If you look back at all the tech companies I’ve called out, deep down I did so as a warning. If they show this contempt for the user, then it’s symptomatic of greater problems. Everything from Google switching your ad preferences’ opt-outs back to opt-ins and the stonewalling when it came to deleted blogs, to Facebook’s incredibly blatant attempts to planting a malware scanner on to users’ computers under false pretences, and its bot epidemic—all these pointed to common goals of treating the user as a product. The thing is, above I refer to things I observed between 2011 and 2016, so by the time Brexit, Trump and Cambridge Analytica rolled around, I had already seen how a lot of this was done.
Yet through that period, and beyond, there were people who said I whinged too much about the tech, that I was the only person experiencing all of this (when the evidence showed the opposite), and it got their backs out because they loved Big Brother.
Everything I’ve recorded over the years has been to say: ignore the propaganda (‘Don’t be evil’, Mark Zuckerberg’s meaningless mea culpas) and wake up. Why people of the 2010s defended Big Tech and what it was doing, I’ll never know, since none of these posts were ever meant to be unnecessary alarm-raising. Things were going down in techland. Wake up.
Even Twitter, deleting anti-war accounts, certain media, even an account that picked up neo-Nazis—long, long before Elon Musk bought the place.
Now more people are waking up when the mess of the online world is spilling over to the offline one and democracy itself is bruised. I see daily editorials from talented writers getting to the heart of what’s happening. These people, too—Carole Cadwalladr, Molly White, Ed Zitron, Paris Marx, etc.—were also sending out their warnings. Shoshana Zuboff warned people in her 2017 book. Roger McNamee warned people in his 2019 book. Nobel laureate Maria Ressa was literally arrested for doing her job of journalism and launched forums dealing with internet and social media issues. The difference now is they are being listened to more and more, and I think this is the new mainstream. All those little things did, indeed, point to this.
You can see where the tech of 2024 has landed us, too, with my posts about disinformation and how hard it has been to battle it and remove it. We should always insist on truth, not this Nineteen Eighty-Four scenario of machine-written junk. I’m still finding pieces, and publicly calling out Semrush was the one thing that had to be done. Despite all the examples of Facebook needing to be embarrassed into doing something (except now in 2025 the bar is considerably higher, as they have opened up to minorities being attacked), I should have heeded that, too. But no, I felt I had to do things the proper way, emailing Semrush first, instead of leaping to embarrassing them from the outset. (You shouldn’t in the future. Nip things in the bud straight away.)
That was the turning-point to the “industrialized” disinformation about me and SEO through 2024, usually posted by gullible, willing, and shameless practitioners in that world—a stark a reminder as any of how unethical and shady that profession is, smothering any of the legitimate work that goes on by what must be a mere sliver of companies. To the few companies and people who set the record straight: thank you.
If your marketing campaigns leaned online, then it is past time for a rethink, especially when it comes to Big Tech. The bar is much, much higher this decade, unless someone can come up with a network of more trustworthy places. The fediverse may present one example. (You think Truth Social has power? Well, it’s built on fediverse software—but the entirety of the fediverse is much, much larger and much more diverse. I see Pixelfed gaining popularity, thanks in part to Instagram deleting mentions of its rival.)
Are these examples of people taking back power? I hope so, but one thing’s for sure: you wouldn’t let children anywhere near corporate social media. It probably should have the same age restrictions as buying alcohol, if they show that they cannot provide safe environments. And right now, they can’t. If they can’t, then most of us should be finding alternatives—and as I’ve said for a long time, if any one of them disappeared, we would find alternatives in a week. Humans are good at connecting and reconnecting.
So those who whinged about my so-called whingeing, how have your defence and embrace of Big Tech worked out for you? Because it now seems people are joining what I believed was a plain, evident and mainstream school of thought, even if it took far longer than I had hoped, with far more on the line than if we had all nipped things in the bud in the 2010s.
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