Quackcast 751 - An internet FULL of censorship!

Last time we talked about old fashioned censorship, NOW we're talking about how it's used these days! Back in the day there were limited pathways for you to disseminate information: newspapers, radio, TV, public speaking, posters, books, film, pamphlets, ads… They were all easy for governments to shut down in various ways. But then along came the internet and suddenly it was a free for all! Anyone could easily make a website and info was freely shared for good or ill, and it was almost impossible to stop. Then Google made things easier than ever to find. Youtube meant we could share videos. Along came social media where it was easy to connect with others and get info out, Twitter users were even described as “citizen journalists”. Smartphones from Apple and Google made it even simpler to share stuff. But little did we know the seeds had been sown for a return to the bad old days…

Monopolies are usually a bad thing and now the internet is divided among a small cadre of huge monopolies. The massive success of social media at connecting us, Google search, Youtube for videos, and Apple and Google at managing our phones and online lives has narrowed us all down and made us far more vulnerable. It's still possible to skirt them all and use other services, but their reach, versatility, utility, ubiquity and user-bases means you're sacrificing a hell of a LOT if you do. Governments are still ineffective at censoring these but they can ban and restrict them which means the media companies that own these services introduce there own forms of restrictions and censorship as a way to try and avoid that and the loss of revue it would mean. The impact of those restrictions are massive since so much of our lives are online now.

They can have all your online accounts deleted, it can affect access to all the photos you've taken of your kids, your phones and tablets can become useless, work contacts and friends can be lost, years of work at building an online client base or fans can be wiped out in seconds with no way to get it back, and that's just a small sample. There are REAL costs involved too, these media companies like Meta can steal your money from you and you have zero recourse- the building of those fanbases and connections, online galleries, video production etc has REAL monetary value FAR in excess of the service they provide you (especially since their ads and data mining pay for it), but they treat you and your work as a free resource. Corporate censorship is THE worst issue facing us now in this context, because of its power, reach, arbitrariness, and total lack of any accountability. With a simple change of their Terms of Service, new policies, the AI bots they're using to police stuff suddenly for no reason you can find yourself in peril.

Lastly there is the idea of “cancel culture”, which has been quite exaggerated because it's seen as left wing and therefore scary. The truth is it's always been around and practised equally by right wing, left wing, and centrist people. The internet HAS given it more reach and made it a bit easier to “cancel” people because you can more easily find out info about them and what they've done and you can also easily make up things and spread campaigns to attack people whether they're based on truth or lies. What is “cancel culture”? Basically it's a kind of mob justice with all the issues and problems mob justice always has: people are stupider in groups, there is no presumption of innocence or context, and there's no possible limit to the “justice” enacted. For every righteously cancelled person there will be many more who it was done to maliciously. And ALWAYS remember when you support stuff like this, if it can be done to others then it can be done to you. We like to think that these things are only done to “bad” people, but reality doesn't work that way, anyone can see you as bad at any time.

Out of it all though, corporate censorship is by far the worst, as the official Drunk Duck Instagram can attest. In an ironic twist it was taken down and deleted by Meta after this Quackcast was recorded. Drunk Duck has had itself “censored” repeatedly by Google because their system downgrades us on its search engine for their own silly reasons, like lack of a mobile site option, putting social media results ahead, we got downgraded for lack of HTTP even though it's not needed at all on our site because accounts contain nothing sensitive and don't deal with money, so we had to pay money to get that up and running to retain our visibility…
Have you been the victim of any form of censorship? Even as a viewer? I know many people who've suffered losses and issues do to corporate censorship.

Gunwallace wasn't able to do a theme this week so instead we have a reprise of Tales from Two Tiny Tittybars - Bouncing boobs in DA CLUB! This was originally from 6 Nov, 2017 in Quackcast 228.

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