Hopeful news! Facebook stock continues to plummet. Yesterday, Thursday, July 26, Facebook experienced the largest one-day decrease in market value of any company in history. As of noon today, bargain hunters are noticeably absent, as the stock price continues to fall.
Here is a sampling of the headlines being featured by Google.
Facebook Inc. (FB) Stock Plunges on Earnings
BREAKING: Facebook Stock PLUMMETS in largest One Day Drop in US History
Facebook Inc. (FB) Stock Has Analysts Baffled
This 20% drop in Facebook took place on a day when the overall stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, rose 1%.
$120,000 billion – poof!
Twitter followed Facebook today, also falling about 20%. Another $6+ billion wiped out.
YouTube, another social media giant, is buried inside Google. If the drop in Google stock price on Friday is attributed to its YouTube division, another (guesstimated) $37 billion has vaporized in the social media realm.
What’s going on here? Censorship.
Facebook, and its de-facto co-conspirators Twitter and YouTube, are “shadow-banning” conservatives, and it’s costing them users.
Shadow-banning involves keeping selected sites away from easy discovery, access and influence. In other words, tilting the playing field.
For example, VICE News reports that the sites of Republican National Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Donald Trump Jr., and at least four Republican congressmen don’t appear when entered into the Twitter search box.
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams reports that his tweets are automatically cut-off to a percentage of his followers to limit his influence. Twitter has responded to Adams. The “official answer is that no one, including [Adams], is shadowbanned on Twitter. It has never happened.” Right.
Project Veritas has an undercover video of some twits at Twitter bragging about turning off Twitter features for Trump supporters and other conservatives so that no one else is aware of what they might be doing, such as “liking” or retweeting a tweet.
The same sort of thing is going on at Facebook and YouTube [Entering “Tommy Robinson” or the title of the Tommy Robinson video I recently linked on iPatriot won’t get you to it.]
On the day of the big plummet Facebook graduated to outright banning, shutting down Alex Jones’ live InfoWars channel for 90 days. And on that same day President Trump tweeted:
“Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
Twitter and Facebook (and Google through YouTube) are directly challenging freedom of speech in America. They have drawn the attention of the people and the President. No wonder their stock prices are falling!
Abuses of power have always brought forth in the United States correctives; beginning with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Our Bill of Rights was written to thwart expansion of federal government power. A century later The Sherman Act established the principle that abusive power will not be tolerated in the private sector either.
What the social media corrective should be I do not know. Perhaps they should be regulated as public utilities. (But who will regulate the regulators?) Or maybe there should be a law explicitly prohibiting social media “viewpoint discrimination,” just as race and sex discrimination are prohibited. (The direct approach) Or maybe they should be broken-up as was done to AT&T under President Reagan in 1982. (Let competition solve the problem.)
Power corrupts. And here are Facebook, Twitter and Google/YouTube to prove it. Something must and will be done.
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