Remember Tumblr, the platform owned by Verizon that I left?
I left because of Verizon’s policies, of placing their corporate agenda ahead of the users. I went to NewTumbl insteadâa site that Tumblr users might not know about, since Verizon has ensured that searches for its competitor come up empty.
I was very surprised to find that Verizon Media has opened an account at NewTumblâa site that they effectively tell their users does not exist.
And what are they doing on it? Running their sit vac ads for free:
It’s not technically in violation of NewTumbl’s terms, but what is interesting are their hashtags.
One of the hashtags is sexy, albeit misspelled as sexu.
Now, either you have to be sexy to work for Verizon (given the other hashtags used), or they are hashtag-spamming, in the hope their ads will be seen more widely.
It is, basically, douchebag behaviourâbut this also tells us that NewTumbl has them rattled. Why else would they advertise here instead of a regular job site?
The effect on their brand is very negativeâsince people can see these ads for what they are: a cheap shot across the bow. This is how petty big US companies are. We see this from Google, so why not Verizon?
PS.: Unlike Big Tech and the bigger players in corporate America, I own up when I learn more. The Verizon account on NewTumbl was revealed to be a fake, and has since been deleted. However, Verizon’s censorship on Tumblr continues (you can’t find NewTumbl but you can find Pornhubâall hail their potential buyers!).âJY
How quickly an opinion can change.
I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008.
For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that are pathological liars. Even a few years back, you could expect to get a personal reply to a tech issue on Tumblr, despite its user base numbering in the millions.
Last year, as part of Verizon, Tumblr enacted its âporn banâ. I didnât follow any adult content, and I didnât make any myself, so it didnât affect me muchâthough I noticed that the energy had gone from the site and even the non-porn posters were doing far less, if anything at all. As mentioned yesterday, I had been cutting back on posting for some time, too. It had jumped the shark.
While I didnât agree with the move, since I knew that there were users who were on Tumblr because it was a safe place to express their sexuality, I didnât kick up as big a stink about it as I did with, say, Googleâs Adsâ Preferences Manager or the forced fake-malware downloads from Facebook.
But what is interesting is how Verizon ownership is infecting Tumblr. I see now that Tumblr can no longer say it supports ânet neutrality because its parent company does not. This isnât news: the article in The Verge dates from 2017 but I never saw it till now. Of course Verizon would have wanted to keep this under wraps from the Tumblr user base, one which would have mostly sided with ânet neutrality.
And now, after posting about NewTumbl on Tumblr last night, I see that Verizonâs corporate interests are at the fore again. Tumblr returns no results for NewTumbl in its search, because itâs that scared of a competitor. Apparently this has been going on for some time: some NewTumbl users in February blogged about it. I was able to confirm it. This isnât censorship on some holier-than-thou âmoralâ grounds, but censorship because of corporate agenda, the sort of thing that would once have been beneath Tumblr.
If I was ambivalent about leaving Tumblr before, this has made me more determined. I still have blogs there (including one with over 28,000 followers), so I wonât be shutting down my account, but, like Facebook, I wonât update my personal space any more after my 8,708 posts, unless I canât find a creative outlet that does what Tumblr currently does and am forced to return. Right now, NewTumbl more than fulfils that role, and itâs doing so without the censorship and the corruption of long-held internet ideals that seem to plague US tech platforms. Tumblr users, see you at jackyan.newtumbl.com.
As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default positionâthough when it becomes apparent that people simply arenât civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions.
We have Facebook making statements saying they are âStanding Against Hateâ, yet when friends report white nationalist and separatist groups, they are told that nothing will be done because it is âcounter-speechâ. We know that Facebook has told the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, that it has done absolutely nothing despite its statements. This is the same company that shut off its âView asâ feature (which allowed people to check how their walls would look from someone elseâs point-of-view) after share price-affecting bad press, yet when it comes to actual humans getting killed and their murders streamed live via their platform, Facebook, through its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, essentially tells us, âThere are no problems, nothing to see here.â
Weâre just a platform
We take no responsibility at all for what gets shared through us. You can say what you like, but we think we can weather this storm, just as we weathered the last one, and just as weâll weather the next.
