Imagine for a moment a group of dyed-in-the-wool conservative news sites funneling money to Black Lives Matter? Sounds inconceivable — but it is happening. Those who find the Marxist philosophy of BLM reprehensible may indeed be horrified to know this truth. And one wonders if the comrades running BLM are making a mockery out of these conservative sites and laughing all the way to the proverbial bank?
Cha-Ching!
Conservative audiences have their favorite news sites and their go-to aggregators for a snapshot encapsulation of current events., The readership assumes that they share common values with these content creators. All this may be true in the case of sites like Whatfinger.com, but there are others out there that lack transparency and are either unfortunate stooges for the radical left or totally unaware of what is really going on. Mixi.Media is a case in point.
On initial inspection, this site appears as a run-of-the-mill conservative news aggregator. They publish content from many well-known conservative news sites in a “partnership” and sharing capacity; essentially, a Who’s Who of right-leaning media.
Why then does each page contain a floating ad image of a black power fist or a yellow BLM image link that – when clicked – takes the reader directly to the Black Lives Matter donation page?
It is, of course, an organization’s choice regarding who they partner with and how they conduct their business. Still, the readers of that entity also have a right to know if they are inadvertently putting money in the pockets of those they politically oppose. Vote with your dollar is an oft-heard cry and one which conservatives use as a form of quiet rebellion in a world that seeks to push conformity and standardization.
Black Lives Matter is an organization founded by self-identified Marxists that seek to defund the police and military and bring down the very structures of the Western world. This is not a conspiracy; this is not hyperbole, but quite simply their stated aim. This group has led protests resulting in the deaths of innocents and the destruction of businesses, homes, and livelihoods. It’s stated mission is the very antithesis of conservative thought.
Here’s How it Works
When a web user spends time on a site that has ads, this generates revenue for the site owner; this is a successful symbiotic system whereby the audience gets free content, and the creator gets paid. In this scenario, your time is literally money, and where you spend that “money” should be an informed choice.
How the Mixi.Media aggregator works is fascinating, if not a little soulless. Partner sites have sections (usually on their home page at the side), which are headed: “From our Partners” or “Trending News,” which when clicked link to a headlining story on Mixi.Media. When the user clicks the link, they are taken to another partner site. Mixi.Media is, therefore, acting as a middleman between regular news sites, taking a little cut of ad revenue when the user passes through their page. The drawback of this aggregation method is that the stories presented are not curated in any way; there is not a human eye selecting news from reputable sources or based on quality content.
An aggregator site such as Whatfinger.com has editors and curators who sift through content to ensure that there is a range of stories available, focusing on well-sourced or well-written pieces. Their goal is to present quality content to the reader. As it is run by patriots – actual people – and not algorithms, a donation page for BLM would never show up on a site like Whatfinger, but research shows that not all aggregators are created equally — and this is a glaring example.
Both forms of aggregation provide the end-user with an array of options. Still, a shrewd consumer, especially in such divisive times, should know if their “money” is going to an organization that shares common values.
As such conservative readers as well as those who run conservative news entities should take to heart the old Latin phrase caveat emptor.
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Read more from Mark Angelides.
