Check out Another Angry Voice on Substack

During the Another Angry Voice heyday I was getting huge amounts of traffic from Facebook and Twitter, but I've gradually been tuned down to such an extent that links I post to this blog are now virtually invisible to the 400,000 people who follow AAV across these platforms.

During the 2017 General Election Facebook virality made me the most shared political writer of the entire election campaign. Three of my articles achieved over a million hits each (the #1, #2, and #7 most shared articles of the entire campaign), and almost all the other articles easily passed 100,000.

These days AAV has been tuned down so much that it's a rarity when one of my increasingly rare blog posts beats 10,000 hits, which equates to a 90%+ collapse in visibility since 2017, despite my follower count continuing to rise slightly.

The Facebook algorithm has basically made AAV invisible to 97% of the people who follow the page, including many thousands who have explicitly asked for AAV to be prioritised in their feed via the "see first" option.

I've basically got no choice at this point but to try to diversify my social media presence, and creating a new AAV Substack seems like the logical pace to start.

Substack is like a blog host, social media account, fundraiser, and mailing list all rolled into one.

The main benefit is that there is no dodgy social media censorship algorithm between me and my Substack audience, deciding on their behalf that the majority of them no longer want to to see any of my content.

If you follow me on there, you'll get notifications every time I put up a new post, unless you decide to unsubscribe for yourself.

I'll aim to do around five posts per week to begin with to avoid overwhelming people with too much stuff.

I'll continue posting things on Facebook too, because I still have a huge audience there. But the new plan is to try to build Substack up as a kind of "inner circle" for my most supportive and enthusiastic readers.

I fully expect the majority of Substack subscribers to choose the free option, but if you can afford to sign up for a paid subscription you will be helping me out enormously, and supporting me to keep producing more content.

Here's the link:

Another Angry Voice on Substack

Thanks everyone,

Tom (Another Angry Voice)
 

The shocking truth about Saudi Arabia that Facebook doesn't want you to know

In March 2022 Facebook deleted one of my posts about the tyrannical government in Saudi Arabia, and accused me of "hate speech".

I was allowed to appeal, but only by clicking a button saying that I disagreed with their decision. There was absolutely no means of submitting evidence that what I'd said was true.

The deleted image, and
Facebook's warning

The deleted post made a number of claims about Saudi Arabia, which I will substantiate in this article.

"The Saudi tyranny just mass executed 81 people"

This is a completely uncontroversial statement of fact.

This barbaric mass execution was widely reported across scores of media sources, including the BBC, left-leaning outfits like Byline Times and hard-right broadcasters like GBNews (archived) It was also condemned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. 

Saudi Arabia is "committing war crimes in Yemen"

Saudi Arabia's ongoing bombardment of Yemen hardly gets a fraction of the coverage of Putin's attack on Ukraine, but that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

Human Rights Watch have documented multiple Saudi war crimes in Yemen, and it should be widespread knowledge that the Saudis have bombed all kinds of civilian targets from funeral gatherings, to children's school busses.

Saudi Arabia "fund and support terrorism"

In 2016 Hillary Clinton's leaked emails demonstrated that the US government were well aware that Saudi Arabia were funding terrorism in Syria.

Furthermore US President Joe Biden has openly admitted that Saudi Arabia provided "hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons" to Al Qaida's successor organisations in Syria.

Then there's Boris Johnson, who accused Saudi Arabia of "twisting Islam" and conducting proxy wars across the middle east.

Saudi Arabia have also provided funds to terrorist insurgencies in Afghanistan, which led to the creation of Al Qaida, and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, in which 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis.

Saudi Arabia "brutally repress political opposition"

Saudi Arabia's repression of political opposition is well documented. Amnesty International reports that in Saudi Arabia freedom of expression, association, and assembly are all repressed.  

Their repression of political dissent is so extreme that they've even sentenced a 14 year old child to death for attending a pro-democracy march!

It's hardly hateful conduct to point out that one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth is politically repressive.

Saudi Arabia "dismember critical journalists"

This is clearly a reference to the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, where the Saudi regime lured him to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where they tortured him, murdered him, dismembered his body, and dissolved it in acid. 

The murderers then reportedly took Khashoggi's severed fingers back to the Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salmen as a trophy, because he'd boasted that he'd cut off the fingers of any writer who criticised him.

Khashoggi was just one of the dissidents and critical journalists targeted for assassination by the so-called "Tiger Squad".

Saudi Arabia are "misogynists and homophobes"

Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth for women's rights, and they still have the death penalty for homosexuality.

Even when they don't condemn homosexuals to death, they dish out utterly barbaric punishments like public lashings, and long prison sentences.

Saudi Arabia "threaten terrorist attacks against western countries to get their own way"

The Saudi regime famously threatened terrorist attacks against Britain in order to get an investigation into corrupt arms deals shut down, and during a spat with Canada a verified Saudi Twitter account posted a photoshopped picture of a 9/11 style terrorist attack against Canada!

Boris Johnson went to Saudi Arabia to "grovel for more oil"

Johnson's grovelling trip to Saudi Arabia was widely reported. And the reason for his visit was repeatedly given as seeking an oil deal in an attempt to reduce reliance on Russian energy supplies.

Conclusion

I've substantiated every single assertion in the banned infographic, but the truth simply doesn't matter to Facebook.

They've set up reporting systems that are incredibly easy to game. Whether a post is true or not is completely irrelevant. The simple truth is that if the post gets mass reported, then it'll be deleted as hate speech, no matter how easy it is to substantiate literally all of the points.

What we're witnessing is an absurd weaponisation of liberal language in order to erase fact-based criticism of probably the most illiberal regime on earth.

Defenders of this disgusting regime are gaming Facebook's report functions, and using the language of anti-racism to pretend that truthful criticism of Saudi Arabia is racist hate speech.

And by going along with these tactics, Facebook are complicit in attacking the truth.

The deletion of my post came with a warning that the Another Angry Voice Facebook page is under threat of deletion, so if it does disappear, you'll know that one of the main reasons it was deleted out of existence was the fact that I chose to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia, and instead of standing up for the truth, Facebook stood with the tyrannical regime to attack me for telling the truth.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Spot the Difference

In 2019 voters in the Don Valley constituency in South Yorkshire elected their first ever Tory MP, a private landlord by the name of Nick Fletcher.

It's absolutely astonishing that people in a poverty-stricken post-industrial part of South Yorkshire would wilfully elect a member of the Tory party as their MP, but political memories are clearly incredibly short, and it seems like people have already forgotten the horrific Tory de-industrialisation policies of the 1980s and 90s that annihilated local economies across the north of England.

They've forgotten the disastrous de-industrialisation policies; they've forgotten the demented Tory "leave it to market forces" fanaticism of just leaving entire towns to rot, so that younger generations had no choice but to leave for more affluent areas where they could actually find decent well-paid jobs; and they've forgotten the Tory austerity ruination that siphoned £billions out of local government budgets as they were simultaneously lavishing tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich!

It's bad enough that people in a left-behind former coal mining area elected any Tory to represent them on the political stage, but it's especially galling that he's a property-hoarder who profiteers off parasites like him buying up all of the affordable housing, so that ordinary people are forced into paying off his mortgages, rather than buying houses of their own.

He's not just an economically unproductive exploiter representing a party that inflicted ruination on the area he represents, he's also ridiculously dishonest, to the extent of taking people for absolute mugs.

On December 21st 2020 he posted a Facebook selfie, taken in the town of Thorne.

On September 20th 2021 he posted the exact same selfie, with Christmas trees still visible in the background.

And on November 10th he posted the same selfie again claiming to have visited the town, and seen it "thriving again after a tough year".

Of course using the same photo over and again isn't even remotely on the same scale of dishonesty and corruption that Johnson's Tory party is absolutely mired in (dodgy PPE contracts, the Owen Paterson scandal, Geoffrey Cox skiving parliament to earn £hundreds per hour representing a tax haven; Tory donors apparently buying peerages at £3 million a pop; MPs accepting freebies from gambling companies then lobbying for them in parliament; David Cameron lobbying for Greensill to get £350 million in Covid loans just before they went bankrupt; Rishi Sunak's wife investing in a firm just weeks before her husband gave them a massive loan ...), but misleadingly posting the same photo multiple times is the kind of dishonest behaviour ordinary people would call their friends out for, isn't it?

It's similar to Tory liar Lucy Allan's bizarrely staged election pictures in 2017.

Of course her mendacious lie about not being invited to remembrance day events (when she actually had her constituency manager reject both invitations) is worse, as is the way she fabricated a death threat in order to smear a constituent who wrote to her in 2015 urging her to oppose David Cameron's war-mongering in Syria, but the fact these people resort to deception, when it would almost certainly be easier to just tell the truth is illustrative of their characters, isn't it?

It absolutely boggles the mind that people wilfully vote to put charlatans like this in parliament, especially when it's people in deprived former coal mining areas like the Don Valley.
 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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8 ways to over-ride Facebook's censorship algorithm

As regular readers will know, the Another Angry Voice Facebook page has been having its posts hidden from its audience for over two months, based on ludicrous and unappealable accusations that links to facts and evidence constitute "spam".

Even before Facebook imposed these ridiculous and unjustifiable sanctions, the Facebook algorithm has been making Another Angry Voice, and a whole host of other independent left-leaning media sites, far less visible to their followers since 2018.

As a result of these changes to the algorithm, the vast majority of the 377,000 people who follow Another Angry Voice on Facebook never see a single post from it, from one month to the next.

Here are eight tips for trying to over-ride Facebook's censorship algorithm.

1. Weed: One very simple trick to improve your Facebook feed is to weed the pages that you follow. Go to your follow list and unfollow anything you’re not interested in any more.

2. Prioritise: Go into the "follow settings" on the Another Angry Voice page, and set it as one of your "favourites", this means you'll be much more likely to see AAV content in the future.

3. Reboot: (no need to do this if you did step 2). Go to your list of followed pages, then for any you particularly like Unfollow the page and immediately Follow again. This makes it look like the page is a ‘new interest’, which will give it priority in the algorithm.

4. Interact: Regularly interact with the Facebook pages that you particularly like (like, comment, share). The more you do this, the more you'll be shown their content in your Facebook feed. Even if it's just hitting the "like" button and leaving a one word/emoji comment on each post you see from them, this prioritises the page in your feed (I absolutely guarantee that no page owner is going to be annoyed at likes and/or one word/emoji replies).

5. Bookmark: Save the Another Angry Voice Facebook page as a bookmark in your usual web browser, and check in on it every now and then to see what the Facebook algorithm hasn't been showing you.

6. Backup: Follow the dormant AAV backup page Yet Another Angry Voice, which exists in case something happens to the main page.

7. Upgrade: Install the Facebook Purity add-on to your web browser. Then select the setting that over-rides the Facebook algorithm and allows you to see your news feed in chronological order. FB Purity is a truly excellent add-on, which dramatically upgrades the whole Facebook experience in multiple ways. There are a few other downloads that allow you to see your Facebook feed in chronological order too: Social Fixer is a browser add-on, and Friendly Browser is an app that works on mobile devices.

8.Diversify: Follow Another Angry Voice elsewhere (the blog and the Twitter account):

These tips also work for other Facebook pages that you particularly like. Add them as a 'favourite' in the page setting; interact regularly; bookmark them; follow their content on other platforms; and install an add-on to see your Facebook feed in chronological order.

I hope you find these tips useful.

If you have any other tips for over-riding the Facebook algorithm, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Tom (AAV)

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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How social media platforms reward misinformation-spreaders

Dan Hodges is the anti-left polemicist who wrote the Daily Mail's grotesque "Labour Should Kill Vampire Jezza" article, just ten days after Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street in 2016.

Dan's absolutely notorious for his ability to find the wrong take on pretty much any subject, and many have even argued that he's actually delivering some kind of absurd wrong-on-purpose performance piece designed to create as much reaction as possible.

You may well ask why on earth anyone would want to make themselves look like a venal, mindless idiot on purpose, just for attention?

The reason of course is that social media sites are designed in such a way that the loudest, crudest, most attention-seeking idiots actually get rewarded by the algorithm, as a result of the reaction to the bile and misinformation they spew.

These grifters either get their content positively shared by users who have had their minds rotted away by years of exposure to the venal radical right culture war bollocks, or it gets amplified by masses of reasonable people trying to point out how wrong and/or completely unreasonable they're being.

The golden ticket for attention-seeking grifters is the kind of post that does massive numbers from both of these target audiences, like that dreadful GB News hack who was invited onto the BBC to argue in favour of drowning migrants, which caused the extreme-right demographic to gleefully retweet clips of it, and liberal icons with vast social media followings like Gary Lineker to spread it further and wider by retweeting it in order to say how much they disagreed with it.

This kind of polemical attention-seeking grift is the entire modus operandi of GB News, and it's absolutely no surprise that Dan Hodges has got himself involved with their professional grifting operation.
 

In some cases the traffic is entirely made up of condemnation, as with Dan Hodges' economically illiterate interpretation of a BBC News item about a tiny fall in the rate of inflation, which he tweeted with a caption reading "Cost of living falls, just as everyone predicted".

Over a thousand people responded with comments pointing out that Hodges was completely misrepresenting the meaning of the story, either through economic illiteracy, or out of a desire to deliberately spread misinformation.

It's absolutely obvious that a fall in the rate of inflation from 3.2% to 3.1% is not wonderfully good news for the British people, or for the government, when the inflation target is 2%, and the Bank of England rate of interest is a paltry 0.1%, but who cares about facts and evidence, when Dan can just claim the article he's sharing means the opposite of what it actually says?

A fall in the rate of inflation, is simply not the same thing as inflation falling (deflation), and it's no wonder that public understanding of economic issues is so poor, when high profile commentators like Dan Hodges spread economic misinformation like this with impunity.

After such a large backlash, anyone with a shred of decency would delete the post and put up an apology, but attention-seekers who value their social media numbers above their reputation would never erase such a post, because 1,400+ negative replies, and 400+ negative quote tweets all still point to the Twitter account of Dan Hodges.

For being totally wrong about something, Twitter rewards him with thousands of links pointing to his profile, and the algorithm even begins automatically offering his account as a 'suggested follow' to people who got involved in the conversation about how wrong he was!

Why on earth would Dan Hodges delete his reward for spreading misinformation?

And it's clear that he knows it's misinformation too, because his follow up Tweet admitted that he got it wrong, then smugly implied that the people at fault are actually the ones who got "agitated" by his misinformation (which produced himself another reward of hundreds more negative replies and negative quote tweets).

Dan Hodges publicly admits that he knows that it was wrong, but he's leaving it up anyway, meaning there's no way it can now be interpreted as anything other than deliberate misinformation.

And he's actually gloating at all the people who have called him out, and revelling in all the attention and free publicity!

If social media sites like Twitter actually cared about confronting misinformation, they'd allow users the means to effectively report misinformation (crowdsourced peer review), reduce the visibility of misinformation-spreading accounts, and improve the visibility of accounts that routinely tell the truth and cite their sources.

Instead, social media algorithms reward misinformation-spreaders by treating all the criticism of their misinformation as if it's people merely sharing and replying to something that's "interesting"!

We're well into the second decade of the social media age, and none of the social media platforms have even attempted to try to effectively resolve this rewarding misinformation problem.

In fact Facebook has even developed a bizarre "violations" system designed to reduce the visibility of accounts that cite evidence and sources, whilst allowing outright liars to get off scot free!

This failure to address the rewarding misinformation problem means the rabble-rousers, hate-mongers, attention-seekers, and misinformation-peddlers are obviously going to continue gaming poorly-designed algorithms to bag themselves ever more social media prominence.

In a system in which the more wrong, more venal, and more provocative the content, the higher the reward, it's natural that amoral attention-seeking grifters like Dan Hodges would continue to work the system to their advantage, isn't it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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How Facebook is systematically persecuting evidence-based debate

It's been obvious for a long time that misinformation has been a huge problem on social media, but Facebook's cack-handed efforts to counter it are massively counter-productive, because they're systematically punishing the pages that cite their sources, while letting the liars get off completely free!

