Let’s say you’re a conservative, and after watching Big Tech attempt to single-handedly destroy Parler, blame Trump for inciting riots in the Capitol, and try to shutdown legitimate stock trading on Robinhood, you’re now really worried about social media censorship. You probably saw my previous posts on MeWe and NextDoor, and think there might just be no options.
Don’t lose hope! Since I couldn’t get Parler to test out, I double-downed and worked through the MeWe interface. If you need help building an account, there are hundreds of “How to get started on MeWe” videos to watch. After you create an account, do the following:
If you liked memes, find a memes group. I would regularly browse Facebook and Reddit for memes. It brightened my days up and made me laugh. Reddit has become disappointingly hostile to conservatives, and Facebook is just part of the evil FAANG empire. MeWe has a pretty burgeoning list of meme groups. To find a meme group, on your home page click on “Browse Groups.” Simply type in Memes, and plenty pop up. I recommend “Meme’s From Everywhere” and “Funny memes and humor” as a start. There are plenty of darker and lighter groups, so experiment a bit and find what suits your tastes.
Start a family group. A big reason for Facebook’s success is sharing pictures with your friends. My wife and I still want to share our family’s adventures with our friends, without the creepiness of Facebook sharing our pictures with others. To do that, we created a Family group and invited our friends to it. Now we can share photos and let our friends download and comment. We can even chat our upcoming plans to them. With your own group, its easy to get back to enjoying your friends as friends instead of focusing on where their politics don’t align with you.
Replicate your interest groups. I never got into the groups on Facebook all that much, but on MeWe it really helps you link up with like minded people. I’m on a chainsaw group and I found a few home solutions for creosote buildup in my fireplace. The gardening group I’m part of helped me design a better fence for keeping the deer out of my garden. Its really easy to search the MeWe groups, find interests, and join groups.
Tell the businesses your frequent. The ballet studio my girls attend uses Facebook to push out updates. That’s pretty common across businesses, and if you don’t have Facebook you miss out. We’re encouraging the studio to dump Facebook and switch to MeWe, since privacy for a ballet studio is pretty important, and the studio has a Christian background. Many businesses don’t even know there are other options, so helping them make the switch is key to breaking Facebook’s grip.
Advocate for the missing features. I still need a livestream option, and neither MeWe nor Rumble have that yet. I also wish I could sell stuff on MeWe easily, but the privacy standards are pretty high, so NextDoor will have to suffice for now. You can communicate this to the developers, and with the explosion in growth they have, they are looking to keep their users. They are likely open to adding features, especially if its something their competitors don’t have.
I wish you the best on MeWe, maybe Peter will start a DaTechGuy group on MeWe so we can share thoughts about our favorite blog!
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, after what CNN deemed “a fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”
By John Ruberry
Wednesday was a dark day in American history. Most of the blame for the riot at the US Capitol deservedly goes to the hooligans, about 1,500 of them, who broke through blockades and defied law enforcement and entered the Capitol building–the first such mass hostile group to do so since British forces marched in during the War of 1812 before setting it ablaze.
Many of the thugs who illegally entered the Capitol have been arrested and they deserve, if found guilty, to face the full brunt of the law.
This was not, as the media deemed last year’s many instances of “unrest” in American cities, “a mostly peaceful protest.”
President Donald J. Trump is by no means blameless. He should have conceded his loss to Joe Biden weeks ago. I support Trump’s fight for free and fair elections. But even in states where the vote count was the most questionable, Pennsylvania and Georgia, had their electoral votes magically gone to the president, Trump still would have lost. And while I disagree with the mainstream media blowhards and Democratic politicians who said Trump incited the crowd to riot, he gave some of the protesters hope. Normally hope is a good thing to spread but he gave some people the belief that their protest might have compelled Congress to ignore the Electoral College and keep Trump in the White House. That was never going to happen.
On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Thursday night he asked that we look at why the protesters–not just the rioters–attended the rally. They were angry.
Why?
In November a Rasmussen poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters believed the presidential election was stolen. Even many Democrats agreed. As for myself I don’t believe the election was stolen. My view is that the weak standards with mail-in voting, put in place on a widespread basis for the first time in many states because of the COVID-19 epidemic, has something to do with that. Mail-in voting, without safeguards, makes such crimes as voting twice or more, dead people voting, and voting in a jurisdiction when you live someplace else more likely.
