Heb je genoeg van Facebook, het VS lobbyplatform voor neoliberaal beleid, verdediger van fake news (nepnieuws) dat de reguliere westerse (massa-) media brengen en dat de waarheid ‘iets te vaak’ censureert? Er is een alternatief, met de naam Minds.
Steeds meer Facebook accounts, die echt nieuws brengen, zijn van Facebook gedonderd….. Effect: velen kunnen via hun Facebook account media als Policing the Police, Anti-Media en anderen niet meer volgen, daar Facebook ze heeft weggecensureerd……..
Geen nood er is een alternatief, zoals gezegd met de naam ‘Minds’. Je behoeft geen keus te maken, immers je kan je Facebook account uiteraard behouden.
Het kost je ongeveer 5 minuten om je aan te melden, waarna je dan wel je account moet aanmaken met achtergrond, eventuele foto’s enz, echter dat behoeft geen uren te kosten, je kan zelfs overwegen de aankleding van je Facebook account mee te nemen, zeker als je van Facebook af wilt.
Laat je niet gek maken met verhalen dat Minds bomvol fascistische/racistische propaganda staat, dat is niet zo, bovendien wordt er gewerkt aan een manier dat soort berichten te weren, aldus de oprichter Bill Ottoman. (en nee dat is niet de censuur in de normale betekenis van het woord, daar fascisten eenmaal aan de macht, lak hebben aan de vrijheid van meningsuiting [en democratie], bovendien propageren fascisten regelmatig geweld en dat op basis van een enorm aantal leugens en het smerig zaaien van haat en angst)
Hier het verhaal van Eleanor Goldfield, waarin ze e.e.a. uitgebreid toelicht en aangeeft dat Facebook al veel eerder bezig was met censuur, zo zijn er al een ongelofelijk aantal accounts van Palestijnen verwijderd, daar ze kritiek hebben op Israël en nee dat mogen Palestijnse mensen niet van Facebook, zelfs niet als één of meerdere familieleden van hen is/zijn vermoord door het Israëlische leger! Aan het eind van het artikel zie je ook een link naar LBRY blockchain, waar je o.a. berichten van Anti-Media kan vinden, vind LBRY zelf overigens nogal een propvolle, drukke site, zie zelf maar:
Sick of Facebook? Read This
zijn er la een ongelofelijk aantal accounts van Palestijnen verwijderd, daar ze kritiek hebben op
(EG Opinion) — “I didn’t realize you were still doing your show!”
“Why can’t I see your posts anymore?”
“I’ve had to re-follow you several times on Facebook.”
These are but a few of the various comments and complaints about my Facebook page that I’ve fielded the past two years. With growing regularity and intensity, the cheery blue “F” has fucked over radical journalists like me, emboldened by the Russiagate and fake news narratives that brand any dissident or alternative media as our generation’s folk devils. While recent crackdowns have been far more pointed and Orwellian than before, censorship and Facebook go way back.
In 2012, The Guardian reported on Facebook’s arbitrary and ridiculous nudity and violence guidelines which allow images of crushed limbs but – dear god spare us the image of a woman breastfeeding. Still, people stayed – and Facebook grew. In 2014, Facebook admitted to mind control games via positive or negative emotional content tests on unknowing and unwilling platform users. Still, people stayed – and Facebook grew. Following the 2016 election, Facebook responded to the Harpie shrieks from the corporate Democrats by setting up a so-called “fake news” task force to weed out those dastardly commies (or socialists or anarchists or leftists or libertarians or dissidents or…). And since then, I’ve watched my reach on Facebook drain like water in a bathtub – hard to notice at first and then a spastic swirl while people bicker about how to plug the drain.
And still, we stayed – and the censorship tightened. Roughly a year ago, my show Act Out! reported on both the censorship we were experiencing but also the cramped filter bubbling that Facebook employs in order to keep the undesirables out of everyone’s news feed. Still, I stayed – and the censorship tightened. 2017 into 2018 saw more and more activist organizers, particularly black and brown, thrown into Facebook jail for questioning systemic violence and demanding better. In August, puss bag ass hat in a human suit Alex Jones was banned from Facebook – YouTube, Apple and Twitter followed suit shortly thereafter. Some folks celebrated. Some others of us skipped the party because we could feel what was coming.
