Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course
Just about every website owner I know is feeling personally victimized by the recent social media purge that has been going on. But here’s an interesting fact: it isn’t, as is widely perceived, just conservative voices that are being silenced. It is dissenting voices.
It’s the voices of critical thinkers whose ideas run the gamut of philosophies who find that they no longer have much in the way of reach.
This social media purge affects everyone, even people who are not on social media. It does so in several ways:
- Dissenting information is silenced which stifles discussion
- Young people who are avid consumers of social media are being literally brainwashed because they only see one side of the story – any story
- The social media purge harms websites that post non-establishment information because it stamps out their ability to reach readers who would be interested in their content.
- The unfairly biased search results show people who are trying to learn more about a topic only one side of the information.
You don’t have to be on a Twitter feed to see how this is an overwhelmingly anti-American problem. Like it or not, social media is a monumental source of information these days, and when it’s censored to only show one point of view, the future of our republic is in peril. We are well on our way to peak censorship and this has been carefully orchestrated.
Non-establishment websites are in trouble.
Their website traffic is plummeting because they no longer show up anywhere near the top of search results. Their posts on social media are not presented to the public – or even the people who deliberately opted to “follow” them. Here’s an example from my own page. I have more than 30K people who chose to follow my page, as you can see in the top image. But in the bottom image, you can see how many of those people were actually shown my post. And this was actually a more successful one than many.
And the same thing goes for social media like Twitter too. I have an email list and if I didn’t, I’d hardly reach anyone. (If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, you can do so right here.) And I really have to wonder – will our “offensive” websites one day just disappear, scrubbed from the internet permanently? It’s only a matter of time until the web hosting companies are being pressured to get in on the censorship game.
For the record, I consider myself neither conservative nor liberal. I try to veer away from any form of extremism and I make an effort to think a situation through before automatically aligning myself with a “side.” If anything, I’m a small l libertarian. My core beliefs are personal autonomy and freedom of association are to be sought in all cases that are not harmful to others. And yet, somehow, that is threatening to some people.
Don’t think it’s limited to website owners. Twitter recently banned 70 million accounts, claiming they were “fake.” But there have been repeated accusations that conservative accounts have been at the very least “shadow-banned” if not all out deleted.
The most notable purge recently has been Alex Jones and Infowars.
Love Alex Jones, hate him, or feel utterly ambivalent aside from an occasional eye-roll, he has been the most notable victim to have been thoroughly erased from the public eye as far as the large social media outlets are concerned. He lost his voice on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Google. Even his email service provider dumped him.
I’m not personally a huge fan of Jones, but I do believe what happened to him was collusion between social media giants. Big Tech got together and now Alex Jones has to find new ways to reach his very large audience. No one is going to stumble across him accidentally in a Google Search anymore. No one is going to see his videos embedded in another website anymore. Like him or not, he has the right to exist publicly.
Jones has a lot of money so this may not be the end of him, but for most website owners, this would be the absolute end of our ability to do business. And to be able to bring the information we bring, we do have to run our websites as businesses. It’s far more expensive than most people realize to run a site. I know that my own operating costs every month are more than $2000. A site as big as Jones’s would be many times that amount. When all your avenues of monetization are cut off, it wouldn’t be hard for a site – and the dissent and information they share – to cease to exist.
If nothing else, dissent is the American way.
Alex Jones is just the beginning of this purge. It’s going to get much worse.
A little allegory on becoming an unperson.
Think back to high school lit class when you read 1984 by George Orwell.
If it’s been a while, I’ll recap the pertinent parts of the plot from Spark Notes.
Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes…
…As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts…
…Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. (source)
The Ministry of Truth is control of all the things from which people could garner their opinions. They provide their own twist on history, current events, entertainment, education, and the arts. The people of Oceana believe them because there isn’t enough information to believe anything else. And questioning the Ministry is a thoughtcrime, punishable by horrible torture or worse. Part of Winston’s job is to turn anyone who doesn’t follow the Ministry line into an unperson and erase them from history as though they never even existed.
