These pictures are not identical. Look closely at the face on the right. Remind you of anyone? – You can see how easily one face passes for another.
I found the following (short) video fascinating but I would quibble with one huge point: the vast majority of independent journalists/content creators cannot afford to pull something like this off. Being one myself, I can tell you that after a decade of having a blog that pulls in anywhere from 1,500 to 16,000 unique visitors a day (depending on the news cycle), we have made less than $500 (TOTAL) for the content.
That’s over the course of 10 years, folks!
And it’s not independent journalists.
Despite their near stranglehold on all sources of information, it’s ironic that it’s the mainstream media that has undergone an astounding drop in ratings. Up to 50 percent (perhaps more) of their viewership has shifted away from prime-time news (CNN, MSMBC, FOX, etc.) to independent content creators. And the elites can’t get their brains around why. They assume that like them, we’re cheating. For them, the truth is a commodity to manipulate. They are stunned that independent journalists, with “the truth and nothing but the truth,”are so successful in influencing others.
We’re a mystery. They can’t attack the content because, in comparison to what they’re dishing out, it’s obvious who’s playing loosey-goosey with the truth. So what do they do? They attack our person to make us look like a bunch of yahoos in flannel shirts. When that doesn’t work, they block us and shut us down; but no matter how much Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter suppress us, we’re like weeds that keep popping up through the concrete. So that’s why they ascribe the same tactics they use, to us.
But they’re wrong. They still don’t get it. Like the old samizdat in the now-defunct Soviet Union, we’re in it for the truth and we don’t care if our product is as slick as theirs. We know that we’re not technologically astute enough to fool anybody so why try? This is not our aim. It’s not our MO. It’s not our brand.
It’s not technology that makes independent journalists compelling. It’s that we’re truth-tellers.
The Left can’t seem to understand how imperative the raw truth becomes when all hell is breaking loose.
What it gets down to is this: People don’t like other people deciding what’s good for them. We see credible independent journalists pulled off YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook every day, and we resent the intrusion. Ultimately, their efforts at censorship won’t work. We’ll find these sources eventually. Why? Because those who covet the truth will go to the ends of the earth to find other truth-tellers. The elites aren’t going to always be successful in suppressing the independent content creators, but it is annoying, and what they’re doing leaves a bad taste in our mouths for the commodity which they are offering.
YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have taken a serious hit and by next year, they might not even be around anymore.
No one wants a sterilized version of raw news. Not anymore. The jig is up: we saw what they did on Election Night last November and no matter how slick Fox News’ election coverage was, or how much the info babes protested to the contrary, we knew we were lied to. We don’t want the news presented in a way where the reporter’s take on something is the foregone conclusion. We don’t want Facebook’s “fact-checkers” (who are anything but) deciphering what’s true and what isn’t. Frankly, all their efforts in this regard are why their numbers are plummeting. They’re selling snake oil. They’re the “deep fakes” and all the tools in their malevolent tool shed are beginning to look a little worse for the wear.
What they’re peddling isn’t the news and we know it.
If you’re coming from a position of truth, you don’t have to make fancy videos. The truth speaks for its self and it is a thorn in their sides. One truth builds upon another making it impossible to refute and if someone wants proof, we have that too.
With a lie, things become more twisted as time goes on and it gets harder and harder to link anything together. At some point, the lie will have to be retired because it stops making sense.
The truth, however, can go the distance and when you have a very large group of people looking at it all the time, it will override anything the elite has to offer. They’ve been peddling too much sh#$ for too long.
The yahoos have finally surpassed the Elites and our numbers are growing.
That being said, this video series is entertaining and it gives us some insight into what they’re doing.
World Economic Forum doing a smear campaign against truth tellers on social media together with big tech and potato head Joe!
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/misinformation-infodemic-world-vs-virus-podcast/
I went to their FB page. They had 2 posts today and only 17 in the last month. Their site was created 35 weeks ago! With over 1.4K members, you’d think they’d be able to do better than that. https://www.facebook.com/groups/wefpodcastclub
Ooo. I left FB some time ago because they put me in jail for quoting a news article they did not like. I will share the WEF FB link with my friend who will be able to tell me what’s on the site. Thank you for posting this.
Shared!!!! I go on their web page a couple of times a week to see what drivel they are posting. I am not on Fakebook.
That’s what Nicholas Cage would look like with the Caitlyn Jenner treatment.
