First off, the linked Video Channel has “strong language” in it at times and adult themes. He means it with his “not for kids” disclaimer up front. You do not need to watch it, I’m just putting it here as record of where the data came from. “His source”.
For those with fortitude (and a decent beer, wine, or booze supply ;-) it is well worth watching his stuff. Better the more you consume, so there’s that…
The basic story is that there’s some new show expected to do well. Good numbers in show #1. “Falcon and Winter Soldier”. Classic White Guy/ Black Guy duo kind of thing that’s worked well before. “Overlord DVD” has a very campy kind of shtick with retro-movie costume and funky DIY Halloween Head Mask thing… but it kind of works somehow. He does know his shows and does seem to have accumulated some insider sources (given what I’ve seen proved out in other of his episodes).
Here’s his take on this Disney property:
Overlord DVD
252K subscribersRatings plunged for the second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier dramatically according to a source, and this ratings disaster seems to be a direct response to wokeness. Here is what I was told. #disneyplus​ #marvel​ #falconandwintersoldier​
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In the video he sites an interesting metric. TOTS Tune Out Time Stamp. When your video feed drops, they note the time stamp. Folks watching to end credits? Good show. Folks dropping early? Issues.
Well, it seems that 79% to 80% of the viewers all dropped in a minute or two of each other. Absolutely unheard of. (His quoted number is 79.9% dropped) Over the next several days, the TOTS rose to 83.49%. So they managed to keep about 16% of their original audience numbers. The WOKEerati only.
What happened at that minute? BLM Like Woke Scene. BIG “Get Woke, Go Broke!”. The scene was the two guys about to “pull their guns on a black man arguing with a white”. Yeah, the whole cops murdering blacks line ( I think. I’ve not seen it; only interpreting the video) despite most black murders being by other blacks. (As most folks only murder folks they know and interact with so it tends to be in the same community.)
Will they be able to “fix it” and repair the show? I doubt it. They had their shot at a new audience. Folks are now going to “stay away in droves”. Why come back for a second sip of the poison when the first one was bitter and turned your stomach?
But from my POV, it’s a delightful metric and a nice tool in the old cabinet. We know that a HUGE majority have “had enough”. We also know that as soon as the Woke Crap is in your grill from the TV set, just hit EXIT and send a loud and clear message… Don’t sit through it for the rest of the show. Just drop it right then. IF you want to watch the rest, come back the next day and replay it starting about 3 to 5 minutes after that time stamp… Rinse and repeat.
That is an unqualified DISASTER for Disney and Wokeness.
So take heart in the knowing that 4/5 of the people are on your side, and only 16% are willing to Swallow The Woke. (And even less of them are the actually Woke… I’d peg it about 5% max.)
I’m also really happy to now know that I can “send a message” just with the EXIT button. I’ll be using that a LOT more.
Musings from the Chiefio 
I have been wondering why your recently elected Government (with a huge majority of Americans voting for them and endorsing their policies) needs to cower behind razor wire with thousands of troops and police protecting them. Don’t they know how popular they are? (Or do they?)
Both Falcon and the Winter Soldier have direct links to Captain America. The latter was his best buddy when he was just Lieutenant America back in WWII, but had been captured by Hydra and converted to a bad guy before Falcon – an Afghanistan veteran who was one of 2 soldiers to use a new experimental single person flight system – turned him back to a good guy in one of the Marvel movies.
SO that is the premise (they formed a strong bond as “mini” Avengers). Leave it to woke to screw that up!
@Graeme #3:
There was no huge majority voting for Resident Biden. If you believe in science, you know this to be true. If you do not believe in science then you will believe any pablum offered to you,
When I watch the woke news, I keep telling my wife (keeper of the remote) “Switch to (whatever), I don’t want to watch this sh|t. I will now tell her why.
I watched the episode… if having it on in the background while working on learning
Little Wing counts… so, missed on the wokeness, but, in general the show is lifeless, well, it’s crap. So, I hadn’t intended to watch any more episodes. It’s just bad entertainment… wokeness is to be expected from Disney, so no need to keep the account or app anymore. Cancelled Netflix a long time ago… along with HBO, etc… soon, I’ll be down to just playing my guitars… a much better way to spend my time…
E.M.