So who is behind this mass purge of dissenting voices?
There’s always a money trail to follow. Any time you wonder why or how something has occurred, look for the money. In this video by Ben Swann, an independent journalist who was mysteriously silenced for quite some time, he provides some important insight.
This is happening RIGHT NOW. We are living it. We are living in the world of 1984.
Rest assured, the way things are going, it isn’t long before we will see only what “they” – the people with the power and money to make it happen – want us to see.
Social pressure is also limiting free thought.
And not only do we have organizations limiting our views of things that would broaden our minds, there’s also the rampant social pressure that we’ve seen since the last election.
When we were recently looking at rental homes, a potential landlady asked me for whom I voted in the last election. I didn’t even bother looking at the place because that is not a standard question one asks of a new tenant. It certainly has nothing to do with my ability to pay the rent. It has nothing to do with my potential for keeping things clean and in good shape. I just left because no house is worth dealing with a person who clearly let me know she was not someone with whom I wanted to do business.
And that is only my personal example. Employers check the social media accounts of prospective employees to see if they approve of how the person thinks. People who disagree publicly with powerful groups get doxxed. Dozens of stories have circulated about social pressure, lost friendships, disagreements, and mistreatment in the workplace that originated from differences in political beliefs.
How can people be expected to form accurate opinions without all the information? How can they do so when they’re under pressure for their livelihood or their ability to rent a home or when they fear for their privacy?
It’s pretty clear that there are those who don’t want people to form accurate opinions. They want to gently, quietly, insidiously get everyone on board by limiting our access to the variety of philosophies and theories that make the world go round.
By making free thought something that is frowned upon and erased, they silence us all.
I see some ways to counter this trend. First would be passing laws to make what the left is doing against the law. I don’t think that will do much good because the left has ignored laws for 50 years or more already. Drug laws in particular.
So, there must be some way around the power these companies exercise. An aggregator site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator seems a to me to be a simple alternative to a search engine. Daisy’s site, https://preppersdailynews.com/ is an excellent example of an aggregator.
Other search sites, such as https://duckduckgo.com/ , don’t track your searches. I don’t know if they limit your search results or not. But I would be surprised if they did.
I have shunned FB and Google for years so I really don’t know how much influence they have. I’ve never used Twitter or the photo/video sites so I really don’t know much about them.
The other approach is to reduce site operating expenses. My impression is that you can get a whole computer from a service to run your website for $100 a month but maybe that is no longer the case. No doubt it is more complicated than that. My impression is that WordPress is also free. So what’s
left? Collecting email addresses and sending email news letters. No doubt, using a service for this is not free. Providing a shopping cart and downloading of electronic products as a service is not free. But programming these is not rocket science, but not particularly easy either. Neither is PayPal or any other credit card service free. I’m probably being naive here since I haven’t investigated these things for many years. But, surely there are co-ops for these types of things or software that can be installed. I know that GoDaddy provides most of these services, at some cost.
Don’t get me wrong, I am just as alarmed as Daisy. I see suppression of free speech and loss of privacy as the most immediate disaster on the horizon. Let me change that. These are here now, not just on the horizon. What is on the horizon is circumventing the 2nd amendment, socialism and either a dictator, invasion, or financial collapse.
The “tech-opoly” is already violating Federal law, specifically RICO and the Sherman Anti Trust Act. Start badgering your Congress-parasite to enforce the law. I haven’t used Google for anything since about 2010. I deleted my Facebook account, which I hadn’t had very long anyway, two years ago. I use MeWe and Onstellar (this one is a bit esoteric, but great for anyone interested in ‘fringe’ topics). Nor do we need social media to keep in touch with family and friends. The last time I checked, email and phones still work just fine.