On October 11th of this year, Facebook purged more than 800 pages including The Anti-Media, Police the Police, Free Thought Project and many other social justice and alternative media pages. Their explanation rested on the painfully flimsy foundation of “inauthentic behavior.” Meanwhile, their fake-news checking team is stacked with the likes of the Atlantic Council and the Weekly Standard, neocon junk organizations that peddle such drivel as “The Character Assassination of Brett Kavanaugh.” Soon after, on the Monday before the Midterm elections, Facebook blocked another 115 accounts citing once again, “inauthentic behavior.” Then, in mid November, a massive New York Times piece chronicled Facebook’s long road to not only save its image amid rising authoritarian behavior, but “to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros.” (I consistently find myself waiting for those Soros and Putin checks in the mail that just never appear.)
What this all proves is what was already clear two years ago: Facebook is afraid of dissenting voices – and they have the power to drain the social media presence of this rising tide of leftist ire. We can’t plug this drain. The drain (and the entire bathtub) is in the hands of a private corporation that has intertwined itself with the government in a perverse partnership based on silencing dissent and streamlining a Stepford-like online experience. Russia’s bad, nipples are hidden, Santa is white, go back to sleep. Put simply, if we are interested in uncovering truth, building networks, fighting for justice and freedom, we have to make a shift.
I understand why people stay – I understand why I stayed. More than a quarter of humanity uses Facebook; it’s been deemed too big to delete. People go there for connection – to see kids growing, to see what people are cooking, to reassure themselves that an ex’s new partner is ugly. People go there to build their brands. I’ve personally built followings for two bands, several organizations and one TV show on the platform. But I can no longer get through. I, and journalists like me, can not break through that aforementioned perverse partnership.
It follows that the “news” people get on Facebook, a main source for news, will never be the news from the front lines of our fights. It will never be the news from the most marginalized and oppressed folks. It will never be the news that hits straight at the heart of this crooked, corrupt system. It will be sanitized, whitewashed, twisted propaganda that serves and protects the owners of corporate media – the very same corporations that depend on our oppression, distraction and apathy. It will be infotainment and whatever makes you feel good about you.Because that means you’ll keep coming back. And as you go back, you’ll expose yourself entirely to the blue and white algorithm. Indeed, outside of Orwellian censorship, Facebook also excels at spying on us.
Already back in 2008, alternative media reported on the surveillance power of Facebook. Ten years later and after his historic NSA leaks, Edward Snowden reminded us that “Facebook is a surveillance company rebranded as ‘social media.’” It seems a hyperbolic visual but the dystopian picture of a constantly surveilled human being scrolling through banal content curated by a state-sponsored corporation is very real.
Since the October purge, calls from the left regarding alternatives have been loud but splintered.
Many suggest that we go back to the days of analog organizing – phone calls, knocking on doors, in-person meetings. As an organizer, I was unaware that we had ever stopped doing that. Truly, face-to-face organizing remains the most effective tool for us social beings. At the same time, to cast off the advancements of technological networking would be to walk away from an internet designed to be a place of collaboration and sharing. We shouldn’t and don’t have to do that.
What we need is an open source, non-surveillance platform. And right now, that platform is Minds. Before you ask, I’m not being paid to write that. My relationship with Minds consists of my account there and an interview with Minds co-founder Bill Ottman on my show.
Fashioned as an alternative to the closed and creepy Facebook behemoth, Minds advertises itself as “an open source and decentralized social network for Internet freedom.” Minds prides itself on being hands-off with regards to any content that falls in line with what’s permitted by law, which has elicited critiques from some on the left who say Minds is a safe haven for fascists and right-wing extremists. Yet, Ottman has himself stated openly that he wants ideas on content moderation and ways to make Minds a better place for social network users as well as radical content creators.
What a few fellow journos and I are calling #MindsShift is an important step in not only moving away from our gagged existence on Facebook, but in building a social network that can serve up the real news folks are now aching for. To be clear, we aren’t advocating that you delete your Facebook account – unless you want to. For many, Facebook is still an important tool and our goal is to add to the outreach toolkit, not suppress it.
We have set January 1st, 2019 as the ultimate date for this #MindsShift. Several outlets with a combined reach of millions of users will be making the move – and asking their readerships/viewerships to move with them. Along with fellow journalists, I am working with Minds to brainstorm new user-friendly functions and ways to make this #MindsShift a loud and powerful move. We ask that you, the reader, add to the conversation by joining the #MindsShift and spreading the word to your friends and family. (Join Minds via this link) We have created the #MindsShift open group on Minds.com so that you can join and offer up suggestions and ideas to make this platform a new home for radical and progressive media.
