For anyone who has followed my battles with bot-written and bot-based junk this year, this should come as no surprise:
The UK riots were fuelled by the same kind of website, with the same raison d’être. This one was in Pakistan, where, sadly, some of the disinformation sites about me have come from. Maybe it was a bit more sophisticated, with greater human intervention—but I’ve seen those during 2024 as well. India and Bangladesh have also appeared regularly among the addresses for the disinformation sites. A tiny, unscrupulous minority are wreaking havoc online, with basic capitalism as their aim—as we’ve seen how Google advertising funds the advertising on some of the disinformation sites I’ve come across. Spread a lie, hope to be found and indexed, and, in those unfortunate few cases, have it go viral.
All they need are gullible occidentals to take their pages viral, and on Elon Musk’s website—still best called OnlyKlans—they have their victims.
All I can say is that I told you so. I don’t raise the alarm on these things because of what’s happening to me. I raise the alarm on these things because of what could happen on a much, much wider scale: to you, to communities, to countries. It is the same reason I warned of Facebook’s bot epidemic in 2014, or of Facebook’s “malware scanner” in 2016. The former was a prelude to a far larger disinformation campaign waged by Russia and others, the latter potentially a means by which Facebook could extract more user data by planting a program directly on to PCs. Fake news, meanwhile, is nothing new—we saw this in the 2010s, too—but the ease with which they can be created, indexed, and propagated happens on an industrial scale now. It’s only going to get worse.
Meanwhile, Google’s advertising programme I’ve been exposing for dishonesty as far back as 2011.
Despite so many “SEO” bloggers being advised of their lies, only a tiny handful came clean and removed their posts; a few posted corrections. Even professional firms were taken in, in one case I can think of (though they put things right immediately). The overwhelming majority did nothing. They still cling to the hope that the lie can be viral and that, to them, is worth more than the truth. Microsoft’s Linkedin believes this, too, hence they have expressly told me that they permit disinformation.
While I don’t always predict the end-game—who knew some of my mayoral campaign policies would have COVID-proofed a city with normalizing working from home and better internet access for all neighbourhoods?—we have seen repeatedly how dishonest Big Tech conduct, which is often left unchecked, festers into something appalling, whether it’s anticompetitive conduct or the genocide of Rohingya Muslims and Palestinians. How many more examples do we need?
The UK riots are but a tiny sliver of the dangers Big Tech—especially US Big Tech—wreaks on societies, and without a balance, democracy is wounded.
We had our terrifying moment on March 15, 2019 when a worthless nutter live-streamed the slaughter of 51 innocent people.
Many of these countries—the UK, or us here in New Zealand—have laws that we all accept and understand; and, frankly, if these sites cannot play by our laws, why on earth are we kowtowing to them? (Facebook had eight copies of the March 15 video a year after the massacre, yet they were permitted to operate on our shores during that time.)
Make them inaccessible till they clean up their act. And if they don’t, let them stay inaccessible. Those who really want to read the drivel on there will find a way through VPNs and proxies; the gullible who might have fascist tendencies can return to the safety of the pub and moan to the limited audience they find there.
PS.: Right after I posted this, this BBC News article came across my feed. It’s not just Google that funds disinformation websites, OnlyKlans does directly to its users who post material inciting racial hatred:
O’Rourke’s X profile was accompanied by a picture of a bulldog wearing a Union Jack jacket.
The court was told he admitted receiving about £1,400 a month in payments for his account.
How much proof does one need that these Big Tech players are a danger to society and must be subject to society’s laws?
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