Today’s so-called “Nazi” was a political moderate 60 years ago. Even Ted Kennedy gave a speech saying he doesn’t want to change the white majority. At this point literally every single political and social issue is manufactured. None of the things we are told to care about have any meaning in a normal society.
I might agree with the overall message of this essay, but in regards to deepfakes – I have somewhat of the opposite concern. It’s actually very easy to make these videos, with a simple home pc and without requiring any special skills. The software that allows you to do this is at least 3-4 years old at this point, and I’ve played with it in the past. It’s so simple, that the main purveyors of deepfake videos on Youtube at this point are bored 16 year olds.
It was before, that you needed practically studio-level equipment and technical expertise for these things, but this is no longer the case. The article you linked in your essay states as much. The big media conglomerates have lawyers, researchers, public shareholders, are beholden to the FCC and stand to lose a lot if it is proven they have been engaged in mass deception. Meanwhile, Joe Schmo on youtube can make a video where it seems like a dozen Hollywood celebrities confess to thinking that Hillary Clinton is pretty much the devil (I think George shared a video like that, as a joke, two or three years ago). His video just gets taken down, and there are no further ramifications. Meanwhile, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people might walk away from his video with the impression that they just witnessed, if only briefly, the lid of the Hollywood liberal conspiracy being lifted.
I don’t know, can’t sell me on “Big Media Conglomerate = Bad” with the argument of deepfakes. To me, these videos are truly concerning, but like I said – for the opposite reason.
When one is technologically savvy, as you clearly are (in a good way), it probably looks easy. People like me who have no interest in deceiving anyone don’t bother to learn and it looks hard.
That’s the thing; truth-tellers just want to tell the truth. They are not trying to trick people.
I don’t recall anything we’ve taken down with regard to something George and I created. If we took something down, it was something we reposted from somewhere else (like those memes George loves) that I think are in bad taste so I delete them.
George has no idea how to create a meme. (And and don’t tell him!)
One does not need to remember the truth. The one and only truth which will never be erased is the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Even in his day there was a massive smear campaign against him – yet the truth prevails.
One needs to remember every single lie and create another many lies after it to make it appear plausible. Another is continual repetition. I do not remember who or when the theory developed that a lie has to be repeated 64,000 times or that 64,000 need to believe the lie. If you do not believe the lie, you will be forced to drink from the well, being determined that you are insane, quarantined, or incarcerated.
The great lie to the lie it that it has a foundation – but it is a house of cards built on shifting sands – eventually when the great lie collapses it take the architects along with it.
In time, all lies will be shattered and the truth and light will prevail as Our Lord told us so.
No less a minion of Satan than Joseph Goebbels observed: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
He was actually talking about other people – namely the British – there, and it wasn’t even one of his quotes, by some accounts:
Back in the day of broadcast radio and TV, you needed an expensive license just to say hello on the air as well as equipment. That meant you needed a certain financial minimum to operate, and that always meant becoming a slave to corporate/NGO sponsorship which in turn was (and still very much is) a slave to so-called ‘shareholder activism’ (funded by Sorosian style NGOs). Your only other chance to compete was through print, and still, you had the problem of super thin margins/high capital costs to get the word out.
In this day and age of ultra low barriers to entry for ALL media (yes, even deep fakes are now Instagram easy to pull off, if you can’t do it yourself you can always hire someone living in a third world country to do it for you), the legacy media has shifted gears. In addition to their lamentations over how “nobody trusts professional journalism anymore”, the game is to prevent content from being found in the first place, and demonitizing it by pressuring social media hosts and payment processors, accusing them of funding foreign propaganda and “hate”.
Yet much in the way of the Soviet era samizdat (print) and magnitizdat (audio recordings), independent journalists and their audiences are always finding ways around the problem using technology and innovation. It’s an ever evolving cat-and-mouse game.
Unfortunately you’re always going to get the unsophisticated news consumer, who simply resorts to the defaults on their phone and browser to stay apace of the news. That person is always going to get their perspective filtered simply because they won’t look past the first page. It is this “movable middle” that the legacy media relies on to keep its dominance in place.
Interesting perspective. What we have found is that both our haters and supporters read the blog. We write on a wide variety of things. We’re like a tabloid and a legitimate news source all wrapped into one. (Unlike other tabloids, however, we tell the truth.)
We purposely use nondescript titles and pictures so you have to read the story to find out what we’re talking about. For Orthodox Christians, they’re going to get the news stories whether they look for them or not. — Most of our readers look at 4+ pages when they come to our site. They can’t help themselves, even those who dislike us! Inquiring minds want to know!