Now is the time to defend the remnants of the Information Revolution. In the streets and online, we need to hear and uplift voices for radical and progressive change. Take off the corporate gag, close the social media surveillance blinds, and shift.
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…We have a small favor to ask. Fewer and fewer people are seeing Anti-Media articles as social media sites crack down on us, and advertising revenues across the board are quickly declining. However, unlike many news organizations, we haven’t put up a paywall because we value open and accessible journalism over profit — but at this point, we’re barely even breaking even. Hopefully, you can see why we need to ask for your help. Anti-Media’s independent journalism and analysis takes substantial time, resources, and effort to produce, but we do it because we believe in our message and hope you do, too.
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================================= Nog een tip van mij: als je een account opent op Minds, gooi dan niet al je personalia te grabbel, zoals velen deden op Facebook, misbruik en inbraak zijn weliswaar veel moeilijker, maar de kans bestaat uiteraard dat dit wel kan gebeuren.
De algehele hysterie over ‘fake news’ (of: ‘nepnieuws’) is compleet en al dik meer dan een jaar gaande, waarbij de sociale media werden aangewezen als de verspreiders, terwijl de echte makers en verspreiders van nepnieuws juist de reguliere media zijn, zie de berichtgeving voorafgaand aan de illegale oorlogen tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië, plus de berichtgeving over Oekraïne (en ga nog maar een tijd door…….)
Nu is er nieuws opgedoken over de VS overheid (en het leger) die al actief negatief nieuws over de overheid en bijvoorbeeld het leger te lijf gaan met een fiks aantal verzonnen personen, die meerdere identiteiten hebben op het internet, personages die het echte nieuws onderuit moeten halen. Het leger van de VS heeft al een klein legertje aan personen samengesteld om hun werk te doen. Overigens heeft Israël al eerder aangekondigd kritiek en negatief nieuws op/over deze fascistische apartheidsstaat aan te zullen vallen met een ‘snelle reactiemacht…..’* Overigens dient opgemerkt te worden dat de VS en Israël nog iets verder gaan dan alleen kritiek aan te vallen, daar ze actief nepnieuws zullen verspreiden die bijvoorbeeld de uitgeoefende staatsterreur (in binnen en buitenland) moeten rechtvaardigen……
Topmilitairen van de VS zien in deze vorm van volksverlakkerij een belangrijk wapen om de bevolking te beïnvloeden, bijvoorbeeld (weer) met het schoonpraten van de grootschalige terreur die dit leger op meerdere plaatsen in de wereld uitoefent…….
Lees de volgende stap in het vervolmaken van de Big Brother staat zoals door George Orwell beschreven, alleen gaat de werkelijkheid straks nog veel verder dan hij ooit had kunnen dromen……. (door de immense technologische vooruitgang nadat zijn boek 1984 in 1949 werd gepubliceerd)
What the Media Isn’t Telling You About Social Media
(CORBETT) — Now openly admitted, governments and militaries around the world employ armies of keyboard warriors to spread propaganda and disrupt their online opposition. Their goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives. Their method? The weaponization of social media.
TRANSCRIPT:
It didn’t take long from the birth of the world wide web for the public to start using this new medium to transmit, collect and analyze information in ways never before imagined. The first message boards and clunky “Web 1.0” websites soon gave way to “the blogosphere.” The arrival of social media was the next step in this evolution, allowing for the formation of communities of interest to share information in real time about events happening anywhere on the globe.
But as quickly as communities began to form around these new platforms, governments and militaries were even quicker in recognizing the potential to use this new medium to more effectively spread their own propaganda.
Their goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives.
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Snapchat. Instagram. Reddit. “Social media” as we know it today barely existed fifteen years ago. Although it provides new ways to interact with people and information from all across the planet virtually instantaneously and virtually for free, we are only now beginning to understand the depths of the problems associated with these new platforms. More and more of the original developers of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter admit they no longer use social media themselves and actively keep it away from their children, and now they are finally admitting the reason why: social media was designed specifically to take advantage of your psychological weaknesses and keep you addicted to your screen.
SEAN PARKER: If the thought process that went into building these applications—Facebook being the first of them to really understand it—that thought process was all about “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s gonna get you to contribute more content and that’s gonna get you more likes and comments. So it’s a social validation feedback loop. I mean it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. And I think that we—the inventors/creators, you know, it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin Systrom at Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously and we did it anyway.