While elections need to continue to be run at the state level Congress should, if such a thing is possible, have an open mind in regards to exploring new nationwide election standards, such as what was done after the Florida recount debacle of 2000. Banning ballot harvesting is a good place to start, as well as replacing early voting, that is “election season,” with–and this is an idea that comes from the liberals–making the day of a general election a work holiday. And photo ID should be required for voting too.
If millions of Americans don’t have faith in the election process then democracy rests on a flimsy leaf.
Now let’s look at the mainstream media and Big Tech. I’ll be brief only for the sake of not overwhelming you. I could bring up dozens of examples of media bias but I won’t for now.
For over four years most of the media flogged a dead horse of a story in Russian collusion. There was no Trump-Russia collusion. Zero. Robert Mueller’s exhaustive investigation found none. That didn’t stop the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC from hawking it, not so subtly, as the way to oust Trump from power for nearly four years nearly every day.
Meanwhile the Hunter Biden laptop story was minimized by that same mainstream media during the 2020 campaign. The younger Biden’s alleged influence peddling activities are not a nothing-burger. And Facebook and Twitter for a while blocked the posting the New York Post story about the deeply troubling news that the former vice president’s son might be compromised by foreign governments, including our greatest rival, China. Twitter, in a preview of 2021’s ongoing purge of conservatives that includes Trump, from the microblogging platform, locked the Post out of its account for nearly two weeks. Free press anyone? The suppression worked. Many people I spoke with, folks who only get their news from Facebook, never heard about the Hunter laptop scandal until I told them about it.
Trump’s core base of supporters are voracious consumers of news–and yes, to be fair of course some of their news stories come from Facebook and Twitter, unless of course they’ve been purged from those sites. And the double-standard of most of the media on those two stories seethes the Trump base.
After the riot the media continued its dismissive attitude of Trump supporters.
Anderson Cooper of CNN, a scion of the Vanderbilt family that got filthy rich during the Gilded Age, said of the protesters after the riot. “And they’re going to go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and talk about the great day they had in Washington … They stood up for nothing other than mayhem.”
Clearly Cooper dines at what he deems are better restaurants than the Olive Garden. And he can afford to stay at the finest hotels, places that are beyond my financial reach. And yes, I’ve stayed at those hotels Cooper denigrated. I’ve eaten at the Olive Garden a few times.
Another cruel irony of the mainstream media coverage of the Capitol riot is that they deemed it one, while they went to great pains to call the many urban riots of 2020–which occurred almost exclusively in Democrat-run cities–anything but that. While storming the Capitol is clearly a much different dimension than looting and arson, and yes, a very disturbing one, the hypocrisy of the media is apparent to a 10-year-old.
More than ever we need new media. If you agree with my post, especially if you dine at the Olive Garden, stop seething. Start your own blog. WordPress and Blogger.com are good places to start. Even if you have just ten readers a day–my own blog has many more than that in case you are wondering–you will be making a difference. Besides, much of the mainstream media, particularly daily newspapers, are endangered species. Warren Buffett, no conservative, expects only a few of them to survive and he made that prediction before the COVID-19 outbreak that has devastated their ad revenue. Those papers, for the most part, take their lead in reporting news from the aforementioned Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s where they learn not to use words like “riot” unless it involves conservatives. They invent terms like “mostly peaceful” or sugarcoat the carnage by saying it is “unrest.” Those last two newspapers aren’t going anyhere but we can fight back with reality. An army of mosquitoes can make a difference.
Update (DTG) I put something like this in as a comment but figured it belonged as a post update as this has gotten instalanched. (Thanks Ed)
John is one one my original magnificent seven bloggers/ He produces quality work and I’m proud to have him here.
I believe he is completely wrong about the election not being stolen, both math, the actions of the left and common sense in my opinion scream it to be the case, but he has the right to his opinion and I respect that he comes by it honestly and have no problem with him expressing it here.
If anyone has problem with him expressing that opinion on my site and want him off for having & expressing it, well that’s too bad.
I’ve never liked Twitter even though I’ve used it. I was a late adopter, and with good reason. It’s the crystal meth of social media — addictive and destructive, yet simultaneously unsatisfying. When I’m off it I’m happier than when I’m on it. That it’s also being run by crappy SJW types who break their promises, to users, shareholders, and the government, of free speech is just the final reason. Why should I provide free content to people I don’t like, who hate me? I’m currently working on a book on social media, and I keep coming back to the point that Twitter is far and away the most socially destructive of the various platforms. So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others. At least I’m giving my reasons, which is more than they’ve done usually.
