After the last newsletter I received several, "So what happened that you're not on social media anymore?" messages. Guess there are more of you out there who don't know than I'd realized, so I'll solve the puzzle here...
In 2020 I made the decision to pull the plug on social media for both myself (personally) & the RMBC. Man has it ever been liberating! At the time I had somewhere around 450,000 Facebook fans spread amongst multiple sites. The RMBC page was the biggest. Along with my friend Jim I also was behind Red, White & Blue News. I also had Black & Conservative, which I believe still exists as some of my friends/page admins - Casper, Ken and Nathan, said they'd like to keep it alive and I think they have. I was also a lead admin on Black Tea Patriots.
All of these combined to a pretty good online presence, so what happened?
As those of you who were around in those days will remember, I was constantly getting put into Facebook jail. Not for profanity or indecency or anything of the sort, but just the Facebook police deeming my content or comments 'in violation of community standards.' A day here, a week there, then eventually (as my minor celebrity status grew & I began popping up more and more on national news outlets) months at a time. But even that didn't do it. Here's what did.
The end of the Obama years & beginning of Trump were the height of the RMBC's Facebook page. So we're talking 2014 - 2019. Page visits, growth and volume were huge in those days. A good post on the RMBC page would garner 5,000+ shares and 500+ comments. A great one could triple those numbers. In a good week we would add 800 - 1,000 new fans.
By mid 2020, the time I decided to end it all, a good post would garner 20 - 50 shares and 10 or 12 comments and the page would add 3 or 4 new fans per week. Not 3 or 4 hundred - three or four!
This is no exaggeration.
In those days I was also a writer for a much, much larger page and website. I don't have permission to name names here (many of you know anyway) but that page had 2 million fans, a good post could easily get 50 - 80,000 shares and 5-6,000 comments. By mid-2019 a strong post would be shared 1,500 times and have a handful of dozens of comments.
This is what's known as 'shadow banning.' In addition to literally banning me/us for weeks sometimes months at a time Facebook and Twitter were clearly, blatantly muzzling conservative speech. They'd turned the spigot down so low our voice was little more than a trickle. Daily we got messages and posts from years-long followers saying, "I thought you guys were gone", "You don't show up in my newsfeed anymore", "I haven't seen anything from this page in forever." All this while they were at the same time promoting the voices of leftists. I know it, I saw it, I lived it.
[and I'm not going into Youtube terminating monetization of my channel, which is a story for another day]
Then, as the 2020 election drew near we saw those companies quit the subtle, shadow tactics. The NYPost uncovered very, very damaging information connecting Joe Biden and his son Hunter to a world of malfeasance & began reporting on it. This information would clearly be damaging at the ballot box. What did Facebook & Twitter do? Completely took down the Post's pages. Remember that?
Then they blocked Trump's accounts followed by a 'permanent suspension.' They banned the sitting president of the United States of America. The man had the largest number of Twitter followers on earth, it was a medium thru which he communicated with millions, and in the months leading up to his potential re-election they silenced him. We all know why.
I am a principled man. Perhaps zealously so. There is a long list of companies to whom I flatly refuse to give my hard-earned dollars. Social media is free to the end user. These companies - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, etc. - make money by monetizing your clicks. I reached the point where I could no longer in clear conscience 'fund' these outfits and thereby participate in funding their desires and efforts by not only giving them my clicks but also ushering the clicks of hundreds of thousands of others. So I signed off.
I lived and worked in Silicon Valley where these tech giants are located. I've spent time in the belly of that beast. I simply cannot participate in feeding it. And while I wish millions more would do the same, b/c every time you hop on Facebook each day you're funding liberty's demise, all I can do is take care of me. I'm out with no intention of coming back.
Now you know.
-dw
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