Unraveling Right-Wing Hegemony Online
In the media filter bubbles we create around us — for our own sanity — it’s easy to miss the fact that conservatives dominate digital media. This is a shift as significant as the rise of TV and the Kennedy brothers, and the left is losing big time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NI2NYFtKHs
That’s why we started The Lefty League — to fight back.
Let’s review:
- Tech for Change reports that in the 2018 cycle, Democratic Senate campaigns spent just 4–7% of their advertising budgets on digital. And yet online media, particularly Facebook, is the cheapest and most engaging form of advertising and right-wing oligarchs are spending hundreds of millions there.
- Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff, is traveling the world to encourage nationalists and dismantle cooperation between countries.
- And this week, Popular Information and the ACRONYM newsletter reported on the MASSIVE Facebook spending by Trump allies at The Epoch Times, PragerU, Blaze Media, and CRTV. Under the guise of journalism and debate, the right-wing hate machine is blanketing popular online media with unregulated propaganda. And sometimes it feels like the left is standing still.
Saturday, I joined Uphill Media’s YouTube show “Progresive Weekly Review” to talk about The Lefty League’s efforts to take the fight to the GOP. We’ve launched a trial of “ImpeachBot,” technology that automates and scales conversation on Facebook and can be used to promote popular progressive ideas in key Senate districts. And we began independent expenditures to troll the last seven members of the California Republican House delegation right out of existence (read more on the blog). We know that even $1,000 spent carefully in a district can make a GOP incumbent’s life uncomfortable — and we plan to cause a hell of a lot of GOP discomfort this cycle.
Will you support our work or share with friends who want to combat right-wing propaganda online?
