Recently, I watched a Korean drama called “Please Enter Keywords”, which is about two search engine giants in South Korea who use all sorts of methods to fight to the death for market share.
There was a time when we were happy to live in a world of freedom of speech, free from surveillance, happy to enjoy “freedom from fear,” but today we find ourselves unwittingly caught up in a web of information manipulation, with the mainstream media and online social media as the protagonists in this living drama.
Many people have become accustomed to using search engines to find information, or for the material in hand to do Factcheck, which has led to the birth of several search engine giants in the world, ranked by market share in 2019, the world’s top five search engine companies are: 1. Google, about 78% market share, 2. Bing about 8%, 3. Baidu about 7%, 4. These five giants together have a market share of 98%.
In other words, 98% of the world’s people rely on these five companies to search for information, and Google alone accounts for 78%. This is a very dangerous signal, because the information we want every day is supplied to a large extent by them, and the data we use every time becomes the material of those companies, and after big data calculations, it becomes the information that is fed back to us. We are surrounded by this filtered information on a daily basis, and over time many of us are slowly living in a stratosphere of information, with less and less objectivity in our judgments and observations. Thinking patterns are gradually tilting to one side.
In the case of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, for example, coverage of the election was controlled by a number of web giants, with Google, Facebook, and Youtube deliberately deleting many unfavorable messages about Biden and conspiring to conceal the truth. However, while the results of the U.S. election are still controversial, and the final results are still waiting to be decided by the Supreme Court or Congress, these social media outlets continue to deal with Biden’s election as President-elect, creating established facts about Biden’s presidency, which is a classic form of brainwashing.
I have worked in journalism and have great respect for Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, CNN, the BBC and other international mainstream media, which can become mainstream media and have a decisive position on the influence and credibility of the masses, but are also more likely to become the most effective brainwashing tool. The string of Biden-linked scandals, the blindness to Biden and Democratic election fraud, and the unanimous declaration of the election by virtually all mainstream media outlets before the final verdict was reached, even though there was overwhelming evidence of serious fraud in several key states, have all but destroyed the credibility they had built up over the decades.
Many people still believe that the election was conducted in a fair and impartial manner and have no doubt about the millions of questionable ballots and unreasonable changes in the election results.
In the face of such a serious wave of brainwashing, what we can do is to raise our own awareness and change the habit of relying on a single source of information, instead of listening only to the mainstream media, because their credibility is gone. In this era of fake news, the existence of these media that insist on reporting the truth is indeed precious, and it is the responsibility of the media to seek the truth as well as the general public. The right to believe that the mainstream media’s self-indulgence will eventually be spurned by the masses.
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