But somebody following her got offended and retweeted it, and then their followers saw it and got triggered and retweeted it, and then she soon began trending from so many people being upset about her tweet even though she was just some random person on Twitter. She and her tweet then became a national news story and she ultimately ended up getting fired from her job.735
Twitter is often fueled by anger with people venting their political frustrations through tweets like irate sports fans yelling at the TV. For others it’s a narcissistic circus where they derive their self-worth by getting likes and retweets since the immediate engagement can become addicting because their notifications release dopamine similar to getting a small payout from a slot machine at the casino.
The instant gratification of getting feedback becomes a deeply engrained habit that’s hard for people to break. Perhaps the only good thing about Twitter is President Trump’s tweets. Previously, to hear what a President had to say, he would have to hold a press conference or give an interview, but now with Twitter he can fire off his thoughts on anything at any time, day or night, and then the media reports on it—often over-reacting to the point of having a meltdown.
There have been calls to ban him, and groups have even started petitions and presented them to Twitter with the foolish hope they would shut down his account, but he’s still there. Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams even said he was sorry for his creation helping Donald Trump get out his message during his campaign in 2016 after Trump told the Financial Times that without it, he didn’t think he would have won.736 “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry,” Williams said.737
Trump knows and loves the power of Twitter, but the big question is—will he still tweet after he’s left office? Barack Obama broke the unwritten rule of not criticizing his successor, and it’s been the tradition of former presidents to not inject themselves into matters involving the next administration, but both Barack Obama and George W. Bush have been openly criticizing the Trump administration, so after he leaves office he may not sit by silently, and could regularly criticize the next administration as well, and it will be hard for people to ignore what he’s saying since his Twitter feed has become such a newsmaker.
There may be only one way for the Liberal Media Industrial Complex to silence Donald Trump, which is why they are constantly painting him as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, and incessantly calling him a fascist dictator, because they are hoping to incite some unhinged lunatic who believes what they say to assassinate him.
YouTube
Most people don’t realize this but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, after Google of course, and it’s also part of the same conglomerate since Google bought YouTube in 2006 for 1.6 billion dollars. Later corporate restructuring put both of them under the new umbrella company Alphabet Inc. When referring to YouTube many people consider it a part of Google, but it should be considered its own separate entity, which it technically is, with its own CEO — Susan Wojcicki.
For the better part of a decade after YouTube was launched, it was largely seen as just a website for user generated entertainment. It was the place for people to upload funny cat videos and show themselves doing stupid “Internet challenges,” but a small group of people (myself included) knew from YouTube’s beginning that it was a powerful tool that could be used to share news and analysis about current events and other important issues that weren’t being properly addressed by mainstream outlets. It was like having our own public access cable channel where we could do anything we wanted with the potential to reach an audience of millions, and for some of us, that started happening on a regular basis.
For over a year after the 2016 election, the mainstream media’s war on “fake news” (in reality a war on independent news and ordinary people using social media to get out their message) focused almost exclusively on Facebook and Twitter since the news giants saw them as being responsible for completely losing their power to control the national narrative surrounding major issues and events.
The mainstream media could no longer prevent certain information from becoming widely known and millions of people were spending their time scrolling through Facebook, and Twitter, and watching YouTube videos instead of engaging with the traditional news outlets that had dominated the industry for decades since their creation.
But Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton was a wakeup call for the Liberal Media Industrial Complex, so they launched a bold new effort under the disguise of fighting “fake news” to completely reshape social media. While they first focused on Facebook and Twitter, eventually they stumbled upon a huge secret that was right in front of their nose for years. People like me were creating YouTube videos on a regular basis covering news and politics and we were getting enormous audiences rivaling or beating cable news. In the run-up to the 2016 election my YouTube channel was averaging around 700,000 viewers a day, about half of what CNN’s primetime shows like Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon get on their best nights.738
But now the Establishment discovered the “fake news” problem was flourishing on YouTube, they said, and it had to be stopped by changing the algorithm to artificially favor mainstream media channels over videos posted by ordinary YouTubers. In October of 2017, sociologist and technology critic Zeynep Tufekci said, “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” after realizing there was much more to YouTube than cat videos and pranksters.739 Traditional media outlets discovered the world of underground news and they were shocked at just how popular we were.
Slate pointed out that Twitter and Facebook had been receiving the brunt of criticism about spreading “fake news” but, “Now a series of controversies is forcing YouTube to address its responsibilities more directly and candidly than it has in the past.”740
Soon YouTube would completely change the way the website had functioned for the previous ten years, and turned it from what was meant to be a place where anyone with an important message could post videos and build an audience, to mostly just another mainstream media site filled with brand name news channels and videos of familiar celebrities.
By mid-2018, as Wired magazine points out, YouTube was “ditching vloggers” in favor of Hollywood celebrities. “YouTube used to be all about young digital influencers who managed to threaten TV with their video blogs. Not anymore. It seems that YouTube is opting for traditional celebrities instead.”741
Another blogger noticed the changes and ran with the headline, “YouTube is turning away from its creators to become a new MTV,” and noted, “YouTube can’t promise brand safety with volatile creators on the platform — advertisers don’t want to be caught in a firestorm. The only move is to pivot, and YouTube is ready. Hollywood names like Will Smith and Demi Lovato are safe bets. Same with music videos already vetted by major record labels.”742
YouTube, which for over a decade was a place for independent content creators to upload their videos, even began producing shows themselves.743 For the better part of ten years since its launch in 2006, Hollywood studios and mainstream celebrities didn’t pay much attention to YouTube. They either were afraid of it because it threatened their monopoly on content distribution, or they were too blind to see how the new technology was revolutionizing media and helping to create new kinds of stars.