sent tweets with location metadata embedded.
  • Almost one in five ISIS supporters selected English as their primary language when using Twitter. Three quarters selected Arabic.
  • ISIS-supporting accounts had an average of about 1,000 followers each, considerably higher than an ordinary Twitter user. ISIS-supporting accounts were also considerably more active than non-supporting users.
  • A minimum of 1,000 ISIS-supporting accounts were suspended by Twitter between September and December 2014. Accounts that tweeted most often and had the most followers were most likely to be suspended.
  • Much of ISIS’s social media success can be attributed to a relatively small group of hyperactive users, numbering between 500 and 2,000 accounts, which tweet in concentrated bursts of high volume.

Based on their analysis, the authors concluded:

Recommend social media companies and the U.S government work together to devise appropriate responses to extremism on social media. Approaches to the problem of extremist use of social media, Berger and Morgan contend, are most likely to succeed when they are mainstreamed into wider dialogues among the broad range of community, private, and public stakeholders.

Our assessment is that given the close Brookings Middle East Center liaison with the Obama National Security Council and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Richard Stengel, the latter tasked with social media counter messaging,  that little follow will occur. That is reflected in Google sponsorship of this Brookings Twitter Census report and overarching concerns of social media like Facebook, Google YouTube, Twitter and  Instagram about maintaining Constitutional guarantees of free speech.  These social media would prefer to establish their own criteria for suspending terrorists and supporters accounts.  Monitoring and development of metadata from  ISIS Twitter supporters in the West, especially in the US and the UK, should be left to counter terrorism intelligence echelons or private groups like SITE Intelligence Group and effective individuals like our colleague Joseph Shahda. Congressional Homeland Security and Select Intelligence Committees should hold hearings and investigations into current terrorist social media surveillance, especially for those US ISIS accounts identified in the Brookings ISIS Twitter Census.  Shahda commented after reading:

The only way to stop the terrorists propaganda and recruitment is to keep shutting down all their means of communications which means all their social media (Facebook, Twitter) accounts as well as their websites.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with graphics originally appeared in the New English Review.

Mind control 2013: Who is really controlling your mind?

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Mind control is the subject of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four“, which has regained popularity. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.

As George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Citizens globally are concerned about their governments spying on them. Others are concerned about media pushing an agenda rather than holding government accountable. Recent scandals like the NSA gathering data on hundreds of millions of US citizens and our allies is front page news. In many cases the NSA, FBI and CIA are accessing personal information which is stored by phone companies, web hosts and social media sites such as: Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. Governments want this data and many of these same media giants will share it based on court orders or voluntarily.

So who controls the present?

Geo-Intelligence posted an infographic (below) to show who controls major print publications, media, Internet sites and entertainment outlets in the United States. These few “privileged Inner Party elite” can influence how you think about everything from the purchase of laundry detergent to your social and political behavior. What you read, hear and watch is controlled by about forty organizations. When they work in concert with government and freely share your information it can violate civil liberties according to the ACLU.

Take a quick look at this infographic, you will be surprised who is involved in “public mind control”.

For a larger view click on the image.

George Orwell wrote, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”

There is online a free full version of the movie Nineteen Eighty-Four released in 1954, click here to watch it. Below is the trailer to the movie Nineteen Eighty-Four release in 1984 and available on DVD: