It’s the US’s master narrative, or nobody’s
RT, the Russian broadcaster, got itself an ‘ad-ban’ on Twitter because it spent $270,000 on boosting its news tweets. The wrong news tweets. News tweets that don’t fit the US’s master narrative.
For anybody who isn’t familiar with how US social networks really works (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.): you actually have to buy views and likes and subscribers. Indirectly. How that works: Your posts by default remain ‘unseen’ or ‘hidden’ thanks to impenetrable algorithms and won’t appear in searches UNTIL you pay for boosting their visibility.
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There is no such thing as a free visibility
Large corporate media with huge resources make good use of so-called ‘partnership packages’, and RT was offered such a package by Twitter in 2016, too. But now the US Democrats accuse Russia of having meddled into the 2016 US election with its Twitter activities because the Democrats’ favorite candidate, crooked Hillary Clinton, lost against Donald Trump. So, America does what it does best: Blaming the tweeting Russians.
RT is not the only media harassed, patronized, and finally censored on US social media. Most alternative media and independent content creators are facing some form of demonetization or discrimination. Censorship is rampant. Millions of videos, articles, posts, and comments “disappear” from Google search results and/or are removed by social media curators.
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US social media: Gatekeepers of news and communication
“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”
-Karl Marx, quoted in Orientalism (1979)
To academics, this development isn’t new or at all surprising: The US dominates the internet. Foreigners-Orientals-are welcomed, as long as they partner-up and play to the US tune. The so-called global public services-Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon-are all US companies and global monopolies that treat their foreign ‘sub-partners’ any way they want, but mostly: poorly.
This RT story is really the story of all World history [with a capital ‘W’], isn’t it: The East must be represented. The Russians, but also the Iranians or the Chinese, are not allowed to participate: Western rules and guidelines apply. The West would never tolerate the East to meddle into the Western master narrative-not in academia, not in politics, and certainly not in the news and media, and, now, the internet. RT on its ban from Twitter:
