“If the service is free, you pay with your private data.” - Edward Snowden
I’m old enough to remember when the DoD/DARPA personal data collecting program known as LifeLog became Facebook. I didn’t trust it then, and although I use it sparingly, I still don’t trust it. You shouldn’t either.
In a slow and insidious example of the “boiling a frog” metaphor, I have watched Facebook slowly change from a site where my feed was filled with content from people on my friends’ list and paid advertisements to a weaponized AI driven bot farm of content I don’t want to see with very little from my 1,669 friends. My back up account is force fed posts from accounts such as: “U.S. Democratic Socialists”, “ Progressive Power”, “Arrest Trump”, “Resist Trump”, and “Orange Turd”. Even if I waste an hour blocking these sites nearly identical ones appear the next day.
I used to utilize Twitter, but my well established account with no previous TOS violations was permanently restricted to read only mode, and all of my followers removed, as part of the January 7, 2020, platform wide mass account purge following the J6 mostly peaceful self guided tour of the US Capitol. My offense? I inconveniently shared live stream videos showing known Antifa instigators, likely Federal assets, and even Capitol Police, causing most of the problems that day.
So I joined MeWe, Spreely, Minds, and Gab, hoping one of them would prove to be a viable free speech platform alternative. Gab.com exceeded all expectations and, even if I often don’t agree with his personal views, it’s founder Andrew Torba is a hero. Once you block the “hate speech” accounts, which likely exist there primarily to damage Gab’s credibility and reputation, it’s a great platform.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed it to “X”. Musk promised blanket amnesty for accounts such as mine and even fired dictatorial speech gatekeepers. But my account was never reinstated, and although I applied twice my disputes went unanswered and my suspension remains unresolved.
Last month, I set up an X account for the Mohave Free Press. It was a refreshing change from Facebook to only see content from accounts I chose to follow, or suggested content that I actually wanted to see.
Then over the holidays, Elon Musk faced brutal backlash from X users over his “I will go to war on this issue” support for H-1B immigration work visa program. On January 3rd, Musk appeared to be gearing up to suppress speech on his platform, posting “Algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational/entertaining content...Our goal is to maximize unregetted user seconds. Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.” Musk was promptly roasted again, given that he had just replied to a critic with “Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face.”
An X user asked Grok, the X platform free Artificial Intelligence LLM, how she could avoid tripping the negativity censors and was advised not to criticize the government, talk about conspiracy theories, accuse government officials or members of the media of malfeasance or dishonesty, and not to tell other users to “F” off in the comments. Then Grok informed another user that X had a sort of social credit “positivity” score, prompting users to ask Grok what their score was. Subsequently, Musk was accused by Gab CEO Torba, of being influenced by Blackrock, the globalist multinational corporation that had just invested $6B in Grok.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly been sucking up to Trump and publicly asserting his renewed enthusiasm for free speech, despite previously deplatforming Trump, right leaning FB influencers and disappearing countless prominent FB groups and pages, not to mention spending over $419M to influence the 2020 election in favor of leftists. In reality, he has turned Facebook into a zombie corpse, it’s a dead platform but most users don’t know it, and he’s hoping to reanimate the site to mine more of your personal data to sell for his personal profit.