There is a lot of disinformation when it comes to politics—and now you know why it was important for me to get rid of the disinformation about me.
No, it’s not because anything written about me could have affected an election. But it is about a medium that takes effort to stay clean and usable, just like the real world (a.k.a. the meatverse). Would you litter or would you pick up after yourself? Would you leave your rubbish on a beach or would you help tidy it?
If I can keep my corner of the ’net clean—and that includes reporting other disinformation I see, not just the stuff about me—then it makes it slightly more usable, with fewer resources being given to rubbish that wastes our time.
Given that I’m not a fan of either Meta or Google, that’s why I still reported bots to the former (till nothing happened to them c. 2017 and I left Facebook) and try to weed out spam entries at the latter. I could easily say, ‘To heck with it,’ and let them sink under their own nonsense, hastening their demise.
While I’ve stopped using Meta—so I really don’t see much junk there any more—keeping search indices clean is in our interest, so people can find legitimate content. I’m not doing it for Google, I’m doing it for us.
It was suggested to me again that I should capitalize on the disinformation and offer SEO services, but there is such a thing as integrity. I can definitely do it better than the false practitioners who all wrote disinformation—it helps to have websites that date back to the 1990s—but it’s not an area I would tout, especially as it is (as demonstrated by this episode with Semrush) full of confidence tricksters. Why be associated with them? (This is also why one should decline having a Gmail address, because spammers and con artists use them.) I feel sorry for the few legitimate players using white-hat techniques who are drowned out by the unethical.
And if I acceded to it all, then people really would suspect that I was behind a spam campaign plaguing the web. I’ve already received abuse over that. And have you seen the other posts these people write? They are unintelligible, often done by “AIs”, so that really would be signalling to everyone that I would be prepared to use wasteful techniques to get myself known. If I got clients out of that, they would not be ethical ones, expecting me to be underhanded. No, thank you.
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