How do they score it if you then switch back in and then out again rapidly?
I watched the video, and I really didn’t see too much that I would consider NSFW or whatever, but I do go to some sketchy sites. There were a lot of really bad puns though, so there should probably be a warning about that for people who don’t like really bad puns (for the record: I like bad puns).
The wife has Disney+, so maybe I’ll check out the show to see if it’s as bad they say. I have a feeling it is. Disney has become very woke (also known as “converged”; I can’t explain what that means, but just think of it as a synonym for “woke” if you ever see it). Disney+ is now putting disclaimers in front of some movies (Swiss Family Robinson is one) as well as in front of The Muppets. If your kid has a profile on Disney+ and you have them under a certain age, they can’t watch movies/shows with the disclaimer . Mom or dad has to say it’s ok for your child to watch The Muppets.
The Marvel comic books have also gone woke. I don’t follow comics much anymore, but I know that some of these characters have been around since the early to mid 60’s. To say that they’re established would be an understatement. But for some reason Marvel has decided to make major changes to some of these characters. From what I’ve read (and I could be wrong, or misunderstood something), Thor is now a female (I’m not sure if that’s a biological female or trans-female), Iron Man is a young black girl, and a number of characters (old and new) have embraced some form of LQBTXYZ. Longtime fans are pissed, and the general consensus, put politely is “Why can’t you just create new characters instead of effing up the old ones that I grew up with?” DC comics (home of Superman and Batman among others) has gone the same way, but not quite as hard. The thing is, comics is sort of a niche market, so the average person has no idea it even exists.
But it’s not just there, it’s in other niche markets too. SciFi publishing for example. I grew up on scifi, I read lots of stuff. But these days, there’s not much that interests me. All the awards are woke now, and all of the publishers prefer woke material. So writers that want to get published write woke crap. And no one really reads it anymore, but whatever. Video games went woke years ago. Just search for ‘gamergate’, and go forward from there. Sports: Between them pissing nearly everyone off with the whole ‘take a knee’ thing, and the WuFlu impacting their business model, how is the NFL still a thing? And MLB just jumped onto the same (hopefully) sinking ship, boycotting Georgia for their new voting law. Resident Joe Biden got four Pinocchio’s from the Washington Post (a liberal paper) for statements he made regarding the law, but that’s not stopping MLB and Delta Airlines from making total fools of themselves by boycotting the state.
But my big question is this: How can all of these companies make all of these stupid decisions and loose all of this money and still stay in business? Who is keeping them afloat? Where is this money coming from? Just something to think about.
@Another Ian:
Were I writing the reporting software, I’d see several up/down/up/down cycles at on IP address and score it as a technical fault. They were trying to watch but having technical difficulties.
Best is just Down and GONE. Then if you really want to see it, come back the next day and show up as jumping into the middle (after the down timestamp a ways) and maybe not finishing again then. I’d score that as 2 different events on 2 different days and the 2nd one as a looky-lou who didn’t like it…
@Pinroot:
Some of his videos have rougher language. For this one I think it’s the transgender rock that might get sideways looks at work…
The fact that their “writers” can’t come up with new compelling characters (woke or not) tells you their skill level.
Some folks create good art. Some create mediocre art. Some just scribble graffiti over good art.
Per money:
Where do you think the many $Trillions of “stimulus” money went? To rioters, graffiti artists and bailing out the Woke & Broke (cities, States, and companies…)
“Where do you think the many $Trillions of “stimulus” money went? To rioters, graffiti artists and bailing out the Woke & Broke (cities, States, and companies…)”
Well that won’t last long then
philjourdan:
Of course I don’t think he (insert name of choice) was honestly elected. If he had been why would his party be cowering behind barriers with armed troops protecting them from “Lethal up-rising” (description on local TV channel). Our own Federals have recently up-graded security around the (largely underground) Parliament.