It should be no surprise, then, that in this world of social media addicts and smartphone zombies, the 24/7 newsfeed is taking up a greater and greater share of people’s lives. Our thoughts, our opinions, our knowledge of the world, even our mood are increasingly being influenced or even determined by what we see being posted, tweeted or vlogged. And the process by which these media shape our opinions is being carefully monitored and analyzed, not by the social media companies themselves, but by the US military.
MARINA PORTNAYA: When the world’s largest social media platform betrays its users, there’s going to be outrage.
ABC HOST: The study to see whether Facebook could influence the emotional state of its users on that news feed.
CNN ANCHOR: It allowed researchers to manipulate almost 700,000 users’ news feeds. Some saw more positive news about their friends, others saw more negative.
CNN GUEST: Well I’m not surprised. I mean we’re all kind of lab rat than the big Facebook experiment.
PORTNAYA: But it wasn’t only Facebook’s experiment. It turns out the psychological study was connected to the US government’s research on social unrest.
MORNING JOE GUEST: This is really kind of creepy.
PORTNAYA: And it gets worse. What you may not know is that the US Department of Defense has reportedly spent roughly $20 million conducting studies aimed at learning how to manipulate online behavior in order to influence opinion. The initiative was launched in 2011 by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as DARPA. The program is best described as the US media’s effort to become better at detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns via social media. Translation: When anti-government messages gain ground virally, Washington wants to find a way to spread counter opinion.
The DARPA document that details the Pentagon’s plans for influencing opinions in the social media space is called “Social Media in Strategic Communication.” DARPA’s goal, according to their own website, is “to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information.”
Exactly what tools were developed for this purpose and how they are currently being deployed is unclear.
But Rand Walzman, the program’s creator, admitted last year that the project lasted four years, cost $50 million and led to the publication of over 200 papers. The papers, including “Incorporating Human Cognitive Biases in a Probabilistic Model of Retweeting,” “Structural Properties of Ego Networks,” and “Sentiment Prediction using Collaborative Filtering,” make the thrust of the program perfectly clear. Social media users are lab rats being carefully scrutinized by government-supported researchers, their tweets and Facebook posts and Instagram pictures being analyzed to determine how information spreads online, and, by implication, how the government and the military can use these social media networks to make their own propaganda “go viral.”
As worrying as this research is, it pales in comparison to the knowledge that governments, militaries and political lobby groups are already employing squadrons of foot soldiers to wage information warfare in the social media battlespace.
AL-JAZEERA ANCHOR: The Pentagon’s got a new plan to counter anti-American messages in cyberspace. It involves buying software that will enable the American military to create and control fake online personas—fake people, essentially—who will appear to have originated from all over the world. The plan is being undertaken by CENTCOM (US Central Command), and the objective of the online persona management service is to combat enemy propaganda by influencing foreign social media websites. CENTCOM has hired a software development company called “Ntrepid,” and, according to the contract, the California-based company will initially provide 50 user licenses, each of which would be capable of controlling up to 10 fake personas. US law forbids the use of this type of technology, called “sockpuppets,” against Americans, so all the personas will reportedly be communicating in languages like Arabic, Persian and Urdu.
CTV ANCHOR: So is it okay to have the government monitor social media conversations and then to wade in and correct some of those conversations? With more on this, let’s go to technology expert Carmi Levy. He’s on the line from Montreal. Carmi, do you think the government’s monitoring what you and I are saying right now? Is this whole thing getting out of line, or what?
[…]
CARMI LEVY: It opens up a bit of a question. I’d like to call it a Pandora’s box about, you know, what exactly is the government’s aim here, and what do they hope to accomplish with what they find out? And as they accumulate this information online—this data on us—where does that data go? And so I think as much as we should applaud the government for getting into this area, the optics of it are potentially very Big Brother-ish. And the government really does need to be a little bit more concrete on what its intentions are and how it intends to achieve them.
4WWL REPORTER: New evidence that government-owned computers at the Army Corps of Engineers office here in New Orleans are being used to verbally attack critics of the Corps comes in an affidavit from the former editor-in-chief of nola.com. Jon Donley, who was laid off this past February, tells us via satellite from Texas, in late 2006 he started noticing people presenting themselves as ordinary citizens defending the Corps very energetically.
