Http://hentaireviews.moe traffic suddenly plummeted from 7000 daily page views to 2300.
The crash made me suspect censorship. If you’re paying attention, ideological purges are taking place on the internet. Corporations are systematically denying service from users on ideological grounds.
The drop began on August 29th, 2018. While investigating what happened, I realized that on every platform I share my content, I am wrestling with the same problem: Invisible rules.
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Google’s algorithms are secret. Nobody knows exactly how to play them. Everybody plays Google’s system to gain visitors, but there are hidden penalties for playing wrong.
I cannot be certain if my recent political content caused Google to reduce our traffic. I cannot know.
Google is banning websites. Youtube is shutting down channels. Twitter is manipulating algorithms and banning users. Facebook is mass banning pages. Independent news sites are banned as “fake news”.
Social media companies have invisible rules too; Algorithms that filter content. And their stated terms of services, have plenty of room for interpretation. As a result, moderators will enforce the rules inconsistently.
These companies have power because they have millions of users globally, they possess an overpowering impact on our societies. Corporate content moderation can swing elections.
As if the online environment wasn’t already chaotic with corporations meddling with the free market of ideas, the social rules in western societies have become completely insane.
The rules that these corporations are implementing are simply reflecting a shift in their users’ attitudes.
In the current cultural climate, what’s considered “acceptable speech” is changing constantly. What topics and the tone of the discussions is strictly controlled by invisible irrational rules.
Most people’s rules are not thought-through, but based on vague feelings. Making matters worse, we have “hate speech laws” that penalize you for hurting others’ irrational feelings.
The definition of “hate speech” should only be allocated to incitements of violence against fellow humans.
The problem with offensiveness as a parameter to measure the acceptability of speech is that it’s based on subjective standards. What’s considered off-limits to speak about differs between social circles.
The problems occur in the public sphere. With many diverse social circles making up the social fabric, the standard for acceptable speech is raised like a drawbridge. The social rules become stricter with more diversity.
Subjectivity lends to a convoluted set of irrational rules.
It’s not what you say, but how you say it.
It’s not how you say it, but who you say it to.
It’s not who you say it to, but when you say it.
It’s not who you said it to, but who overheard it.
It’s not what you say, but what your skin color is.
It’s not what you say, but what your gender is.
It’s not what you meant, but how people perceived it.
It’s not that your statement isn’t factual, it’s just offensive.
Normal people are not the only ones lost in this web of rules. On a weekly basis, we read news of prominent celebrities, politicians, and companies breaking social rules, often getting their careers destroyed for it.
It’s almost as if none of us know where the line goes anymore. We cannot discuss the rules with this censorship.
The culture war in the west has escalated to a point where the companies that control our means of public discourse are no longer ideologically impartial. The companies are filled with moral ideologues.
Subjective social rules don’t amount to a functional system. Yet, when offensiveness is considered the parameter to measure transgressions against moral norms, this is what we get: Tyranny and mob rule.
Rules are important. We cut support from individuals and businesses who transgress against our moral codes. Conversely, individuals and businesses that produce value to people, communities raise to prominence.
No matter how many times you recite “diversity is our strength”, human communities formulate around common values. People with different values cannot share a space for a prolonged period of time.
You can visit a foreign country, but you don’t stay in a place where you struggle to feel comfortable. You don’t hang with friends who have vastly different political beliefs than you.
Why are we so divided, that we’re incapable of imposing our morality on these companies? Because we don’t embrace the same virtues. We are building different systems; diversity divides us into tribes.
Common transcendent values bind us into one tribe. The universal morality of Christianity transcends race, gender, age, sex, everything. The diversity you love is a trait of the free market, not socialism.
These problems are occurring because we have stopped loving the same virtues. Virtues transcend immediate self-interest, they inspire us to make sacrifices to build something greater: A civilization.
These corporations we have raised to prominence by using their services, and the corrupt politicians they collude with, have no respect for us. Because they knowingly do evil and we ignore it, they don’t respect us.
The immorality of these corporations is a culmination of our own collective immorality.
We don’t need Google, there are other great search engines. Twitter has viable alternatives now. Youtube has alternatives. Everybody is only on Facebook because everybody is on Facebook.
If these companies stamp out online free speech, they didn’t do it alone. We let them.
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I feel your pain. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you don't break these big companies up. What happened to competing OS in the 80s before is the same as what's happening now to social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube + Google hold too much power at this point in the history of the internet. They have no real competitors, and can pretty much do as they please. Whatever competing entities that do get some traction end up getting bought by one of these giants. See WhatsApp.
I'm generally against the government acting on this. The free market, people, should be reacting to these monopolies by organizing, spreading information, boycotting. It may be utopian to expect, but I'd like to think the free market can handle these issues better than governments which often make things much, much worse.
I just think it's unrealistic to leave everything to the free market. I admire the libertarian ideal, but my point was always this; who's gonna watch the watchdogs? Governments, corporations, and people are all organisations in the end. They're all susceptible to the same problems, and that is getting too big, and corrupt.
People watch over the governments through a representative democracy, governments watch over corporations through regulations, and the corporations watch over the people who work for them. In the lax laissez faire system, you remove the government from the equation, and that leads to corporations getting bigger and bigger till THEY become the government, which is what happened already with Google, Twitter and Facebook. At some point, they have no reason to even innovate since they don't have any competition.
The reason the free market doesn't seem like it could work is because you don't think in the correct timeframes. Every monopoly falls eventually as competitors start innovating, competing, and nagging at the foundations. The corruption of the monopolistic company becomes mode widespread, and they start bleeding business. You have to be patient and trust people to work out the issues. When there's no government we can rely on to handle things for us, it forces us to organize. Otherwise there is no incentive.
I didn't say the freemarket doesn't seem to work. It's just that monopolies need to be regulated. Here's an anecdote from my own country. My government sold 40% of shares of the national telecom to Orange in 2000. We started getting ADSL but at a very expensive price compared to other countries in the world.
There were competitors trying to compete, but they all died off because the telecom controlled the only undersea cable to the other places and any other company which wanted to use it had to pay a fee to them.
For more than a decade, I had to suffer hrough crappy ADSL with constant cuts with me usually calling their services several times. Not to mention what they offered wasn't cheap, but I had no other choice. The other competitors seemed to have an even worse service.
As the years went by, the government implemented price cuts to the internet packages in an effort to give internet access to everyone, as the problems with their internet service also became less frequent. But still to this day, what I'm paying is still more expensive than if I was to pay it in some other country.
So now remove the government in the equation. Let's say they didn't own any part of the Telecom. Honestly, we would all be fucked by Orange hard. Sure, they did innovate, but their premium pricing kept the lower class off the internet as long as they could. In 2004, no one I knew had ADSL. I was one of the few that did, and the reason why they didn't get it was the exorbitant pricing that Orange had at the time.
Now you think Google will fall? That's very unlikely, and even if they did, another monopoly will soon take over.
And this is why I will never ascribe to the no government idea. They aren't there to stifle innovation, because if they are, then they're doing a terrible job. They're here to improve the lives of the populace, and if they can do it without having to stifle innovation and competition, which they didn't in my case, then it is the realistic, and smart solution.
Unfortunately, because the US is so much in bed with corporations, Google, Facebook and Twitter will be the defacto social media for a very long time.
You are describing the one case where government intervention is necessary: When a company has monopolized a piece of vital infrastructure.
I stopped using Google search back in 2014. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine now
I've been using Ecosia. They use ad revenue to plant trees. https://www.ecosia.org/
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