Also a local nuisance referred to Georgia’s new electoral law as a Jim Crow law, and claimed that it made handing out food and drink to waiting voters illegal. From what I read it requires identification before you can vote. Neither rule would raise one eyebrow in Australia, although we have compulsory voting* which makes checking easier.
*usually around 5% non-voting and 5% who vote informal and aren’t counted. According to some I know, who have scrutinised the vote counting, many of these contain rude comments about government. While our politicians watch the Polls intently, they also pay attention to these categories as any rise in the numbers represents dissatisfaction (and costs them votes). Lately both categories have been increasing. Unfortunately we have a contest between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Even in scandals.
My daughter bet that I was watching the “Ten Commandments” this Saturday evening. She lost the bet. I don’t watch network TV much. I was watching “The Quiet Man” and “To Catch a Thief” instead. And I have the Blu-ray version of the “Ten Commandments.” It’s much, much better without all those commercials. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I tried to see if it was free, on-demand. “Ben Hur” was, and I watched that. The scene in the leper colony where Judah and Esther are going to take the mother and sister, Miriam and Tirzah, to see Jesus was interesting:
Miriam: “I’m afraid.”
Esther: “No cause. The world is more than we know.”
Yeah, sure thing, Esther. Try telling that to a liberal or a climate scientist.
Jim
@Graeme No.3 – nor does it make it illegal to give out water when waiting in line. What it requires is that anyone desiring to give the voters water (or other drinks) place it on a table to be distributed by poll workers. That way, the LAW that states no politicking within 150 feet of the voting place is preserved.
Here’s an easy rule of thumb. And it will be accurate 90% of the time. If the Fake News is reporting it (MSM), it is a lie.
Case in point, the 60 minute hit job on Desantis. Before it aired it was proven wrong (by Democrats no less). Yet they edited the clips to prove a lie.
Maxim – If you have to lie to prove a point, you have no point.
@Phil
Maxim 2: If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.
Jim
@Jim Masterson – only the woke. The real woke do not believe it to begin with.
I want to beat Disney with a stick. Really hurt them where it counts.
That level of malice is hard to quench Disney. You turned a loyal paying customer into a dedicated enemy.
Note to Hollywood:
NO PRISONERS
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK New https://tinyurl.com/4bfajfhn
For roughly half a year, I’ve been running a series of interviews here on TK called “Meet The Censored,” with the aim of highlighting the scope of a growing Internet censorship issue.
From now on, “Meet the Censored” articles will be released in pairs. The speech debate has become so partisan that people now often cheer news that this or that person has been kicked off the Internet — this is an increasingly common reaction. When I profiled World Socialist Web Site writer Andre Damon, conservatives complained that his site wasn’t representative of the censorship problem, and I was showing bias. When I profiled Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier, leftists argued I was carrying water for the intolerant right.
I don’t particularly care whom people think I’m carrying water for, but in the effort to keep eyes on the ball, I’m going to release these stories in matched sets: one on the right, one on the left, one conservative, one not, etc. The first two such pieces, coming out today, will feature the non-profit investigative outfit U.S. Right to Know, and well-known conservative reporter Paul Sperry.
Nearly three years ago, when I first started covering this stuff, I realized the censorship issue would be a tough sell in the Trump era.
For blue-leaning audiences, news that companies like Facebook and Google had begun shutting down or de-ranking accounts in ways we’d never seen before was, to my initial shock, mostly perceived as a good thing. In the wake of Trump’s election, many Democrats believed something had to be done about “fake news,” Russian trolls, and, especially, inflammatory right-wing speech.
Polls showed 40% of millennials believed the government should be allowed to limit speech offensive to minorities, a number significantly higher than the one for either Baby Boomers (23%) or GenXers (27%). If those levels of support among younger voters existed for outright government censorship, how would that audience ever be convinced to care about private companies zapping political accounts?
