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
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of the folks I care to keep up with on Facebook are no longer
active on Facebook.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
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
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.
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