The Devil Roams

 

     This is just to let you all know that the day may come in which you surf in expecting fresh political content and may run up against a 404 page. I know because it happened to me yesterday. I was about to put up a post and I got that 404 page informing me that I got locked out of my own blog. Their generic-catch-all excuse was that I'd "violated community standards". It's the usual Kafkaesque, dystopian bullshit. Colder than Pluto's ass end and just as personal. So they asked me if I wanted to request a review and I said fuck yeah. A half hour later, Welcome Back to Pottersville came back up as if nothing happened. No explanation, no apologies, no nothing.

     This is the first time this has ever happened to me in the 16 and a half years I've run this blog. Obviously, this is yet another classic case of a giant corporation (Google owns this domain and has for well over a decade) that liberally makes use of brainless algorithms making arbitrary decisions so that humans, God forbid, don't have to actually think.

     Still, the scare that was put into me yesterday afternoon made me go to the template section. I copied and pasted it into a Word document and emailed it to myself so I'd always have a ready-made template to use in case I had to set up a new blog (which I have). But that's not what I want to talk about.

     The point I want to make is that this sort of bullshit happens for real and that's no truer than in this strange election cycle. We know that Zuckerberg, a typical autistic right wing billionaire social maladroit out of Silicon Valley, hired some right wing clown to clamp down on left wing content on Facebook.

     But that's just one symptom of a problem that's endemic throughout the internet.

     The other run of the mill, autistic right wing billionaire social maladroit out of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, has been engaging in more overt right wing rat fuckery in his own sandbox. 

     The fact that Twitter for the last two years has been clamping down on left wing content is patently obvious and isn't even up for honest, serious debate. He brought back Kanye, he brought back Trump, he brought back Alex Jones, in other words, the other social maladroits who are radioactive elsewhere on the internet. Musk is the same guy who briefly shut down a Kamala Harris support group, Meemaw and permanently shut down Ken Klippenstein for putting out information that was already freely available on the internet.

     Recently, one of my followers complained that he loses followers in droves every time he posts something critical of Musk. In fact, since last night, he reports that he's lost over 500 followers. That's happened to me, too. In fact, when a big progressive account gives me a shoutout and I get a large influx of new followers, it's notable that Elon starts clawing them back. And don't even get me started on the shadowbanning that's been happening to me literally from Day One.

     Axing accounts when they briefly tweak your bloated ego is petty, immature and puerile enough. But having that kind of power points to something much more serious and sinister.

     Shadowbanning is a scummy way of silencing critics without actually banning their accounts. They simply artificially suppress the reach and visibility of certain accounts so that your content gets fewer eyeballs. It enables the domain owner (in this case, Musk) to severely limit the visibility of content with which they differ without having to admit to censorship (Musk bought Twitter two years ago this month with the promise of making it a free speech oasis).

     But these social media giants also tweak their algorithms so that they bombard accounts with "recommendations" from other accounts they find repugnant. Of course, on Twitter, this means overwhelming progressive feeds with right wing content. You can block the accounts generating that content, sure, but it's the ultimate game of Wack-a-Mole. You block one account, it seems there are 100 more to take its place.

     There are manifold reasons for this, I'm sure- It's targeted harassment so that more and more progressives get fed up and disgusted with Twitter to the point where they leave in disgust and go wander the desert wasteland of Bluesky.

     It's also good old fashioned propaganda carpet bombing.  As a certain authoritarian said, "If you tell a big lie enough times, it eventually becomes the truth." Musk, like all right wingers, hold the truth in absolute contempt, especially if those self-evident truths put the lie to their talking points and betrays them for the Nazis they truly are.

     And things aren't much better on Facebook. When Zuckerberg decided years ago to not fiddle around with news content, I guess he forgot about the part where he's not supposed to throttle progressive content for simply telling the truth. Because, as with school districts these days, all it takes is for one asshole to make some complaint for someone to get their account suspended or even deleted. And, of course, there are algorithms that will do that for them.

     What happened yesterday was a wakeup call for me. I haven't been completely blindfolded about what's going on out there. But for a half hour somebody or something thought I'd done something egregious enough to take down my blog, albeit for just a half hour, with no real appeals process and no explanation as to what I'd supposedly done. And this would've happened just nine days before what is possibly the most important election in US history.

     And social media tells us time and again that when you give billionaires a disproportionate amount of power over the visibility of other peoples' words and thoughts, the innocent will always suffer.