The issue was such a non-starter with younger, blue-leaning audiences that when I did a feature about Facebook’s 2018 purges of so-called “inauthentic” accounts, Rolling Stone headlined the piece, “Who Will Fix Facebook?”, as if to disguise what the story was actually about. (I got letters from disappointed readers who’d been drawn in by the headline, hoping to read a story demanding that Facebook wipe out more right-wing/conspiratorial content). After the expulsion of Alex Jones and Infowars from Apple, Facebook, Google, and Spotify, it seemed many younger readers didn’t see a problem with increased content moderation. If anything, Silicon Valley didn’t remove enough obnoxious content.
Conservative readers from the start have been significantly more unnerved by the content moderation movement, for the obvious reason that most higher-profile targets of tech crackdowns have been right-wing figures. After years of decisions like kicking Donald Trump off Twitter, suspending or banning figures like James Woods and Milo Yiannopoulis, and intervening to block access to the New York Post’s expose on Hunter Biden, the censorship issue in conservative media has usually been pitched as being a problem exclusive to them.
After the Hunter Biden story was blocked, Republican politicians like Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and Colorado’s Cory Gardner hauled tech CEOs to Washington to face accusations of “bias.” At the much-covered hearing in October, Wicker railed at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “Mr. Dorsey, your platform allows foreign dictators to post propaganda, typically without restriction,” he said, “yet you typically restrict the president of the United States.”
Ultimately, like nearly all problems in this country that have both bipartisan causes and an impact in all directions, the censorship issue has been chopped up into parts, in order to be marketed to different news demographics, and consumed as partisan grumbling.
Conservative outlets have sold the story as a conspiracy of Democratic politicians and “Masters of the Universe” tech companies. In mainstream outlets like the New York Times, meanwhile, the speech issue has usually been pitched as a chin-scratching intellectual dilemma: how much freedom can “civilized” society safely brook, in the age of figures like Trump and Alex Jones?
Often, you see the issue framed as an either/or, i.e. either a “Wild West” of no controls, or a more civilized regime of thoughtful moderation. In one Times editorial, Shira Ovide cheered the Apple App Store model of “utter lack of free speech,” saying few “credible people” would want our online world designed any other way:
It’s time to stop debating whether we want powerful gatekeepers vetting information. We do. We don’t want people to be able to shout the proverbial “fire” in a crowded theater, and we don’t want terrorists, stalkers, dangerous conspiracy theorists, and authoritarians to have free rein on the internet.
Humorously, that Times piece, with its obligatory reference to shouting fire in a crowded theater (a scenario which by now has happened in theory roughly ten billion times more than in reality), was forced to concede that Apple-style moderation can have a bit of a downside. For instance, Ovide wrote, Apple controls in China have resulted in bans of companies the government “believes break its laws,” like “some news apps, including The New York Times.” Apart from censorship of her own newspaper, ditching “the myth of free expression” was presented as mostly a good thing.
When this issue first started gaining steam a few years back, it looked like Facebook’s shutdowns of sites like Jason Bassler’s Free Thought Project or James Reader’s pro-Democratic “Reverb Press” might be algorithmic glitches, just as the zapping of a “No Unite the Right 2” page advertising an anti-nationalist counter-demonstration appeared to have been. The public was told the companies were mainly going after Russians and hate speech.
It’s now clear that’s not the case. One of the fundamental (and clearly intentional) elements of the crackdowns of the last few years has been the systematic de-ranking or removal of smaller, independent news sites. The pulling of raw footage and livestreams by outlets like Jordan Chariton’s Status Coup or Ford Fischer’s News2Share seems to indicate that platforms like YouTube and Facebook want to limit the power to use certain images or content to larger, corporate outlets like CNN, CBS, or the New York Times.
In other words, if the Charitons and Fischers of the world can sell their work to a big national outlet, mazel tov. If they choose to try to publish it on their own, they risk having their work pulled by Facebook and Google. It’s a journalistic Sophie’s Choice: either sell away your competitive advantage (i.e., your mobility and “on the ground” reporting) to a corporate rival, or put your financial fate in the hands of invisible, unreachable executives at places like YouTube, the type of people Chariton described as being harder to find than CIA operatives. Either way, you’re surrendering, involuntarily, to giant companies.