Any social media site with the slightest sense of responsibility towards the standards of public discourse that they host on their platforms, would seek to actively encourage evidence-based debate, and discourage the spreading of outright lies.

But instead Facebook is systematically punishing pages that cite evidence via unappealable decisions that their evidence constitutes "spam", draconian distribution restrictions to dramatically reduce the audience of the evidence-citing pages, and even profoundly intimidating threats to delete the pages outright if they carry on trying to engage in evidence-based debate.

The draconian restrictions and threats against Another Angry Voice began on September 3rd 2021, with a supposed "spam" violation, which was actually an article on the independent left-wing media site Skwawkbox, posted to justify an assertion about the ongoing persecution of left-wing Jewish activists within the Labour Party.

The only previous "violation" of Facebook standards on record was one solitary algorithm glitch on a June 2020 post, which was absolutely hammering the Daily Mail for their support of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, where the algorithm somehow concluded that because the image contained a picture of Adolf Hitler, it must have constituted glorification of Nazism. The appeal against this ludicrous algorithm glitch was then ignored.

So just two so-called "violations" in well over a year, and the Another Angry Voice page gets hit with draconian reach restrictions, and intimidated with threats of outright deletion!

Since then, Facebook's "spam" algorithm has gone absolutely wild, with accusations that links to the following all constitute "spam":

• A link to an article about HGV driver shortages on the UK newspaper The Independent.

• A link to an article from the trade union Unite posted to counter an outright lie about what trade unions had been saying about Brexit (Facebook obviously took no action against the completely unsourced lie)

• A link to the website of the British Safety Council

• A link to the Another Angry Voice website, which has never even contained adverts, let alone "spam". There's obviously something seriously wrong with the system if the algorithm is flagging links as "spam" even when the link is from the website the page that posted it takes its name from!

Every single one of the these five links flagged as "spam" is from entities that have their own Facebook pages! (if they truly were spam-peddlers, why does Facebook allow them to have official presences on their platform?)

And every single appeal against these false accusations of "spam" has been met with a boilerplate notification that Facebook is too short-staffed to actually investigate the appeal, so it just stays on record as a "violation", adding more distribution restrictions, and edging the page ever closer to deletion.

Every single one of the links being punished as "spam" was either posted to justify a factual assertion, or to counter an outright lie with facts and evidence to prove it wrong, yet they're being used as the basis of draconian and unappealable punishments.

The strangling of the page via distribution restrictions is bad enough, but the threat of outright page deletion is a profoundly sinister attack on the concept of evidence-based debate.

If people think they're going to get their page deleted, just for backing up their assertions with facts and evidence, Facebook is actively making itself an anti-scientific forum, in which citing sources is punished, rather than rewarded.

Not only does this systematic persecution of evidence-sharing discourage the responsible practice of citing sources to justify assertions, it also gives succour to misinformation-peddlers by intimidating and dissuading those who would be inclined to counter their lies with links to facts and evidence.

If Facebook really wanted to counter misinformation on its platform, they wouldn't be systematically persecuting evidence-sharers, and restricting the visibility of their pages, they'd be rewarding them, and giving them priority over the misinformation peddlers, and over those who don't bother to evidence their claims.

But Facebook is a profit-seeking corporation, so their priority isn't the fostering of healthy evidence-based debate on their platform, it's whatever makes them the most profit in the short-term.

I'd argue that Facebook's best strategy for the long-term would be to introduce some kind of social peer review, via a gamefied feedback system designed to reward pages that provide verifiable information, and reduce the reach of those that promote lies, and also to reward users that provide accurate peer review feedback, and penalise those that try to game the system though malicious misreporting of links that they just don't like.

But as is always the case with capitalism, it comes down to the conflict between short-term profit and long-term gain.

It's obviously more profitable in the short-term for Facebook to allow the misinformation-peddlers to keep churning out content on their platform, whilst introducing cheap sticking plaster solutions (like appending automatically generated information warnings onto posts based only on keywords, and algorithmic solutions that end up systematically persecuting evidence-based debate).