Glenn Reynolds
Apparently Twitter has decided that even though their written accusations against me are patently false it’s much too embarrassing to grant my appeals quickly only to have their apologies and claims of “mistakes” be illustrated as false.
For what is now the 6th time in under 20 days you have locked me out claiming that I was spreading intimate images when I was in fact each time tweeting out a link to a post on Benford’s statistical law which demonstrates the impossibility of Joe Biden’s magic ballots.
Moreover Every time I have appealed you have upheld said appeal apologized and claimed my lockout was an error. YET EVERY SINGLE TIME AFTER THESE “apologies” I HAVE RETWEETED THE VERY SAME LINK TO THE VERY SAME PIECE AND WAS LOCKED OUT WITH THE VERY SAME FALSE ACCUSATION AGAINST ME.
To say this is despicable and dishonorable is to not only repeat myself from previous appeals but to say something that is so apparent that it almost doesn’t need saying. That you still do this demonstrate why other alternatives like Parler are doing so well.
Bottom line you’re accusation is false and I’m not only not going to delete the tweet but after this appeal is won I will test to see if your upcoming “apology” and assertion of a “mistake” is worth any more than it was the last five times you sent them.
At least my next lockout for that same link will be lucky number 7
emphasis mine
they have clearly concluded that there is no percentage in handling my appeal in a timely manor.
So I am now on day three of my lockout awaiting the results of my appeal and counting. For Twitter it’s the best of possible worlds in the sense that they keep me silent while pretending that they are carefully considering the nuances of my appeal but they keep the Benford’s law post from spreading, at least on their platform, while always dangling the carrot that if I just delete the tweet in question I’ll be welcomed back.
Now if I was 14 or 21 or maybe even in my 30’s that might has some oomph, alas dear twitter I’m nearer to my 70th birthday than I am to my 45th and thus lived many decades without twitter, and while it is a convenience I can continue to function without it.
While the in the short term such a plan will achieve goals in the long term discouraging your product (that’s folks like me) from being on your platform while encouraging them to go to other places such as Gab (Parler wants a cell phone number that I don’t have) might not be appealing to one’s customer base (advertisers) which is likely to have as bad an effect on shareholders as encouraging your voter base to not reproduce with the same predictable results.
The problem exemplified by the case of Lena Dunham is that the “r strategy” (parents having fewer children, with the idea of more “quality” in their offspring) pursued past a certain point, involves an increased risk of eventual reproductive failure. This is what I mean by taking into account secondary and tertiary consequences, thinking forward to the third generation down the line. Suppose this hypothetical:
John and Jane have two children.
If both of their children have two children of their own, John and Jane will have four grandchildren.
If all four grandchildren each have two children, then John and Jane will have eight great-grandchildren.
Now a slightly different hypothetical:
John and Jane have three children.
If each of their children have three children of their own, John and Jane will have nine grandchildren.
If all nine grandchildren each have three children, then John and Jane will have 27 great-grandchildren.
In other words, increasing average family size from 2 to 3 — which is not much, really, in terms of r/K theory — produces a third generation of descendants more than three times larger. This fact is obvious from simple arithmetic, yet its social consequences are profound.
Now if your business model is to attract users so that you can sell exposure to them to advertisers the exile of those who actually reproduce might be a bad idea if you wish to have your company last like a Ford or a McDonalds for generations after you are founded.
But if you are merely using a publicly traded company as a means to an end either social acceptance or to advance a narrative a /la Tina Brown then it all makes perfect sense…to all but the shareholders who were looking for profit rather than status that is.
Those guys are into Parler and Gab
Closing thought, one must also consider that depending on who the shareholders are they might not CARE about profit as long as conservatives are silenced consider:
That’s the real point here. Economics isn’t what’s driving this ideology and status is. Jack and the big investors who back him don’t care about the money, they’re never going to be hurting or needing. It’s all about the stuff money can’t buy and by leaning on conservatives you remain acceptable to the “right” people.
Seriously did you think Tina Brown got all those people to lose all that money over the years because they thought she was brilliant or was putting out to get it? Nobody’s that brilliant and there are plenty of woman who would put out for less. It was all about getting the bona fides and entree to the right parties, and the right people and believe me those “right” people who hate our guts will use that for the fullest effect.
Jack and twitter aren’t going to change because of economic pressure or anything else. He’s virtue signaling and that signal is being seen by the people that he wants to see it.
If the primary goal isn’t profit it’s all good to them.
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