Censorship and the self-destruction of Facebook

This is important information for people to know.

The information highway is going dark and reputable sites (along with some more questionable ones) are subject to censorship.

Every day we read of people who fall into Facebook jail – even ones who produce material that should not be objectionable to anybody (except those who don’t want the truth to be said) and who have never ever violated the “community standards” of Facebook and You Tube.

The Self-Destruction of Facebook: NSA/CIA and Shareholders have opposing interests

Joaquin Flores

Russ Fort,

30 October, 2017

Many of the folks I care to keep up with on Facebook are no longer active on Facebook. Facebook is now on a self destruct course and will be making huge claims to shareholders and advertising clients which are vastly out of line with the real projection of Facebook's future. The 'real people' on Facebook are disappearing in droves, tired of being spied on, losing job opportunities due to some obviously f'd up things in employment culture which Facebook actively participates in, and this is a culture that believes you are always representative of the company and thus are never a free public or private citizen. 

Activists and opinion makers I follow and care about have been actively de-linked to organic Facebook for political/censorship reasons, even more so since the Soros-Clinton-Zuckerberg wing of the Democrat Party have decided to put their politics even before Facebook's profitability, especially in light of Russia and especially in light of the Trump phenomenon. A similar thing has happened with Google's Adsense program we should also mention, though with Adsense there seems to have been a serious push-back from the 'fiduciary wing' 

My Facebook feed seems to be the same 50 people, even though I have 3000+ friends. So what if last week I 'liked' some post of theirs? Facebook actively discourages likes because those likes create a walled garden, and a vicious cycle. Like things, and that's all you'll see. All you see is all you can like. Thus you interact with the same 20 people, and your interaction with and understanding of the community shrinks in proportion. 

All of the 'like' pages for personalities, political parties, brands, and social movements that I'm interested in keeping up with have disappeared from organic Facebook , and have been ported over to 'Explore feed' - which works more like 'Facebook Magazine'. At least this feature has been introduced, although the present button and it's location is not intuitive. It's more like they need a third button at the top - ''Profile -- Home --- Magazine'' 

The pages I manage have less than 1% interaction with our fans. Facebook openly says that eventually we should expect organic interaction should approach ZERO. They want me to 'buy' fans even though everyone knows you can't buy love. They then want to pay to 'boost reach' to those same 'bought' fans who are just random profiles in parts of life and the world that have no connection or interest to our socio-political message. 

They want me to buy readers who have no interest in our message/product, and then charge me to reach them. 

Facebook is stuck between two big questions which each have two contradictory components, this it can't solve its problem of being simultaneously increasingly profitable and increasingly popular. This actually exposes the anti-social nature of profit before people. Facebook grows because of people, it shrinks when organic advertising through organic use and normal interactions aren't enough, and must be 'shown' (falsely) to shareholders to have some sort of 'infinite growth' mechanism, which nothing in reality, virtual or otherwise, actually has. 

1.) a.) It has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, whom it is actively lying to, that the continual changes from 2013/14 onward will increase the user experience when these have not. Its actual changes push people away from Facebook. People want to use Facebook for all kinds of reasons - not 'one size fits all reasons'. There may be average reasons, even median reasons, but these are not the same thing as the reasons of actual human beings as individual consumers. The bell curve of 'why' people use Facebook and 'how' they want to use it is probably much more flat than is being said to shareholders. This means that the 'outliers' on this curve are in total numbers, probably larger than the single median purpose user. For Facebook to be a place that people go, it has to work how people want it to work, not how Facebook tells people to want it to work. There's a huge difference here between reality and a Potemkin village being sold to shareholders. 

b.) This same fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, working on a bogus theory of how social beings interact with communities - "superficial only" - (idiots, we can get superficial/simulacra/virtual interactions anywhere!, even through reality TV! and aspirational programming, idiots!) - is entirely at odds with how people actually want to interact. And these same shareholders are being told thateverything can be monetized. So then we see placed and purchased ads from products we have no interest in, and stop seeing pages from things we are interested in. The audience here isn't captive. The present operating theory of Facebook is that they don't have to maintain the original Facebook that was attractive people, since now they are already here. New people will come to Facebook since people are on Facebook , and they believe they've cracked the code of a perpetual social motion machine. Sorry, no such thing exists. As Facebook stops being the Facebook that made it grow, people will leave Facebook . 

2.) a.) As an intelligence project of the NSA/Deepstate/Whatever, it wants to censor and limit visibility of users and pages, and has destroyed organic Facebook to achieve that. They want to win the information war against the global resistance by censoring voices speaking truth to power. But they can't win this with the power of their message, because on a certain level people intuit right from wrong, it's not purely a matter of social construction. Humans are moral beings for vastly more complex reasons (evolutionary, spiritually, etc.) than a consciously constructed culture can direct or change. 

b.) The other side of that intelligence project for Facebook on the other hand needs to be a place that 'problem' political elements can be found and monitored in the sense that it cannot simultaneously act as a policing agent for socio-political movements while at the same time turning these users off from Facebook by censoring them, limiting their ability to reach audiences, through the destruction of organic Facebook . They just stop using Facebook , and then you can't monitor them or understand their message, for the purposes of redirecting, subverting, or simply combating outright. 

