The Daily Mail is a hateful and divisive hard-right propaganda rag that deliberately stokes divisions in society in order to deflect criticism away from the mega-rich establishment class (like their tax-dodging billionaire owner Jonathan Harmsworth, and the Tory political establishment they promote so relentlessly).
So it's particularly ironic to see the Daily Mail run a front page splash about how Facebook is supposedly "ripping society apart".
Anyone with a few brain cells to rub together knows that the main purpose of the Daily Mail is to rip society apart as much as possible in order to prevent solidarity forming between the lower orders, because they know as well as we do that if the British people actually stood together for once and demanded change, the tiny self-serving cabal of establishment elitists would be powerless to stop us because we massively outnumber them.
So they divide and divide and divide. They continually stoke hatred of immigrants, Muslims, single mothers, the unemployed, refugees, students, judges, public sector workers, Millenials, academics, and anyone who expresses even remotely left-wing or liberal ideas.
The central purpose of the Daily Mail is to continually divide society, yet here they are damning Facebook for "ripping society apart" on their front page on the very same day that Rupert Murdoch's biggest propaganda rag launched their own front page attack on Twitter.
Once we see this front page Daily Mail attack on Facebook as part of a concerted mainstream media campaign against social media, we get to the main point of it.
The Daily Mail hate Facebook and other forms of social media because they give a voice to other people. Social media gives a voice to people like me to point out what a vile extreme-right propaganda rag the Daily Mail is; their history of promoting fascism and praising Adolf Hitler; their support for modern day fascists like Norbert Hoffer in Austria, their contempt for democracy and the rule of law; their call for Jeremy Corbyn to be killed just weeks after Jo Cox was murdered in the street, the fact they've been banned from Wikipedia as an unreliable source; the racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes they continually promote; and the way they regularly ridicule the credulity of their own damned readers.
Despite being one of the most hateful and divisive publications in Britain, there are many at the Daily Mail who actually consider themselves to be the rightful gatekeepers of public discourse. So it fills them with impotent rage that social media is allowing other people to express dissenting opinions, and undermine the enormous power and influence of the right-wing billionaire press barons they work for.
Of course Facebook and Twitter are not perfect. Anyone who has ever ventured into the extreme-right Britain First hate chamber will know the kind of terrifying depravity that these companies host on their sites, yet the extreme-right, immigrant-hating, anti-Muslim, ultra-nationalist hate fest that is Britain First is simply a purer distillation of the hatred that Daily Mail hacks have spent decades deliberately stoking.
The Daily Mail can't really be angry at the existence of hatefests like Britain First, other than for the fact that they're stealing the target audience of hate-filled, extreme-right, white supremacist halfwits they've spent decades cultivating for themselves.
This furious front page splash is proof that Facebook and other social media sites are an absolute disaster for the Daily Mail.
Not only does social media provide a platform to decent people to stand up and offer alternatives to the divisive, hard-right, pro-establishment propaganda that the Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing press churn out on an industrial scale, social media also provides a platform for extreme-right fanatics like the Britain First mob to steal and further-radicalise the Daily Mail's own core audience of angry hate-filled right-wingers.
So social media is undermining the power of the Daily Mail from both ends.
The direction of travel is obvious now. The Internet is breaking down the walled ideological gardens of the past. Only the older generations and the technology averse still turn to a single source like the Daily Mail for their news. Ever more people are obtaining their news from myriad different sources via our social media feeds, which may include the occasional Daily Mail article, but alongside all sorts of other stuff, including independent media pages like this one.
The Daily Mail hacks are like the Luddites who wanted to reverse the industrial revolution by smashing milling equipment. They're furiously decrying social media because they desperately want the social media cake to be unbaked and returned to its neatly segregated ingredients like it was before.
This anti-Facebook headline is another piece of evidence that the right-wing propaganda barons and their mercenary hacks are losing their vice-like influence over British political discourse, and the mix of terror and impotent fury this erosion of influence is provoking in them is an absolute joy to behold.
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