Many of you are going to be reading this via Facebook or Twitter when this blog hits. These networks, as big as they are, are dangerous tools that are propagating a narrative to you. There’s been a lot of chatter lately about what these giants are going to do to “stop trolling” or “stop the spread of fake news”. You can look those up yourself if you haven’t already seen it. What all of those comes down to is that these sites are putting moderators in charge of what you see in an attempt to influence what you believe. This is direct fascist-style propaganda tactics. It’s not the President being mean to CNN. He hasn’t shut them up in the least, and they have no fear of saying anything — they’ve doubled down so hard it’s unbelievable. There’s no censorship there, quite the opposite. Real censorship is the mega-corporate giants who control the platforms telling you what reality is.
The scoop:
This morning, a good friend of mine linked a blog that talked about Milo in a positive fashion on Facebook. I watched as I chatted with him in messenger as one by one, his messages to me disappeared as “flagged for spam by facebook.” A few minutes later, his account disappeared. A few minutes after that, he let me know that he’d been locked out and doesn’t even know what to do about it.
We have a massive societal problem of a convergence of Apple/Google/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/Youtube/Wikipedia and others that are all working in lockstep — this is illegal, and called collusion in every other business where it’s controlled by an oligopolic few. They all have far more resources than any dissident voices from their approved narrative. They will censor you from their platforms for your wrongthink. One perceived misstep is all it takes.
Everyone is very aware of how prominent political targets on Twitter get banned. I don’t need to name names. It happens almost every day. These targets all have one thing in common, they’re all trounced by the media to try to justify the fact that one political spectrum is targeted, and the circumstances of their bannings are all extremely suspect. It’s so crazy over there that you can’t even link Vox Day’s blog on twitter without them preemptively stopping your post. I’ve tried it!
A little over a week ago, Youtube dropped a new planned series by PewDiePie, a pretty non-political guy and huge youtube star, over off-color jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlmUklTkgAw If you think the timing of that isn’t suspect with the timing of the Milo takedown and ban from publishing, then enjoy reporters telling you what to think.
Around that time, I was informed by Reddit’s Kotaku In Action subreddit that the admins had shadowbanned my post. The mods didn’t know why, they couldn’t do anything about it. They told me to contact the admins, the admins never got back to me. I don’t post anything inappropriate. There’s one reason for that. My shadowban there is politically motivated as well.
Which brings us to this morning. It’s no coincidence that all of this is ramping up with all these companies in tandem.
Censorship is happening at every level on the internet. There is a concerted effort by the Big Tech Moguls and their cronies in Big Legacy Media to silence, erase and destroy anyone who is building a platform via the new norm. the reason this is happening is to protect the gatekeepers that have been in charge of approving what you see for decades.
These companies are destructive political forces with billions of dollars at their disposal. Don’t think this won’t happen to you or that you’re centrist enough that they’ll ignore you. This is where the front line in the fight for free speech is.
A friend of mine posted a blog earlier that had a great quote pulled from the Alinsky manual. We can use this: “Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
The gatekeepers already don’t have the power they think they do or that people believe they do. The more of us that turn away, the more they will lash out like the above for certain, but also the better it gets for the next person down the line to have to deal with them. Stop. Listening. To. Them.
There are solutions. Here’s part of how we can do that with Big Tech:
Gab.ai already. http://gab.ai – a twitter style platform that doesn’t censor people
Use Infogalactic instead of Wikipedia
Use the Brave browser so you can stop collecting data via your history for Google/Apple/Microsoft to try to sell you more crap.
More will be coming. It’s time to diverge from the censors. You are not a number, you are a free man. Remember that.
Love your closing statement.
One of my favorite tv-show quotes.
Please learn how the interwebs work. Invest in smart people that support your voice. It’s the same cry of history: please, please, please, remember the men and women that work.
Reminds me of the 1988 movie They Live.
I have no idea how technically feasible this would be, but another way to hit them where it really hurts would be software which can be set by the user to block any page which has any links to / content from Twitter (or Facebook, or whichever platform you wish to avoid giving page views / advertising revenue to).
That way, upsetting a significant portion of your users would soon become revenue poison, and in a way which would be set and forget for the user. You shadow ban me on twitter, I (and anyone similarly outraged) auto block anyone’s page which includes any of your content. Over time, that would really multiply the penalty incurred over just losing one angry user.
This is also a superb idea.I encourage anyone who is able to create this.I would def use it.
Can someone tell me how I can post this entire article on my Facebook page before I close out my account there. The points made here are so true and many of them have been on my mind and troubling me for some time. The author’s words would fully explain to my friends the reasons for my exit. I could not do it nearly as well. My thanks to Mr. Arroz for his great analysis and writing.
Can just copy and paste it.
just copy and paste the url at the top.
Gab.ai is already under attack by Apple, who are out to require them to self-censor in order to have their app available on the iOS platform.
I know it, as an iphone user it pisses me off!
How true. I am astonished they get away with it, and, there is very little public dialogue on the subject. Most of my friends are so enamored with their smart phones that they give no thought to the insidious tracking, surveillance, and manipulation. When did our society accpt commercial tracking so readily? How did we become this “Amazon Enabled” consumption machine? How did we accept planned obsolescence and frequent “upgrades” as the business norm? I recently gave up my very expensive iphone in favor of an inexpensive flip phone. It has greatly improved my sense of focus and freed up time for nore productive pursuits. Great post, very thought provoking.
Even before I was aware of censorship on Facebook, I found the way they promoted posts was counter to my tastes. The posts I wanted to read did not show up in my feed and the posts I didn’t really care fore was all my feed had to offer. With their huge user base its draw is still strong for content creators, but count on your posts being thrown to the void even if they aren’t political in nature and your discoverability outside of your true fan base, being nil.