Look back to April 18th 2017 and the day that Theresa May called the snap election of hubris, and you'll remember how all the talk amongst the political pundit class was of the UK becoming a de facto one-party state, the only debate being whether May would be crowned Brexit Queen with a super-majority or a mega-majority.
The polls had the Tories over 20 points ahead of Labour. One poll even had them taking double the vote (48-24). Theresa May had some of the highest approval ratings in history and Jeremy Corbyn was being treated like a figure of ridicule by most of the mainstream media.
Within seven weeks Theresa May's reputation has been shredded, the Tory lead had evaporated (in the end the Tories won the General Election by less than a million votes) and Jeremy Corbyn walks away as the undisputed champion of the election for the way he conducted himself with the integrity of a true statesman, and never once crawled down into the political sewer to sling insults, abuse, smears, deliberate misrepresentations or lies back at the Tories and their despicable right-wing media bully boys..
Jeremy Corbyn fought a fantastic campaign. To millions his authentic optimism was a refreshing antidote to Theresa May's robotic repetition of her catchphrases (many of which will continue biting her for the rest of her political career), her cowardly refusal to debate her political opponents, and her refusal to give straight answers to even the most basic and mundane of questions.
We all saw how Corbyn has been monstered by the mainstream media, not just the filth that was relentlessly lobbed at him during this election campaign, but also during the two Labour leadership contests in 2015 and 2016 (where "left-liberal" publications like the Guardian were amongst the worst offenders).
Jeremy Corbyn has a lot of admirers. A lot of people remember him as one of the leaders of the Iraq war protest, and a lot of people really appreciate his statesmanlike refusal to crawl into the sewer and slinging abuse back at the Tories and their bully boy hacks in the mainstream media.
These Corbyn supporters needed media to turn to, and remembering the treachery of the supposedly left-wing media they turned in their droves to independent media.
#2 Why you need to speak to someone who works in the NHS (85,045 shares)
#7 Theresa May's extraordinary Facebook meltdown (50,885 shares)
In the final week of the general election the Another Angry Voice Facebook page generated almost one million likes, comments and shares. That's almost as many as the Labour Party Facebook page managed, and significantly more than the Facebook pages of all of the other political parties combined!
That's one lone wolf guy making more Facebook noise than the pages of every UK newspaper except the Daily Mail and the Independent. And a huge amount of the Daily Mail's interactions were on their clickbait honey trap videos (you know, cute kids, fails, and cat videos) to lure people into their depraved extreme-right echo chamber.
Evolve Politics was even more viral than Another Angry Voice. Their virality rate for the final week of the election was an astounding 578%, working out at 5.78 interactions per follower in a single week!
With just 92,000 followers Evolve Politics content generated more engagements than the page of the ruling party in the final week of an election campaign!
The best virality the mainstream media managed was 0.4 interactions per follower achieved by the Independent (they produced some fantastic articles to hold Theresa May and the Tories to account, so I'm not at all surprised they were the most viral mainstream media source).
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| 7m+ views! Astounding statistics, but all I did was say something that needed to be said. |
The Canary, despite having slightly lower interaction and virality figures than AAV and EP, also played a huge role because their content was very much dominated by factual well-sourced articles rather than the mix of articles, infographics and videos approach taken by the other two pages.
The phenomenal virality of factual independent media content should be one of the dominant stories of the post election analysis, but the mainstream media are skirting around it for some reason.
Either they're too blind to have even seen it (do they have no Facebook friends in real life or what?) or they saw it going on and decided not to give any extra publicity to the fact their carefully planned election narratives were getting totally annihilated on Facebook by two small left-wing websites and a lone wolf blogger!
Of course there's a lot of speculation for the mainstream media political pundits to do over the future of the nation under a hung parliament with the Article 50 clock ticking (well done for the smooth and orderly Brexit Mrs May!), but their inept attempts to frame the election through the prism of Brexit-Remain goggles are painful to watch.
This election was so obviously a battle of truth against lies.
Honesty is undeniably in the ascendancy in British politics, thanks in no small part to Jeremy Corbyn for leading by example, and to an epic social media fightback against a frankly depraved smear-mongering campaign by the billionaire propaganda barons and their minions, and the transparently fake pro-Tory "neutrality" of much of the political pundit class.
Maybe the mainstream media will wake up to this absolutely essential honesty vs lies theme at some point? I guess they'll have to won't they. Millions upon millions of us are now seeing right through their propaganda tactics, their depraved smear-mongering and their smug fake neutrality.
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