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Can You Understand why Populism is Popular?

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Dr Brian of London ✅
@brianoflondon
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Yesterday I wrote about how Facebook isn't woke enough for the woke crowd.

Today Kara Swisher writes in the New York Times that she is leaving Facebook. Zuckerberg is probably personally devastated. More on that story later. In the mean time it led me to this tweet by another NYTimes writer, Kevin Roose, which seems to be bemoaning the fact "far-right" figures are so darn popular on Twitter.

And as I said in my retweet: are these popular figures, hated so much by the far-left, popular because of Facebook or despite it?

Here's part of what Kara Swisher writes in the New York Times:

Clean Up Your Act, Facebook, or We’re Leaving

Last week, you announced that you are finally labeling the most egregious dreck that is broadcast on Facebook by President Trump, after years of his escalating behavior. But it’s too little, too late.

And it’s too calculating. You and other Facebook executives keep hauling out the tired line, “We know we have more work to do.” It’s irksome. And you won’t like me when I am irked.

You seem to be shifting toward labeling — after insisting recently to your employees that you would not budge on this — in reaction to a campaign to persuade advertisers to boycott your company, a movement known as Stop the Hate for Profit. After years of other forms of pressure that apparently failed, those who are seeking to force you to change are finally getting traction by focusing on your wallet, knocking billions off your net worth in recent days, as your stock price goes down.

This refers back to the ADL led Stop the Hate for Profit campaign I wrote about yesterday.

And while she does mention the big brand boycott which is gathering steam, she fails to mention how little a difference this makes to Facebook's global revenue (the highest-spending 100 brands are $4.2 billion or only 6% of revenue). In fact she unwittingly hits at the real problem with a bit of anecdotal evidence (she's addressing Zuckerberg directly throughout the piece):

Your stranglehold on the ad business is undeniably the source of your power. I talked recently with some people running businesses that rely on Facebook, all of whom are scared to speak out publicly against your platform. Many compared your service to a bad relationship.

“I really cannot stand them at all,” said a leader of a medium-size company that gets a lot of its leads on Facebook. But while he worries about the damage Facebook is doing to society, he added, “I am going to keep marketing there because I have no choice.”

The current far-left hysteria over the idea Facebook and other social networks are allowing "hate" to flourish seems to exist because these far-left ideologues cannot ever believe populism can be popular.

There is a blind spot in their culturally Marxist world view for anything that doesn't conform to their increasingly insane set of intersectional and heavily race based world view. They cannot comprehend how populism is popular without believing insane hoaxes such as Russia tricked people on Facebook to like Trump, or a ghost story of Hitler making Tommy Robinson popular in the UK.

When your world view is built on such nonsense, it is no wonder every solution to any given problem which you propose, will be silly.