Kiwi lives donât matter
White nationalist groups make for great sharing. And sharing is caring. So we wonât shut them down as we did with Muslim groups. The engagement is just too good, especially when weâre only going to upset fewer than five million New Zealanders.
Hate is great
Hate gets shared and people spend more time on Facebook as a result. Whether it’s about New Zealanders or the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, we’ll be there to help distribute it. Genocide’s fine when it doesn’t affect our share price.
Facebook users are âdumb fucksâ
Our founder said it, and this is still our ongoing policy at Facebook. Weâll continue to lie because we know youâre addicted to our platform. And no matter which country summons our founder, we know you wonât have the guts to issue a warrant of arrest.
Actions speak more loudly than words, and in Facebookâs case, their words are a form of Newspeak, where they mean the opposite to what everyone else understands.
#Facebook: we had better turn off the âView asâ function, it could be open to abuse.
Also Facebook: live-streaming is fine, nothing to see here.#Facebooklies
Iâm not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week. The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2·17 million Facebook followers. âSupposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to our page just to receive all the spam content that we put out there (sounds realistic),â he wrote in RT.
After Facebook removed the page, Twitter followed suit and suspended their account.
Not only that, Shahtahmasebi notes that Anti-Media team members had their Twitter accounts purged as well. Its editor in chief received this message: âCareyWedler has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for:â. That was it. Sheâs none the wiser on what violation had been committed.
But here are the real kickers: their social manager had access to 30 accounts, and Twitter was able to coordinate the suspension of 29 of them, while their chief creative officer had his removed, including accounts he had never used. The Anti-Media Radio account suffered a similar fate, Twitter claiming it was due to âmultiple or repeat violations of the Twitter rulesââand it had no Tweets.
Shahtahmasebi has his theories on what was behind all of this. It does give my theories over the years a lot of weight: namely that Facebook targets individuals and its ârulesâ are applied with no reference to actual stated policies. Essentially, the company lies. Twitter has been digging itself more deeply into a hole of late, and itâs very evident now, even if you didnât want to admit it earlier, that it operates on the same lines. Google I have covered before, some might think ad nauseam.
One of his conclusions: âThere is nothing much that can be done unless enough people take a principled stand against such a severe level of censorship.â In some cases, including one Tweeter I followed, it has been to vote with oneâs feet, and leave these spaces to continue their descent without us.
Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content – something they didn't actually want to do – are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed. That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history: https://t.co/IZHF8GVkgC
Unlike most leftists who laughed & celebrated when Infowars was purged by Big Tech, I vehemently oppose the censorship and deletion of left-wing pages by Facebook and Twitter.
If you don't support free speech for even your most ardent adversaries, you don't support free speech.
Thatâs it for ânet neutrality in the US. The FCC has changed the rules, so their ISPs can throttle certain sitesâ traffic. They can conceivably charge more for Americans visiting certain websites, too. Itâs not a most pessimistic scenario: ISPs have attempted this behaviour before.
Itâs another step in the corporations controlling the internet there. We already have Google biasing itself toward corporate players when it comes to news: never mind that youâre a plucky independent who broke the story, Google News will send that traffic to corporate media.
The changes in the US will allow ISPs to act like cable providers. I reckon it could give them licence to monitor Americansâ traffic as well, including websites that they mightnât want others to know theyâre watching. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, puts it: ‘We’re talking about it being just a human right that my ability to communicate with people on the web, to go to websites I want without being spied on is really, really crucial.’
Of course I have a vested interest in a fair and open internet. But everyone should. Without ânet neutrality, innovators will find it harder to get their creations into the public eye. Small businesses, in particular, will be hurt, because we canât pay to be in the âfast laneâ that ISPs will inevitably create for their favoured corporate partners. In the States, minority and rural communities will likely be hurt.