Now I fully *get* that many of our readers no longer mess with Facebook - and good on you. Our situation is a bit different, as a mid-sized daily online newspaper which reaches a hundred thousand or so readers a day, access to social media and every conceivable platform, is crucial to our ability to get our message out there. 

We're actively looking at and for different platforms to spread our important message ever further and wider. Certainly Facebook looks like a chapter in the history of social networking that's coming to a close ... in a way reminiscent of Myspace. 

It is not only "alt-right" and anti-war, anti-imperialist sites that are being targeted. In general the Left (the real Left, not the faux- anti-Russia, identity politcs libtards) s being targeted as well

Google intensifies censorship of left-wing websites

By Andre Damon

WSWS,

19 September, 2017

Google has intensified its censorship of left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, cutting the search traffic of 13 leading news outlets by 55 percent since April.

On August 2, the World Socialist Web Site reported that changes to Google’s search algorithm had led the search traffic of these sites to drop by 45 percent, according to figures by the search analysis service SEMRush.

In the ensuing six weeks, the search traffic of every one of these sites, without exception, has plunged further, leading the total search traffic for the sites to fall by an additional nine percentage points.

The World Socialist Web Site, whose search traffic had fallen by 67 percent between April and July, has now experienced a total drop in search traffic of 74 percent.

By other measures, the WSWS’s performance in search results has been impacted even more substantially. On September 16, the latest date available, articles from the WSWS were shown in search results 68,000 times, down from over 450,000 in April. This constitutes a decline of some 85 percent.

As a result of Google’s censorship, the WSWS’s global page rank has fallen from 31,000 to 41,000, according to Amazon’s Alexa traffic ranking software.

Other sites affected include:

Alternet, one of the top 3,000 sites in the US, has seen its Google search traffic fall by 71 percent between April and September, up from 63 percent in the period through July.

Democracy Now, one of the top 5,000 sites in the US, had its search traffic fall 50 percent between April and September, up from 36 percent in the period through July.

Common Dreams, ranked in the top 8,000 US sites, had its Google search traffic fall by 50 percent between April and September, up from 37 percent in the period through July.

Global Research, one of the top 14,000 sites in the US, had its traffic fall slightly from its massive 62 percent decline between April and July.

Truth-out.org, ranked in the top 12,000 sites in the US, had its search traffic fall by 49 percent, up from 25 percent in the period through July.

The information uncovered by the WSWS has been prominently reported on a number of alternative news websites, including Consortium News, Global Research, Counterpunch, Truthdig, Russia Today, Truepublica and others.

In an article on Truthdig, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges pointed to the censorship of the WSWS and other left-wing websites: “The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics…

“This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence.”

Despite the broad support for the WSWS’s calls for an end to Google’s Internet censorship, the company has refused to reply either to the WSWS’s petition opposing its censorship or repeated attempts to contact it for comment.

While Google’s censorship has substantially reduced traffic to the WSWS, its effect has been partially counteracted by readers sharing articles through email and social media. One widely shared article published on September 9, titled “Why aren’t trains evacuating people from the path of Hurricane Irma?”, has been viewed over 90,000 times.

While only about 300 people reached the article through Google, tens of thousands accessed it through links from other websites and social media platforms.

In April, Google’s vice president of engineering, Ben Gomes, announced in a blog post that the search giant would be implementing changes to its search algorithm to “surface more authoritative content.” Google’s guidelines for human search evaluators, issued around the same time, stressed that “authoritative” content should appear ahead of “alternative viewpoints.”

On August 25, World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North issued an open letter to Google demanding that it stop censoring the Internet and end its political blacklisting of the WSWS.

An online petition calling for Google to end its censorship has received over 3,800 signatures from dozens of countries.

Google, however, has not replied to North’s letter.

Recent weeks have seen a drastic escalation in calls for Internet censorship. The campaign to censor the Internet—usually justified in the name of “fighting terrorism” and blacking out “fake news”—has assumed international dimensions and is promoted at the highest levels of government. On ABC’s

This Week program on Sunday, the first three people interviewed, including British Prime Minister Theresa May, US National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, and Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called for stricter control of the Internet.

President Donald Trump responded to last week’s terror attack in London with a tweet declaring that “we must cut off” the Internet.

In her newly released book, What Happened?, Hillary Clinton again attributes her defeat to “fake news.” She writes approvingly that “Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already begun taking steps—adjusting algorithms, deactivating bot networks, and partnering with fact-checkers”—to fight the “torrent of misinformation” supposedly responsible for the outcome of the election.

Google’s actions against the World Socialist Web Site and other left and progressive sites are making clear the real targets of Internet censorship: news outlets and political organizations opposing war, social inequality and the domination of society by the financial oligarchy.

xBLACKxOPSxSECRETSx Channel Terminated, Link To Back Up Channel Below; We Are Losing Truth

https://www.youtube.com/user/xBLACKxO..