Does that mean I’ve escaped them, or even done them any damage? No. Just about every website I use is using Google or Amazon or Facebook ad and analytics services, including this one. This suggests another tactic; whenever you see an ad coming from Google, Facebook, etc. ad services, contact the advertiser and inform them that the fact that their ads are being served through those services means that you won’t be buying their product. One or two people doing this will be ignored, but if they start getting fifty emails a week, it will start to have an impact.
Something we have overlooked about most of these companies that is very important to understand, is that their primary business is not search, social media, or retail. It’s data, specifically our data. Yes, they sell services based on that data to advertisers and other private businesses, but their biggest customers are governments. If you look at these companies’ histories, you’ll find that all of them and their founders have one thing in common: all owe their success to connections in the military/industrial complex and investment funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and similar programs. By fostering these companies and their founders, the “Five Eyes” (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, and New Zealand) governments were able to create a private sector domestic surveillance apparatus that allows them to sidestep Constitutional protections and Congressional/Parliamentary oversight.
So, polish up those pitchforks and light the torches. Congress must be made to understand that their political careers are on the line if they continue to ignore this issue.
Daisy,
while your concerns are valid, what is happening in the social media field is just another step along a way that the world (yes, the world, not just the USA) has been on for a while. The true dissenting voices have been kept out of television, newspaper, movie theaters, and bookstores for a long, long time. The ones that were portrayed as dissenting opinions were just smoke and mirrors, dissenting on marginal issues while fully supporting the mainstream line. The rest, the real alternative thinkers, were assigned various denigratory labels: crazy, tin foil wearer, you name it, and marginalized.
Again, looking at the past, we have seen repression of free thinking for centuries. Various government did it. Various churches/religions did it. Various social groups took matters in their hands and did it. Still, despite the repression or maybe thanks to it, alternative ideas have emerged, revolutions have been fought, and civil rights have been won. People found way to communicate and spread ideas under the most repressive regimes, in time of peace and in times of war. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. are not in control of what we think and say unless we let them. We have a choice: continue to speak using alternative ways to convey the message, or be silenced and let them win.
How did we get in this situation? People accepted the so called social media as a benign power but, to a critical thinker, they are and have always been private companies selling a service. The same way that a baker should have the right to deny service to a gay couple, the social media company should have the right to offer their service to whoever they want. So I recognize their right to ban anyone they want. At the same time, their customers (and investors – have Facebook in your 401k or IRA anyone?) should apply the same rule. If I think a store is not a good fit for me, I shop somewhere else. If Facebook takes actions I do not agree with, I delete my account.
People have been so brainwashed that they forgot the world was spinning even before social media existed. People actually had a social life when they were not staring to their screen every single minute of their waken life. People stopped and thought about issues rather than just like what someone else thought, after reading a 140 characters sentence. People met for a coffee with friends, made phone calls, wrote letters and emails. People talked. But people embraced the new way to do things without thinking of the consequences; maybe just to part of the hip crowd. How many times I have heard: “You’re not on Facebook?!?!”, like I was a strange creature just emerged from the mud. But not once someone asked me why. I would have explained that I think Facebook is like a room full of people where you hear just background noise and you just end up absently nodding to the person you’re talking to because you can’t really hear him.
OK, this is getting too long. Daisy, you do a good job bringing information to the reader and connecting the readers with people who have important things to say. The social media can have helped you somehow but it is your work that bring people here. I got here without seeing a single twit or Facebook post from you. It is time for the alternative media to think beyond the social platforms and use some old way (or invent a new one) to spread the voice. And it is time for people to stand up for whatever they believe it is true. Staying silent now will just allow the fascist who are taking, or maybe already have taken, power to triumph, and it will make much harder to raise in the future.
Thank you, Daisy, for an excellent commentary!
George Orwell’s 1984 is one of the most prescient books ever written. Created as a work of fiction — a novel — today it reads more like non-fiction because much of what happens in the book is actually happening today via Groupthink and our being “led” by delusional people who consider themselves leaders, but who are in reality blind followers of an ideology.