And while some might delight that certain websites pushing political viewpoints at odds with their own could be throttled, they also have to remember that this can happen to websites that share their own views. If it’s an independent site, it’s likely that it will face limits.
The companies that can afford to be in that âfast laneâ have benefited from ânet neutrality themselves, but are now pulling the ladder up so others canât climb it.
Itâs worth remembering that 80 per cent of Americans support ânet neutralityâthey are, like us, a largely fair-minded people. However, the FCC is comprised of unelected officials. Their ârepresentativesâ in the House and Senate are unlikely, according to articles Iâve read, to support their citizensâ will. Hereâs more on the subject, at Vox.
Since China censors its internet, we now have two of the biggest countries online giving their residents a limited form of access to online resources.
However, China might censor based on politics but its âGreat Wallâ wonât be as quick to block new websites that do some good in the world. Who knew? China might be better for small businesses trying to get a leg up than the United States.
This means that real innovation, creations that can gain some prominence online, could take place outside the US where, hopefully, we wonât be subjected to similar corporate agenda. (Nevertheless, our own history, where left and right backed the controversial s. 92A of the Copyright Act, suggests our lawmakers can be malleable when money talks.)
These innovations mightnât catch the publicâs imagination in quite the same wayâthe US has historically been important for getting them out there. Today, it got harder for those wonderful start-ups that I got to know over the years. Mix that with the USâs determination to put up trade barriers based on false beliefs about trade balances, weâre in for a less progressive (and I mean that in the vernacular, and not the political sense) ride. âThe rest of the worldâ needs to pull together in this new reality and ensure their subjects still have a fair crack at doing well, breaking through certain partiesâ desire to stunt human progress. Let Sir Tim have the last word, as he makes the case far more succinctly than I did above: ‘When I invented the web, I didnât have to ask anyone for permission, and neither did Americaâs successful internet entrepreneurs when they started their businesses. To reach its full potential, the internet must remain a permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression. In todayâs world, companies canât operate without internet, and access to it is controlled by just a few providers. The FCCâs announcements today [in April 2017] suggest they want to step back and allow concentrated market players to pick winners and losers online. Their talk is all about getting more people connected, but what is the point if your ISP only lets you watch the movies they choose, just like the old days of cable?’
Weâve had years of Google and Facebook acting like arses, but itâs disappointing to see Twitter give us more and more causes for concern.
In 2017, we saw them change their terms and conditions so speaking power to truth is no longer a requirement. You canât help but think that the decision to accommodate the US president is part of that: there is a policy within Twitter that President Trump is immune to their terms and conditions, and can Tweet with impunity what you and I would get kicked off for doing. We also saw Twitter, which is scrambling to show the US government that it is doing something about alleged Russian interference, kick off a privately developed bot that helped identify fake accounts. Youâd think that if Twitter were sincere about identifying fake accounts, it would embrace such technology.
One of my regular blog readers, Karen Tolfree, very kindly linked me a report from Hannity (which another friend later informed me was first revealed on Breitbart) which showed Twitter staff caught on video admitting to shadow-banning either because they disagreed with the userâs politics (with an admission that Twitter is 90 per cent US Democrat-leaning) or because of US government pressure (when discussing Julian Assangeâs account).
What was the old saying? I might not always agree with your politics but I will always defend to the hilt your right to express your views.
Therefore, I mightnât be President Trumpâs biggest fan but those who support him, and do so within the same rules that Iâm governed by on Twitter (e.g. not resorting to hate speech or attacking any individual or group), must have the same right to free speech as I should.
I do not wish them to be silenced because many of them have good reasons for their beliefs, and if I donât see them in my feed then how will I understand them? I donât wish to live in a bubble (meanwhile, Facebook and Google want you to; Facebookâs âcrowdsourcingâ its ranking of media sources is going to make things far worseâhave a look at Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg’s series of Tweets at the end of this post).
Because you never know if Twitterâs shadow-banning is going to go after you, since, like Facebookâs false malware accusations, they could be indiscriminate.
