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How I’m Responding to Facebook and Twitter Censorship
The previously clandestine and now quite overt censoring of conservative voices on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Platforms has now reached dangerous levels. This is not just about Trump. Social media is critical to modern political discourse. The censorship must be resisted. That means targeting profitability, and that means boycotts. But I won’t cut off my nose to spite my face.
I will continue to use these platforms in the short term while taking the following measures to abandon them as soon as it is practical.
1. To the greatest extent possible, I will try to post nearly exclusively on Parler and MeWe
2. I will post on Twitter and Facebook only links to those Parler and MeWe posts
3. You are not forced to join those sites to view my posts, but I hope once you are on the sites reading my stuff, you will take the opportunity to join those communities. Please join/follow/friend me when you get there.
4. Eventually, once those alternative communities have reached the critical mass needed to function as effectively as Twitter and Facebook once did, I will abandon those legacy services entirely. Ironically, with their recent actions, those legacy companies may have accelerated the realization of that network effect functionality.
In the meantime, here is what else I am doing:
To the extent possible, I am viewing my favorite video podcasts on Rumble instead of YouTube. They don’t censor political speech and their terms are financially much more appealing for content creators. Also, they have plans to incorporate live streaming in the new year.
I have abandoned Google as my search engine on all platforms. I use Duck Duck Go
I am researching my options for switching email providers to jettison G-Mail. Looking at Protonmail which offers end to end encryption. They don’t mine your emails for data about you to sell. Even if privacy isn’t your primary concern, you’ll be incrementally robbing Google of a source of revenue.
I’m @Exaeroman at Parler https://parler.com/profile/Exaeroman/posts
I’m Jesse McVay at MeWe https://mewe.com/i/jessemcvay
https://Rumble.com https://rumble.com
https://DuckDuckGo.com https://duckduckgo.com
https://Protonmail.com https://protonmail.com
Feel free to comment on this post if you have other suggestions for alternative social media platforms.
If you agree with this approach to taking back Social Media Freedom, please share and ReTweet (Echo) this post.
Published in General
I use Brave, it was started by the dude who was kicked out of Mozilla because of his beliefs
Dave Rubin has created a site called https://www.locals.com/ which is hosting site for creators of content.
Back in about 1997 I predicted that although the internet seemed to open up free speech everywhere, that soon it would be used to restrict speech world wide. My prediction is sadly coming true.
People used to have their own blogs. I still have mine, but the software I used is no longer available, and I‘ve stopped blogging in 2011 when I went to Afghanistan.
I feel a need to start again. I doubt there’d be much original to say, but at least I’d being saying something. I never had any followers beyond immediate family and friends, but maybe someday in the future someone will find it and know that not all of us were so blind.
Thanks for this I hope everyone who reads it send it to all of their (rational?)contacts.
Yeah. I jumped ship years ago and now I have no dramatic gesture handy at the critical moment. Awkward.
Gonna ask the same as Hartmann. I am also interested.
Amazon is suspending cloud hosting services to Parler. So long The Blaze, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, … the digital curtain has descended. The left controls the infrastructure of internet 2.0 and can shut anyone and anything down.
We no longer live in a free world.
I thought Amazon bought ABEbooks.
https://techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks/
Yes, this is why I’m NOT running to join/post on Parler, Gab, etc. I’m sure there are lefties on those site waiting to see who jumps right now and see who they can come after.
Scrub and lock down your social media. If you’re on FB, “unfriend” and block the “hall monitor” types. I don’t know if you can “go anonymous” of FB; you can on Twitter and you can also lock your account.
And for God’s sake, don’t be like those fools at the capitol; don’t snitch on yourself!
As am I
Me too, please.
I am taking similar action, joining and using Parler and Gab.com. There are a number of similar sites, some mentioned here of which I was unaware. May the best site win.
My wife and I recently discovered Twitter and we have liked the opportunity to get news in short bursts. However, I am ready to end it with twitter.
As for facebook, I use it to see pictures of my grandchildren in France, travel being a bit of a challenge these days, so I guess I have to keep it around.
I have used Duck Duck Go for years, continually changing the browser defaults from Bing and Google which somehow change back with new browser updates, at least that is true for Bing and Microsoft.
The problem is, I can’t block autoplay of videos in Brave (or Chrome).
Also don’t use the Chrome Browser. I like Brave. Albeit built on the Mozilla kernal, it’s not Mozilla.
Check your Brave Shield Settings. I only get autoplay on the sites where I’ve got partial Shields (e.g. Instapundit).