The reason going after independents matters so much is that “credentialed” media, when they screw up, tend to do so en masse. If you try to launder all content through a handful of big corporate players like CNN, MSNBC, and the Times, you’re virtually guaranteeing that the next WMD or Gulf of Tonkin or Russiagate reporting fiasco will go undetected for longer. The same reasoning applies to algorithmic changes that sharply reduced traffic at alternative sites like Antiwar.com or The World Socialist Web Site: putting a thumb on the scale to drive readers into more “mainstream” baskets just makes bigger outlets worse and less accountable.
Stories like Fischer’s and Chariton’s are important to help convince non-conservative readers of the seriousness of the censorship problem. On the other hand, avoiding the issue of censorship of conservative sites isn’t right, either. That absolutely is happening, even though the highest engagement numbers on Facebook continue to be enjoyed by people like Jordan Peterson and Dan Bongino.
It’s become so taboo on the blue side to express any concerns about censorship of conservative voices that it’s rarely even presented in the mainstream press as a legitimate issue, unless someone like, say, Bernie Sanders admits to being “uncomfortable” by the precedent of tech monopolies hitting the mute button on a sitting president of the United States.
The phenomenon we’re living through isn’t about partisan politics. The central problem is the speech landscape has been almost fully privatized, with the overwhelming majority of people getting information via a handful of key companies: Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon. That bottleneck makes it possible to control information in amazing new ways, especially since the companies have shown, from the zapping of Infowars to the paper-training of Parler, that they’re willing and able to work in concert, against any set of actors they deem unsuitable.
When Infowars was kicked off those platforms, huge percentages of people cheered, because who doesn’t hate Alex Jones? But who was kicked off Facebook, Apple, and YouTube was less important than the what and how: unaccountable, unelected private executives making major decisions about who gets to speak in a 100% non-transparent, unappealable process.
The same problem is inherent in the case of Trump’s Twitter ban, even though a strong argument can be made that Trump did repeatedly violate the company’s terms of service. The issue isn’t companies shutting Trump down, it’s that shutting a president down is even possible. As Sanders (and, sadly, few other politicians on his side of the aisle) pointed out, “tomorrow it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.”
Moreover, the mission creep has been mind-boggling. Silicon Valley has gone from banning Trump for past concrete violations to future potential violations. Facebook just last week banned an interview of Trump by daughter-in-law Lara, declaring that “the voice of Donald Trump” will henceforth be removed, as the risk of allowing it to be heard at all is “too great.” In flash, content moderation went from enforcement of terms of service to Minority Report-style projection of future offense.
Furthermore, the bans on Trump almost immediately swam downstream and turned into bans of people covering Trump. In the same way that people like Fischer and Chariton were penalized for filming pro-Trump protesters, groups like the Freedom of the Press Foundation had their database of Trump tweets attacking the media temporarily removed from Google Docs. Only through sheer luck — the Foundation had contacts in Google — was the database restored.
This is a consistent feature of these stories, as Gary Ruskin of U.S. Right To Know discovered in the case of his own organization, which saw a sudden, catastrophic drop in traffic: people who experience suspensions or algorithmic changes find themselves frantically looking for backchannels into the Silicon Valley castle, to plead their cases. “It’s straight out of Kafka,” says Ruskin. “What door do I knock on?” If there’s a person who doesn’t think this is an insane way to manage the media business, I’d like to hear the argument.
Ten years from now, people will likely not have trouble realizing that putting five or six companies in charge of regulating all content was probably not a good idea, for all but a small handful of empowered actors. At the moment, the partisan angle is clouding the issue, as ordinary people are being conned into viewing speech as a giant turf war in which they have a rooting interest. News flash: you probably don’t.
In any case, more on all of this TK. Check for two new “Meet the Censored” features in this space in the next day.
Use a VPN or Tor to download or view
The problem is – he is going to run out of left leaning censored long before he runs out of conservative censored.
Calypso Louis is still posting on all platforms.