Social Media Uses #Fakenews and Stalinist Efforts to Help Repeal Ireland's Pro-Life 8th Amendment
Social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google want to mine and control information. Like their news media predecessors, they are some of the largest culprits of disseminating #fakenews.
This is particularly heartbreaking because the internet was the average person's means of circumventing a monolithic Leftist mainstream media. It was a powerful and cost-effective way for small nonprofits like ours (The Radiance Foundation) to get out a factual narrative that challenged the singular one regurgitated by an entire establishment.
But now, the Titans of "Tolerance" are showing their true (homogeneous) color. It's Stalinist Red. Silicon Valley's overt and transparent effort to thwart free speech is scary. Forget Russia's alleged U.S. election meddling. The whole Leftist regime is meddling. The Left is fighting to repeal Ireland's prolife position as enshrined in the nation's 8th Amendment: "The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."
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Global social media platforms, touted as making us an international community, are now punishing people for reaching across national boundaries to have meaningful conversations about issues that profoundly impact us all. In a blatant attempt to silence the #SaveThe8th messaging, Facebook will now prevent any foreign "ads" (including clearly identifiable boosted posts) from reaching Ireland's Facebook users. Google announced it will refuse all ads on the referendum.
The pro-abortion side has celebrities, mainstream media and George Soros-funded groups like (Sh)Amnesty International to propagandize the small island nation. Prolifers depend on social media tools to communicate, but it's become a separate and unequal situation. The Deities of Disinformation will not allow it. (I wonder if they'll do the same for efforts to curb global human trafficking, or gendercide, or the plight of child laborers in developing countries?) We wouldn't want to "meddle" in another nation's political matters, right? The Washington Post article, which attacks prolife organizations for "interfering" and "distorting democratic politics", features the pro-abortion #RepealThe8th campaign logo as its headline image. Nope. No interference there.
Facebook hides behind bogus efforts like the Transparency Referendum Initiative (TRI), which MSM describes as a "group of Irish technology advocates" who are calling for an "open, truthful and honest debate" in Ireland's abortion referendum.
TRI is anything but open, truthful and honest. Scrutinizing this supposed "non-partisan" watchdog group and its claims requires something that is anathema to most of the news media—actual journalism. On its website, TRI claims: "We are building a database of all political ads targeting Irish Facebook users ahead of the referendum on the 8th amendment. We are publishing a list of these ads, so they are open to scrutiny by journalists, fact checkers and anyone wishing to understand the campaigns."
Yet TRI's effort is the #fakenews it claims to be exposing.
TRI's database includes numerous U.S.-based prolife groups who've "stealthily" paid for political ads in order to influence the abortion referendum. Keep in mind, they claim to "filter" Facebook ads by using, in part, these keywords: abortion, unborn, foetus, pro-choice, pro-life. So basically, that would include anything ever posted about abortion. That's not a filter. It's a catch-all. This explains why the fraudulent TRI included The Radiance Foundation, LifeSiteNews, and Rachel's Vineyard, for instance, in its widely reported database. From CNN to Politico to The New York Times to Wired to the Irish Times and many more, leftist journos repeat TRI's lies.
Radiance is included in this bogus database for our post expressing support for NIFLA's (National Institute of Family and Life Advocates)
battle at the Supreme Court here in the United States. The post has everything to do with pro-abortion legislation trying to force pregnancy centers to promote abortion; it has absolutely nothing to do with Ireland's referendum.
And here's the irony. Facebook forces Radiance to boost some of our posts because the "progressive" platform suppresses our content all the time. Another irony: the post features our meme that says: "Love Free Speech." This particular TRI-identified post was boosted for a whopping $5.49!
The same applies to LifeSiteNews.com. Not a single one of the four LifeSiteNews entries in TRI's database has to do with Ireland's Abortion Referendum. Three are generic appeals for donations (see here, here, and here), and one is about Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signing a 15-week abortion ban. Yup. I can see how some would confuse that for Ireland.
Rachel's Vineyard, a very nonpolitical post-abortion ministry, is also included for its completely unrelated post.
Do you see the #fakenews trend here? Yet mainstream media holds up TRI as some kind of unbiased and legitimate information source. I even reached out to one of TRI's founders, Liz Carolan, who boasted on Twitter of the massive media coverage her fraudulent initiative is receiving: "Stories built using our work today in Vice, Politico & Open Democracy – anyone who thought they could misuse social media in this referendum & get away with it was mistaken."
I asked her why she's misusing social media by including our post in the database despite it having nothing to do with Ireland's abortion referendum. In an evasive response she claimed: "Our database is built from ads that are found in the Facebook feeds of Irish people, which has content related to the forthcoming referendum, which is on abortion access, so any content that fits this criteria is left in." First of all, anyone who uses terminology like "abortion access" is not neutral in this fight; only pro-abortion activists use that language. Secondly, our content didn't fit the criteria. Thirdly, when I asked her if she'd remove our unrelated post from the database, she ignored the question.
Any mainstream media outlet could have asked her the same questions and more. How many of these hundreds of entries are bogus? The bigger question, though, is one of free speech. How long until Google, Facebook and Twitter decide to muzzle everyone whose perspective doesn't fit their criteria?
