The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is one of the biggest political scandals of our time. It has shaken the entire American political system to its core and deeply divided the American public in one fell swoop. The leak may have shifted a few important paradigms about the American political establishment, but more importantly, it has changed the way many Americans view the media.
As it turns out, new media is just as censored as conventional means of information and, arguably, a lot easier to tamper with. On September 6, 2017, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, published a blog post about Russian interference in the electoral process, calling it “an organized attempt to misuse our platform.”
Stamos wrote, “The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”
The words “didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate” do not matter. Most of the mainstream media, as well as their favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton, made sure to spin these facts so they fit their narrative, which, in a nutshell, is: “Russians elected Donald Trump.” They are yet to prove their conspiracy theory, but they will have a hard time arguing against Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett’s written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he writes that Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using the #PodestaEmails hashtag, adding that “the core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks.”
On the other hand, they do not have the need to argue facts. Why would they, when they can just bastardize them to fit their narrative? They will, undoubtedly, do so, just like they have done with the Facebook ads scandal, and they will continue to feed propaganda and misinformation to the public, disgustingly reinforcing the conspiratorial hive minds of their favorite online echo chambers. These hermetically enclosed echo chambers orbit the propagandist and Orwellian mainstream media as it throws them bones of propaganda. And it is safe to assume that they will continue to do so.
Meanwhile, the right wing is jumping at the chance to lure in more voters through, ironically, the biased media propagandists they control. The metaphysical space between the American left and the American right, instead of being a place of public discourse and productive debate, is slowly turning into vacuum. A vacuum which sucks in and obliterates any and all attempts at free thought.
[Featured Image by Andrew Burton/Getty Images]