In fact, two New Zealanders were shadow-banned over the last week: one with stated left-leaning views (Paul Le Comte), another (Cate Owen) who hasnât put her political leanings into her bio, and who was shadow-banned for reasons unknown. Itâs not just conservatives these guys go after, and neither was told just which Tweet netted them this âpunishmentâ.
I think itâs generally agreed that we have passed peak Twitter just as we have passed peak Facebook, but as itâs one of the original, mid-2000s social media services I still use, Iâm disappointed that I canât feel as happy being on there as I once did. After all, our presence is effectively our endorsement, and do we really endorse this sort of censorship against people because of either their politics, governmental pressure or reasons unknown? Twitter paints itself as a place where we can speak freely, provided we do so within certain rules, and the dick moves over the last 12 months make me wonder if itâs heading in the same direction as Google (tax-avoiding, hacking, lying about advertising tracking, allegedly pressuring think-tanks to fire someone over their viewpoints, biasing results in its own favour) and Facebook (forced downloads using the excuse of malware detection, kicking off drag queens and kings, tracking people after they have opted out, potential database issues that kick people off for days, endless bots and general ineffectiveness in removing them, lying about user numbers). Twitter always had bots and trolls, but weâre seeing what goes on inside nowadays, and it ainât pretty.
In 2018, we know Twitter is not a place for free speech, where rules apply differently depending on who you are, and where the identification of bots is not a priority.
And even though weâve had some happy news already this year (e.g. the prospect of Baby Clarcinda in five monthsâ time), these influential websites, whose actions and policies do affect us all, are âdoing it all wrongâ.
To be (more) clear, promoting trustworthy news sources is a reasonable idea.
Relying solely on crowdsourcing to determine trust, though, or making trust scores individualized, are both poor implementations that will create more negative unintended consequences.
I get that companies don't want to editorialize, but there are other paths than inscrutable algorithms, such as creating or working with independent non-partisan bodies to make the hard editorial decisions based on transparent and obviously measurable criteria.
Above: Facebook kept deleting Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph each time it was posted, even when Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten did so, preventing its editor-in-chief from responding.
Thereâs a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the ânapalm girlâ photograph from the Vietnam War shared by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland, then by prime minister Erna Solberg and Aftenposten newspaper, it has highlighted to me how the big Silicon Valley players have become exclusionary. In this latest case, it is about how one firm determines what is acceptable and unacceptable without regard to cultural significance or free speech; it even punished people who dared criticize it, and has failed to apologize. Earlier this year, in one of my numerous battles with Facebook, I noted how a major German company falsely claimed videos that did not belong to them, yet there was no penalty. An individual or a small firm would not have been so lucky: when we file copyright claims, we do so âunder penalty of perjuryâ on the form.
Google, never far from my critical eye, is the same. Iâve watched Google News, for instance, become exclusionary, too, or, rather, a service that prefers big players rather than the independents. When deciding to send traffic for a particular news item, Google News now ranks big media outlets more highly, and to heck with journalistic quality or any regard on who broke the story first. Itâs damaging to the independent voice, as Google concentrates power in favour of larger firms today, and itâs rather disturbing when you consider the implications.
Mainstream media can be homogeneous, and, in some cases, damaging, when bias and prejudice get in to the system. When it comes to politics, this can be detrimental to democracy itself. And why should a search engine prefer a larger name anyway? Many newsrooms have been stripped of resources, ever more reliant on press releases. Many now engage in click-bait. Some have agenda driven by big business and their technocratic view of the world, especially those that have their corporate headquarters outside the country in which they operate. Those who desire to wake people up from their slumber get short shrift. Google is aiding this world, because since it became publicly listed, it has had to adopt its trappings, and one might argue that it is in direct conflict with its ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra (one which never held much sway with me).
This is the world which Google and Facebook, and no doubt others, wish to serve up to users. They may well argue that theyâre only delivering what people want: if a lot of people get their news from the Daily Mail or The Huffington Post, then thatâs what theyâll show in their results. Thereâs little freshness online as a result, which is why people arenât as inclined to share in 2016 as they were in 2010.
