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March 28, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – There has been a disturbing trend on the Internet during especially the past several months that should be of deep concern to all conservatives. This trend has also been having a serious negative effect on readership and funding for all conservative websites, including LifeSite. It has been affecting our recent fundraising campaigns but this time, during our Spring campaign, we are especially getting hit hard. Still, we are managing to do relatively better than most conservative websites and blogs, many of whom have had to shut down because of factors beyond their control.

The trend I am referring to is an almost declared war by the globalist social media giants – Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube against websites, blogs and individuals who promote conservative views or even just factually report news that is seen as any kind of threat to progressive hegemony. It has gotten especially ugly over the past several months with Facebook leading the way in trying to shut down conservative voices and now giving strong preference to liberal websites and views.

Doug Mainwaring reports in another article today on the effects of the most recent Facebook algorithm changes. They have caused even the massive Breitbart News' Facebook engagement to drop by 28% and PragerU dropped by a whopping 32%, despite publishing 18% more content.” 

Mainwaring also states,

“In the month following the algorithm change, engagement on Donald Trump’s Facebook posts dropped sharply,” according to a Breitbart report.  “Total engagement dropped by approximately 45 percent, according to data from leading social media analytics firm NewsWhip.” 

All of these discriminatory changes by the Internet giants appear to ultimately be directed towards especially one main goal – to fix the November mid-term US elections so that there cannot be a repeat of the massive Republican win of 2016. The services of Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter were very effectively used by grassroots Americans to bring about that 2016 win. The Internet oligarchs are determined to not let democracy reign like that again this coming November. They despise genuine democracy.

Hurting our Spring fundraiser

Right now, all of this is definitely hurting our fundraising campaign. We are being actively prevented from reaching all the people we used to easily reach with our news stories and our appeals during our 2-week campaigns.

Therefore, to those of you who were not blocked from reading this letter, we are depending on you much more than normal to help us to  reach our goal this time while we work on new strategies to overcome the Internet monopolies' discriminatory tactics. 

Internet has been a godsend to conservatives

For many years, the Internet has been a godsend to conservatives – allowing us to finally bypass all the liberal establishment media and information controllers and go direct to the public with the truth on many subjects. Now, we suddenly find ourselves rapidly going full circle back into the past where a few powerful liberal elites are trying to control what we read and which ideas are allowed to be promoted to the public.

In the past, Facebook played a massively positive role in the growth of true freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We and many others took full advantage of what Facebook offered to us. As a result, we grew to reach millions with our news and information that was a clear and welcome alternative to the establishment-controlled media that very few trusted anymore.

Readers come to read LifeSite stories via three main ways:

  1. From Facebook. This is by far our largest source of readership and spreading the truth about the many issues that we cover. LifeSite Facebook pages have a total of almost one million likes. That is, one million persons have chosen to receive LifeSite Facebook posts in their personal Facebook feeds. These are legitimate, not purchased likes. These people all WANT to read our materials – and have been doing so by the millions.

  2. Google search results and Google news. This is the second largest source of LifeSite readership

  3. Email subscribers. LifeSite has a large list of individuals subscribed to our various email lists. This is our core and most loyal readership.

Regarding 1., Facebook has drastically changed the rules and is not allowing our posts to reach most of those who have liked our pages. LifeSite postings are being blocked for the most part. Only a fraction of those who have liked our Facebook pages are permitted to see our stories anymore.

In a must-read article on Breitbart, John Nolte charges,

Facebook (along with Twitter and YouTube) are all guilty of bait-and-switch. They lure us onto their platforms with the promise of unbridled free speech, create their respective monopolies, and then go the full-Kafka against opinions that personally offend them.

Some people respond, “Don’t rely on Facebook” or “don’t use them.” That is almost impossible at the moment.

Nolte explains why in another must-read article, Arguments against breaking up Facebook don’t hold water

Facebook has monopolized a vital part of the online public square where almost all of the civilized world (two billion users!) communicate with friends and family.

And now that Facebook has trapped all of us onto its platform, thus ensuring there is no alternative, Facebook is arbitrarily censoring conservative ideas and speech.

Worse, in some cases, Facebook is violating our right to free assembly by purging us entirely from its public square — greatly restricting our right to free association and deciding what real news is.

As for 2. Google, by far the world's dominant search engine, the rules have also radically changed. Google has been deliberately downgrading conservative views and news in it search results and discriminating in favor of progressive or liberal information and news such as the world’s leading Fake News services The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, etc. Facebook is also similarly now discriminating in favor of those same heavily biased news services. 

LifeSite has seen its Google ranking go down and down, the same as with Facebook, at a time when the quality and volume of our news reports have been going up and up.

The same has been happening with Twitter and YouTube. And globalist giants Apple and Amazon are also very supportive of these repressive measures against conservative views. The election of Donald Trump and his thwarting of their globalist plans has caused all of them to turn into Internet thugs.

I could go on at length.

See Doug Mainwaring's more detailed, excellent article today on the current manipulations by the Internet monopolies. It is very revealing and presents ideas about what can be done to resolve this situation. Contact information for you to take action is provided.

In the meantime, please donate to LifeSite today. We are still short an unprecedented $138,000 of our necessary minimum goal with only 2 days left in our campaign.

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