We may never know why I only saw left wing propaganda on Facebook in 2016, since Facebook is so secretive about what they do with our data. But I now have a working hypothesis as to what happened.
In the 2nd half of 2016 and especially in the fall of 2016 prior to the election, my Facebook news feed was filled with political propaganda, essentially all of it “left wing” propaganda, especially propaganda posters from fake news services such as Occupy Democrats. I cannot remember seeing any pro-Trump ads or propaganda.
After the election, we were told by media reports that Trump won because his campaign had mastered digital media better than Clinton, and that conservative propaganda on Facebook overwhelmed progressive propaganda.
This assertion seemed bizarre as I had only seen left wing, often extreme left wing, propaganda that was specifically targeted at left wing sympathizers.
I may have spotted a clue as to why this occurred.
Twitter enables us to download all of the things they have deduced about us. These include assertions made by Twitter, assertions made by ad partners, and then a long list of assertions that seem to be tied to database “interest tags” to track interests in a database.
Depending on which group made the assertions, I was surprised to find that some of their assertions are that I was a political activist, left wing, and a registered Democrat. None of those are true (don’t belong to political parties). To be fair, another section of their dossier labeled me a Republican, a Democrat, and a Libertarian, never mid the inconsistency in their assertions. However, Twitter had clearly marked me as left wing – why?
I suspect because I have posted a lot about the uses of social media propaganda, they marked me as a political activist, when in fact, my posts are more properly seen as anti-political activism. Once they made the incorrect conclusion that I was a left wing, Democrat, political activist, they – and their partners – steered more left wing content in my direction.
That, in turn, gave me more examples of propaganda messaging to use on this blog, nearly all of which was propaganda from the left wing. The more I posted, the more this seemed to confirm their incorrect assertions about my politics.
Because this blog is linked to Twitter and a Facebook page, which are linked to me, I suspect Facebook drew the same incorrect conclusion.  Facebook filtered what I saw so that only ads targeting the left appeared in my news feed.
Consequently, I was surprised to read that conservative posts were dominant over left wing posts. That certainly was not what I saw. But wwe now have a thesis of how Facebook was filtering the messages I saw to be almost exclusively left wing.
This small example illustrates how Facebook is polluting our minds into believing things that are not representative of reality. In this case, I am not talking about specific content of each poster – but about Facebook steering only left wing propaganda too me, almost all of which was specifically designed to hook the emotions of a left wing political activist. This made me think that most propaganda on FB was from the left and not the right – which as far as I can tell, was an invalid assumption. But it was caused by Facebook’s mind control algorithms.
Facebook’s filtering of the content we see is incredibly manipulative to the point that it renders Facebook useless for anyone wanting to be informed. This is another reason for me – and you – to stop using Facebook. Zuckerberg does not understand this – he has no clue and this week, has demonstrated no leadership skill. If Facebook wants to regain trust, it must install new leaders.