Yet it was not always this way. The hope in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that Google et al would be tools in distributing power equally among all netizens. Started an independent online publication? If the quality is there, if youâre the first to break a story, then Google News will lavish attention upon you. If you have specialized news outside what mainstream media deliver, then youâll pop up regularly in the search resultsâ pages. The blogosphere rose because of this, with people seeking opinions and research outside of what the mainstream could deliver. The reason people blog less isnât just because of social networks making one-sentence opinions de rigueur; it is because people have found it harder to reach new audience members, and their own tribe is the next best thing.
It makes the ânet a far less interesting place to be. Without fresh, new views, we run the risk of groupthink, or we become particularly influenced by the biases of certain media outlets. We donât really want to surf casually as we once did because we donât learn anything new: itâs harder to find novel things that pique our interests.
There are potential solutions, of course. I tend not to Google, but use Duck Duck Go, so at least I donât get a filter bubble when I search for particular subjects. However, Duck Duck Go does not have a comprehensive news search, and Googleâs index size remains unbeatable. What we really need next is something that brings back that sense of equality online. I believe that if you put in the hours into good content and design, you should excel and get your site ranked above the same old sources. Google claims that it does that when it tweaks its algorithms but Iâm not seeing this. Facebook merely builds on what people have foundâso if you can’t find it, it won’t wind up being shared. Twitter, at least, still has some interesting items, but if you donât catch it in your feed at a given time, then too bad. Itâs not geared to search.
Duck Duck Go is a start, at least when it comes to general searches. It becomes easier to find views that you might not agree withâand thatâs a good thing when it comes to understanding others. Googleâs approach lulls you into a sense of security, that your views are sacrosanctâand all that does is give you the notion that the other half is wrong.
So what of news? Duck Duck Go could well be a starting-point for that, too, ranking news based on who breaks an item first and the quality of the site, rather than how much money is behind it. Or perhaps this is the space for another entrepreneur. Ironically, it might even come out of China; though right now itâs equally likely to emerge from India. What it then needs is a bit of virality for it to be adopted, spread by the very people it is designed to aid.
We need something that rewards the independent entrepreneur again, the people who drove so many innovations in the 1990s and 2000s. This isnât nostalgia kicking in, seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses while happily ignoring all those businesses that failed. I completely acknowledge there were sites that vanished at the time of the dot-com bust, triggered in no small part by 9-11, the anniversary of which we celebrate today.
Society needs those distinctive voices, those independent entrepreneurs, those people who are willing to put themselves forward and be judged fairly. What they donât need are reactionary media who want to silence them out of fear that the world will change too much for them to bear; and big Silicon Valley firms all too happy to join in these days.
Itâs high time the most influential websites served the many rather than the few again.
Remember, too, how Google has stated on numerous occasions that it would not bias search results? Consider this: I wanted to search for an old post of mine so I could link it from the above text. The term: Google Buzz “de-Googling”.
On Duck Duck Go, I found the post immediately:
Out of interest, on Google, it cannot be seen: only positive things are mentioned and Google Buzz itself is the first result.
I know I have done more obscure tests to show that Google’s results are getting less precise. But the above is interesting.
It backs up an earlier article I read online about how Google treats search results, and that there is actually some bias in the system now.
I don’t begrudge Google for doing this, but it needs to stop saying that it doesn’t. We all know that it was quite happy to engage in censorship when it had Google China, already making its brand less idealistic than it once was.
Having set this precedent and created this brand association, it’s easy to believe that it now does this quite selectively for a lot more countries.
You might say that my one search is not a sign of bias, merely one where Google has a less than comprehensive search index and it could not find three old blog entries that have been around for a while. And which it used to be able to find.
It’s quite a coincidence that three negative posts about Google are no longer easily found with the relevant search terms.
That’s not great news for Google, either. Duck Duck Go is looking better by the day as the Google search engine, the one service to which its brand is tied, gets less precise.
As my final post on Google Plus, I posted 