JON DONLEY: What stuck out, though, was the wording of the comments was in many ways mirroring news releases from the Corps of Engineers.
[…]
SANDY ROSENTHAL: These commenters tried to discredit these people . . .
4WWL REPORTER: And when Rosenthal investigated, she discovered the comments were coming from users at the internet provider address of the Army Corps of Engineers offices here in New Orleans. She blamed the Corps for a strategy of going after critics.
ROSENTHAL: In the process of trying to obscure the facts of the New Orleans floodings, one of their tactics was just verbal abuse.
NAFTALI BENNETT: Mo’etzet Yesha, in conjunction with My Israel, has arranged an instruction day for Wiki editors. The goal of the day is to teach people how to edit in Wikipedia, which is the number one source of information today in the world. As a way of example, if someone searches the Gaza flotilla, we want to be there. We want to be the guys who influence what is written there, how it’s written, and to ensure that it’s balanced and Zionist in the nature.
These operations are only the visible and publicly-admitted front of a vast array of military and intelligence programs that are attempting to influence online behaviour, spread government propaganda, and disrupt online communities that arise in opposition to their agenda.
That such programs exist is not a matter of conjecture; it is mundane, established, documented fact.
In 2014, an internal document was leaked from GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA. The document, never intended for public release, was entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations” and bluntly stated that “We want to build Cyber Magicians.” It then goes on to outline the “magic” techniques that must be employed in influence and information operations online, including deception and manipulation techniques like “anchoring,” “priming” and “branding” propaganda narratives. After presenting a map of social networking technologies that are targeted by these operations, the document then instructs the “magicians” how to deceive the public through “attention management” and behavioural manipulation.
That governments would turn to these strategies is hardly a shocking development. In fact, the use of government shills to propagate government talking points and disrupt online dissent has been openly advocated on the record by high-ranking government officials for the past decade.
In 2008, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who would go on to become Obama’s information “czar,” co-authored a paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” in which he wrote that the “best response” to online “conspiracy theories” is what he calls “cognitive infiltration” of groups spreading these ideas.
“Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. […] In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities.”
It is perhaps particularly ironic that the idea that government agents are actually and admittedly spreading propaganda online under false identities is, to the less-informed members of the population, itself a “conspiracy theory” rather than an established conspiracy fact.
Unsurprisingly, when confronted about his proposal, Sunstein pretended to not remember having written it and then pointedly refused to answer any questions about it.
LUKE RUDKOWSKI: My name is Bill de Burgh from Brooklyn College, and I know you’ve written many articles. But I think the most telling one about you is the 2008 one called “Conspiracy Theories,” where you openly advocated government agents infiltrate activist groups of 9/11 Truth and also stifle dissent online. I was wondering why do you think it’s the government’s job, or why do you think the government should go after family members who have questions and 9/11 responders who are lied to about the air, survivors whose testimony conflicts, and also government whistleblowers that were gagged because they released information that contradicts the official story.
CASS SUNSTEIN: I think it was Ricky who said I’d written hundreds of articles and I remember some and not others. That one I don’t remember very well. I hope I didn’t say that. But whatever was said in that article, my role in government is to oversee federal rule-making in a way that is wholly disconnected from the vast majority of my academic writing, including that.
[…]
RUDKOWSKI: I just want to know is it safe to say that you retract saying that conspiracy theories should be banned or taxed for having an opinion online. Is it safe to say that?
SUNSTEIN: I don’t remember the article very well. So I hope I didn’t say either those things.
RUDKOWSKI: But you did and it’s written. Do you retract them?
Now, a decade on from Sunstein’s proposal, we know that military psyops agents, political lobbyists, corporate shills and government propagandists are spending vast sums of money and employing entire armies of keyboard warriors, leaving comments and shaping conversations to change the public’s opinions, influence their behaviour, and even alter their mood. And they are helped along in this quest by the very same technology that allows the public to connect on a scale never before possible.
Technology is always a double-edged sword, and sometimes it can be dangerous to wield that sword at all. There are ways to identify and neutralize the threat of online trolls and shills, but the phenomenon is not likely to go away any time soon.
Each of us must find our own answer to the question of how best to incorporate these technologies into our life. But the next time you find yourself caught up in an argument with an online persona that may or may not be a genuine human being, it might be better to ask yourself if your efforts are better spent engaging in the argument or just turning off the computer.