But they really need to consider whether it's a good long-term branding strategy to run their site as a vast misinformation hub, where misinformation-peddlers spread their lies with impunity and those who approve of, and engage in, evidence-based debate are actively driven away onto other social media platforms.

I'd be more than happy to talk to someone at Facebook about these issues, but it's basically impossible to get hold of anyone there, even to get the false 'violations', distribution restrictions, and intimidating threats removed from my page, let alone to talk about better strategies for combating actual misinformation-peddlers on their platform.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Who are the people behind all these annoying fake-grassroots Tory spam ads?

During the 2017 General Election campaign several small independent left-wing sites (Evolve Politics, The Canary, Another Angry Voice ...) went absolutely mega-viral on Facebook, generating hundreds of thousands of interactions, and millions of views, without paying out a single penny on sponsored Facebook adverts.

Incredibly I produced the number one, number two, and number seven most viral articles of the entire general election campaign, without paying Facebook anything. The articles went mega-viral purely because so many people liked, shared, and commented on them.

Facebook will not allow this to happen again.

Last year they dramatically clamped down on small independent media sites, using their algorithms to prevent any repeat of this kind of mega-viral independent media phenomenon.

So instead of seeing organic viral content in your Facebook feed this election, you're increasingly likely to see sponsored anti-Labour attack adverts from fake-grassroot organisations that have spent thousands of pounds to inject their propaganda ads into the Facebook feeds of their target audiences.

In this article I'm going to look at four of the worst offenders so far, and reveal the people behind them.

Working4UK

This fake-grassroots attack page was created on October 29th 2019.

The person behind it is Tory Party councillor Suraj Sharma who initially tried to pass it off as a non-political page to bypass Facebook's rules on political advertising. He was soon caught and made to register with the Facebook Ad Library, where you can see the propaganda he's been sending out, how much he's been spending, and who he's targeting with this Tory propaganda dressed up as grassroots activism.

Clearly none of this spending is being registered as Conservative Party election spending, and it's entirely unclear whether Sharma is using his own money to bankroll this propaganda campaign, or laundering it from elsewhere.

Right to Rent, Right to Buy, Right to Own

This page is masquerading as some kind of property rights advocacy group, but if you check out the sponsored ads they're pumping into people's Facebook feeds, it's clearly just a succession of hyperbolic anti-Labour, anti-Corbyn propaganda ads.

The page was created on September 30th 2019, less than a month before the general election was called, and has already managed to pick up 2,000 followers (presumably a bunch of selfish buy-to-let slumlords).

Clicking through to the "RtR,RtB,RtO" website provides absolutely no detail on who is behind this propaganda operation, with their "About Us" section telling you absolutely nothing about who they are, other than the fact they hate Jeremy Corbyn, a lot.

The Facebook Ad Library entry for this propaganda outfit names someone called "Jennifer Powers" from Surrey as the person who paid for all of these anti-Corbyn ads, and guess what ... she turns out to be another Tory party activist.

Parents' choice

This page promotes the private school sector, and defends the ability of elitist private schools to hide behind charitable status in order to avoid paying tax, despite many of them raking in tens of thousands per pupil, per year.

The page was set up on October 11th 2019, and has been pumping literally thousands of pounds worth of Tory propaganda into people's Facebook feeds.

The man behind this fake-grassroots operation is yet another Tory, this time the former Tory MP Richard Patrick Tracey.

Campaign Against Corbynism

This anti-Labour propaganda outfit is the most vitriolic of the lot, and guess what ... check out their Facebook Ad Library entry, and the guy paying for all of this vitriol is a Tory party activist and Conservative Home columnist called James Bickerton.

This page stands out from the others because it was created in March 2019, rather than immediately before the general election campaign, but it's pursuing the exact same strategy of blasting huge amounts of cash on pumping fake-grassroots Tory propaganda into people's Facebook feeds.

Where does all the money come from?

