Meet the Company Trying to Control Your Mind. By Ben Shapiro.
First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney. There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.
In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with Big Tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Google-owned YouTube; the CCP’s TikTok; and even Snapchat and Pinterest.
This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, “Content not appropriate for any advertising support.”
In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace. …
Here’s how it works:
How exactly do the approved narratives set by these global entities get enforced all the way down to the daily content you consume? …
NewsGuard is an organization that formulates ratings for American media. They rank news sites on a 0-to-100 scale based on nine supposedly apolitical criteria. These criteria are anything but apolitical. They often align with left-wing positions.
During the height of COVID-19, NewsGuard falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites, only well after the fact admitting that they either “mischaracterized the site’s claims” about the lab leak theory — referring to the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory” — or “wrongly grouped together unproven claims” about the lab leak with the “separate, false claim” that the “COVID-19 virus was man-made” without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated and the other was false.
“NewsGuard apologizes for these errors,” they said. “We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”
And when you compare their ratings of Left-leaning news organizations to Right-leaning news organizations, you see the same bias appear.
The Media Research Center, a free-speech nonprofit, studied NewsGuards’ ratings. The study found glaring examples of bias by NewsGuard.
The Left’s BuzzFeed managed a 100 out of 100 perfect score, despite its reporting on the Steele dossier and alleging collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia.
The study found that The Global Times, a Chinese propaganda government outlet, scored a 39.5 — that is 27 points higher than the U.S.-based conservative outlet The Federalist. Despite a scandal at USA Today revealing the publication of multiple fabricated sources in their stories and their own fact-checking operation misleading readers on the history of the Democratic Party and the KKK, USA Today maintained the 100 out of 100 rating by NewsGuard.
And here’s how the the censors are forcing Twitter back into the fold. From Sundance:
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is the group who define the content on platforms according to their ideological worldview and then blacklist sites who do not align their content to support the GDI perspective.
[The GDI is backed by George Soros, and aims to defund conservative groups. It is separate but similar to NewsGuard.]
According to the Washington Examiner, Elon Musk has just partnered with them in order to enhance the advertising portfolio of Twitter and find ways to make it lose less money. …
Once you are reliant on the advertising, you must then comply with the content terms of the companies who control the advertising. Joining with a group to define “disinformation” is an outcome. …
In 2021, Twitter generated $5.1 billion in revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal. According to the New York Times, in 2023 that revenue has dropped to around $1 billion per year.
Musk stated during public conversation that Twitter was essentially break even at $4 billion, which was the position in 2022 just prior to his taking over. … Musk cut approximately $500 million in expenses from realignment and staffing reductions.
Musk has a $1.5 billion debt service on the loan he took out … The debt service alone is higher than his revenue. … Twitter Blue subscriptions are around 180,000 users, paying $11/mo. That’s around $2 million a month — a pittance in comparison to what he needs.