I just heard about Brave about 5 days ago. Watched a 10 minute video on Roku. I use Firefox now and don’t see a reason to switch. Do you have a different opinion? I’d be interested in your thoughts on this.
http://lobsterforest.com
Brave is built on Chromium. It basically works like Chrome but without all the spying.
I’m very happy with Brave.
Been there, done that. If you search the internet for information, you learn that Chromium determines that it cannot be done. Are autoplay ads blocked on YouTube for you?
How does one get an invite?
Never mind. I’m getting it sorted.
Very valid point and one which I have agonized over for months. Twitter wasn’t just valuable for the availability of conservative viewpoints, but for the availability of ALL viewpoints. I continue to follow many mainstream liberal journalists on Twitter, and I will continue to do so for as long as I am there. Parler is a refuge for conservatives who have been forced away from Twitter, but the opposition isn’t coming with us. We are in danger of becoming locked inside a self reinforcing bubble. And yet, what choice do we have?
Then I’m glad I never checked in.
I follow https://vivabarneslaw.locals.com/ on locals. Viva Frei (real name is David Freiberg) is a Montreal lawyer and YouTuber who does video blogs on issues of law. Robert Barnes is a US attorney and civil libertarian. Has represented Alex Jones, Wesley Snipes, and some of the other Covington kids (not Sandman). He has recently been one of several on the team advising the president especially in Georgia. (He thinks Lin Wood is a kook and Sidney Powell got conned). Anyway, these two present the most amazing weekly podcast every Sunday night, live streamed on YouTube and also available later via recorded video on both YouTube and Rumble. I highly recommend everyone watch. I know tonight’s episode will be amazing with all the recent censorship action. I promise you’ll get some valuable insights.
Agreed. I haven’t left Facebook, though I’ve also joined MeWe. I think we should support platforms that explicitly endorse free speech (MeWe, Parler, etc.), but that doesn’t mean we should voluntarily silence ourselves on the platforms that embrace censorship and speech control.
In addition to those, I’ve reactivated my old account on LiveJournal. I started there in 2004, before the site was bought by a Russian group, and last posted in 2006.
LiveJournal became popular with Russians because it was the first social media site to support the cyrillic character set.
There has been some concern about just how independent the site would be after Putin demanded that social media sites used in Russia host their databases in Russia, too. I really don’t know. I have seen comments elsewhere about how freedom of speech on VK (a Russian Facebook) has been eroded, but I don’t know the specifics. Alexei Navalny has a presence on LiveJournal, and maintains an English version of his posts as well as a Russian version. (I searched for him specifically, because that would give an indication of how far it has succumbed to government control.)
I do like the way LiveJournal works much more than other social media sites, but maybe some would find it too complicated. I don’t find it any more complicated than Facebook, which I still haven’t figured out. I saw that one of my old correspondents (who used to be the main commenter on my Russian movie blog) had written a good article about the significance of the recent events in the United States. He wrote in Russian, using a lot of words outside my vocabulary, as well as at least one new and potentially useful idiom, but with the help of Google Translate I managed to get the gist of it. I replied in English, and ended up receiving an e-mail containing his article and my comment. I like that. I wish more sites worked that way, because we can’t expect Facebook, Ricochet, or LiveJournal to be around for as long as I’d like to keep copies of my comments. (I don’t expect my e-mail hosts to be around forever, either, so I store copies of my e-mail on my own computer and back them up to multiple locations.)
One of the amusing encounters back in the day was when a young man asked me to join the Libertarian group so he wouldn’t have to be the oldest person there. He was in his 40s and I was in my mid 50s at the time. Already at that time I no longer considered myself a libertarian, but I did join. I haven’t checked yet to see if that group is still active.
If anyone from here decides to add LiveJournal to the repertoire, I’m there under my real name, johngorentz.
Nailed it! I completely agree. Running for the hills is just a right-wing “safe space.” However I think it’s bad for us and bad for the country. It’s as bad for us to create our own siloes and echo chambers that distort our perspective, just as it is for the left.
It’s bad for the country because we need to get our ideas out there, and you can’t do that when we’re shutting ourselves out. Even neuroscience has shown a correlation between the ideas people are exposed to and the beliefs they hold. If we want to see positive changes then we have to increase our exposure. People must hear us.
It matters who shows up to fight.
Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla b/c he dared to oppose same-sex marriage. He’s now in hot water again for daring to question St. Fauci.
Correction: The last posts from Navalny were in 2014. Not a good sign.