“The more a society drifts from the Truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” -George Orwell
Doesn’t this explain the #NeverTrumpers more than anything? I certainly think so…. after all, Trump took 29 states to Hillary’s 21, as well as two-thirds of the nation’s parishes and counties. There are still plenty of free thinkers out there who refused to be brainwashed. The left is Fringe no matter how they spin it. They have become irrelevant, even to themselves (#Walk Away, etc.) To say nothing of the crimes and treasonable offenses they’ve committed in pursuit of votes.
I suggest that you dump Twitter and get on Gab. Gab does not censor anyone or any group. And more and more people are on Gab. So please join us!
When you don’t use major social media, you don’t even notice that nonsense. Who cares about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Apple Store and all the rest? Alex Jones? He was busy banning his critics. What comes around goes around.
I just read your article. The answer is https://steemit.com/ and https://d.tube/ They are decentralized blockchain social media / video sites that are truly immune to censorship. I hope you start there now to establish a following there now before the bigger rush begins.
Are they really immune to censorship? The big corporations and the government own the keys to the internet and they can stop anything they want. There is not real decentralization unless the infrastructure used to run the system is decentralized and under users’ control.
great work
WHO’S in the most danger here,ALL those military people who TOOK and OATH TO GOD,they are now with one foot inside the gates of hell and the other one on a banana peel,THEY ALL LIED TO GOD they completely failed to fullfill their Oath and NOW a few are standing up,but its just a few,the rest are yellow cowards and chickenshits,they’ll enjoy hell,its where their all going….to bad,it could have been avoided by just killing every traitor they saw,LIKE THEY SWORE TO GOD THEY WOULD DO….
Time for facebook/twitter/google to fall to the same obsolete fate as MySpace, and the inventor of the internet has unveiled a new tool to do just that:
inRupt “dot” com
https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web
Unfourtnately, I have been purged from Twitter and have 5 devices destroyed by hackers. I cannot walk around the block in my middle-class neighborhood without it being broken into and vandalized, even with an ADT home alarm system. The psychopaths in my neighborhood have been repeating things that i have said in the privacy of my house with the windows closed and blinds down, in addition to re-enacting things that I in my house with the blinds down, and people in my life to let me know that they are surveilling me. They would also pour on my front porch every single time that I would leave my house at irregular interviews. I have know idea what the point of their illegal activity is. It seems like a total waste of time to me. I have lived in this neighborhood for longer than all of but 4 households. Now, the majority of new neighbors have working age men that do not work. New neighbrs moved in on 3 sides of my house since 2016. They have also stolen 2 cords to computers. I refuse to move. This is my home, and I will not be bullied out of it by criminal, low-life stalkers. They vandalize my property and steal things when they break in.
Unfourtnately, I have been purged from Twitter and have 5 devices destroyed by hackers. I cannot walk around the block in my middle-class neighborhood without it being broken into and vandalized, even with an ADT home alarm system. The psychopaths in my neighborhood have been repeating things that i have said in the privacy of my house with the windows closed and blinds down, in addition to re-enacting things that I in my house with the blinds down, when they are outside, or inside with their curtains open, and impersonating people in my life to let me know that they are surveilling me. They would also pour on my front porch every single time that I would leave my house at irregular interviews. I have know idea what the point of their illegal activity is. They have also hacked into my WE energies Smart electric meter and are remotely controlling lights and appliances in my house.It seems like a total waste of time to me. I have lived in this neighborhood for longer than all of but 4 households. Now, the majority of new neighbors have working age men that do not work. New neighbrs moved in on 3 sides of my house since 2016. They have also stolen 2 cords to computers. I refuse to move. This is my home, and I will not be bullied out of it by criminal, low-life stalkers. They vandalize my property and steal things when they break in.
pour water on my front porch, was the statement, was hacked by grafton psychopaths again!
I was hacked when writing the above statement.