The disinformation continues, this time on Quora. Here this person defends the indefensible by … agreeing with me?
They claimed later to have deleted the post, but that was a lie. The post remains, but my comment has been deleted. They can’t handle someone pointing out their deceptive conduct.
There were a couple more on Medium this week—then I stumbled on to this lot. Probably all created by the same person. Medium took the lot down within minutes of my email (specifically, I sent my email and 17 minutes I had their reply that the accounts had all been nuked). Medium has been the best and most effective at dealing with disinformation.
So if this is happening to me, what is happening to a public figure? Google and Bing have allowed themselves to be gamed—badly—with democracy placed at risk. I don’t talk about a post-search era for no reason.
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The internet and its main players (not us, of course) are a tiresome lot.
Feels like we have to stay in the fight, though, doesn’t it? Forget post-search era, how about we talk about a post-internet era? You and I are old enough to remember pre-internet and pre-smartphone days. Civilization might be better off if someone flipped the switch.
It is a very real possibility! Or at least teach people some basics about mental health, and why so much exposure to online stuff (which really is keeping them in their heads) is bad. The fact we had to deal with dial-up, and not have 24–7 broadband, is a good thing, so we were limited at how much time we had online. Talking to humans in the meatverse (that’s not a typo) is a good thing.
If this had been 10 years ago and it was me, I’d be pitching a fit and sending letters demanding they check themselves (and to stop scraping my content if I found it) to everyone I could think of, including the big G. I see my name with my weblinks all over the place now, but I rarely see anyone trying to be me (who would? lol), and I’m happy enough with that to move on.
That’s a few hundred letters—I have been writing to most as they come up (one a day on average), but liars are liars. Most people in the “SEO” business appear to be unconscionable, based on this experience. Semrush and Google will get formal letters once I get some time. Microsoft has made it clear that disinformation is permitted.
We do have a no-scraping clause in our T&Cs. The concern is there is more disinformation on this topic than truthful posts.