Saturday, April 13, 2024

The End Of The Affair

I expect the judge to bring this up on Monday. The trial is where talking about witness becomes a very serious matter. It’s already illegal, Hercules. Try to live in this century. My serious expectation is that the judge will remind Trump on Monday of the gag order, impose one on the parties and witnesses (no talking about the case with witnesses), and make it clear Trump is at liberty for the trial, but he can be remanded to custody and spend the trial in jail every night if that’s what it takes. This is a criminal jury trial, and judges don’t let parties fuck with that. Besides, anything Trump says can and will be used against him. He can effectively waive the 5th with this shit.
The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Farhi wrote. "Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent." 
"FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing 'only' 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago," he added. 
According to Farhi's research, the primary reason for the precipitous drop in clicks for far-right websites is ultimately due to Facebook. Conservative publishers were for years dependent on Facebook engagement as a primary source of traffic. The social media platform's algorithm (the complex code that determines what content shows up in a user's feed) had predominantly favored outrage, as content that provokes a negative reaction is more likely to get a user to click, like, comment or share a post. 
In 2020, Vox reported that the Facebook algorithm was overwhelmingly favorable to conservatives, with far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino bringing in tens of millions of clicks per month from Facebook engagement. Progressive media analysis group Media Matter for America found that anti-transgender content in particular generated a disproportionate amount of clicks for conservative websites. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose found that "conservative pages were beating out liberals’ [pages] in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive." 
Amid a wave of criticism from Congress and international bodies over Facebook being exploited by bad actors to influence elections, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the algorithm in 2018 aimed at promoting content from friends and family over news publishers. He further tweaked it in 2021 to further deprioritize content from publishers, which has, over time, resulted in far fewer clicks for the conservative publishers that used to dominate the platform. 
"All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites," Farhi wrote. "The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media."
The report notes that right-wing media has fragmented, not vanished from the face of the earth. But J6 was a very centrally organized effort, straight out the White House to Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to major media sites and there to individuals. It was a very group effort; and if you’re not gonna get the band back together…
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