Back in 2017 left-wing pages like mine didn't need to pay Facebook to spread our content news feeds. We relied solely on the fact that we were providing an alternative narrative to the lamentable mainstream media narrative that Theresa May and the Tories were going to romp to victory, with the only possible debate being the eventual size of their thumping parliamentary majority.

This time around the Tories are attempting to buy the Facebook election with numerous fake-grassroots pages blasting through thousands of pounds each to inject their crudely disguised Tory propaganda into people's Facebook feeds.

It doesn't take a lot of investigative work to figure out who is behind these disingenuous propaganda operations, but it's impossible to trace where the money to pay for these propaganda ads is actually coming from.

Are we seriously expected to believe that these pages, most of which popped up out of nowhere at the exact same time, using the exact same tactics, similar graphic design styles, all operated by Tory party insiders, are not part of some deliberate coordinated Tory party effort to flood Facebook with a tsunami of fake-grassroots Tory propaganda?

Do they really expect people to be this gullible?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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How Google are helping the Tories rig the general Election. Again!

Google's corporate code of conduct famously includes the phrase "don't be evil", but if deliberately colluding, for cash, with one political party to rig elections in their favour isn't "evil" then it's hard to know what is.

In 2017 Google accepted wads of cash from the Tories in order to help them hijack political searches so that anyone in the UK searching "Labour manifesto" would end up seeing an outrageous Tory attack site full of outright lies as their first search result.

In any sensible country this kind of cynical manipulation would have been legislated against so that political parties can't hijack political searches with attack ads, but given that the party of government were beneficiaries of these cynical, democracy hijack tactics, and most of the rest of the Westminster establishment class are a bunch of bloody incompetents, and the Electoral Commission are an absolute joke of an organisation, nothing whatever was done.

So Google and the Tories are at it again, this time hijacking search terms like "register to vote" and "postal vote" to serve up Tory attack ads as the first result, instead of neutral links with information on how to actually register to vote, or obtain a postal vote.
 

4 examples of this Tory-Google attack ad strategy
(click to enlarge)

The link description in these attack ads includes hyper-partisan Tory slogans like "back Boris", "get Brexit done" or "don't risk Corbyn", and the link itself takes you to a data harvesting page where the Tory party collect your personal information under the guise of needing it to register you to vote!
Research has shown over and again that huge numbers of people are incapable of differentiating between genuine search results and sponsored adverts, so it's not like pumping hyper-partisan political propaganda has no effect. If it had no effect, the Tories wouldn't be blasting huge wads of cash on doing it would they?

Just imagine if you enquired with your local council about how to register to vote or obtain a postal vote, and instead of offering you neutral advice, they sent you a load of hyper-partisan party political propaganda for one particular party.

There would be absolute outrage about it, especially if it turned out that this particular political party was actually paying the local council staff to supply their propaganda, instead of impartial advice.
 

If you click the link, it takes you to this
Tory data collection page.

But since it's Google behaving in this outrageous manner, it's apparently perfectly fine and acceptable!

Just consider all the scandal surrounding Russian efforts to hijack our democracy, and consider that by rigging their search results Google is doing a much more effective job of undermining our democracy, and they're doing it for cash, out in the open, because nobody seems to care.

And even if there aren't specific rules against this insidious collusion between Google and the Tories, it would easily be within Google's power to reserve democratically sensitive search terms to prevent this kind of sponsored hijacking (in the way that Twitter have banned political adverts), but they don't lift a finger to protect democracy, because helping the Tories hijack democracy is a nice little earner for them.

Of course Google aren't the only ones actively helping electoral cheats and liars to destroy democracy, what with Facebook making a special exemption for political parties to allow them to tell outright lies in their paid adverts.

For the best part of a decade the Tory party have allowed tech giants Google and Facebook to pay virtually no tax on the vast profits they make in the UK, and now Google are once again actively colluding with the Tory party attack and undermine democracy.

Something needs to be done because if left unchecked, democracy is going to be undermined to the point of destruction by the tech giants, not particularly because they aim to bring about the end of democratic era, but because helping electoral cheats and liars to wreck democracy is a nice little earner for them in the short-term!

That's the banality of evil right there.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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