Tag Archives: Medium

Yes, we all heard it before, ‘I hereby solemnly swear‘, ‘I pledge my allegiance‘ and ‘for what we are about to receive‘. All nice sounding words, yet are they worth the value of the printed paper when people speak these words? That is where you stand when we were given ‘Leaders and tech firms pledge to tackle extremist violence online‘. And the quotes are nice to read too. First there is: “World leaders and heads of global technology companies have pledged at a Paris summit to tackle terrorist and extremist violence online in what they described as an “unprecedented agreement”“. The article (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/15/jacinda-ardern-emmanuel-macron-christchurch-call-summit-extremist-violence-online), and President Macron, who is in all kind of non-economic states took the time to shed light on this. So when I saw: “a “plan of action” to be adopted by countries and companies to prevent extreme material from going viral on the internet” I needed well over 10 minutes to stop howling with laughter. It was funny, I agree, but in the article there is supporting evidence for my ‘howls of deriving laughter‘ (borrowed from Monty Python).

You see, the first delusion is ‘prevent extreme material from going viral on the internet‘, the internet is all about going viral, and we enabled marketing and SEO systems of doing just that for the need of creating awareness in whatever way possible. The creation of viral events is what drives Facebook and their social companions. And even as their might be some form of control on Facebook, places like 4Chan have close to 0% control and whilst people are trying to find the viral video, a dozen copies will be spread to alternative locations. If you want to understand viral video, take a look at Medium dot com (at https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/10-ways-to-make-your-video-go-viral-d19d9b9465de), they make a nice top 10 with actually interesting issues to consider. Social media is about getting viral (or is that virile?), they need to sell advertisements and the list mentioned give at the second tip the stage where you have millions of views in just under 72 hours, and that was merely some girl dancing.

The Guardian gives another part. When we see: “The footage was picked up by some international media outlets who initially published excerpts of the video and links to the gunman’s extremist “manifesto” before quickly dropping them in the face of political and public outrage“, so until outrage became slightly too loud, the news media themselves had no issue propagating the video (partially), that is the larger failure. You want to stop social media, whilst the media themselves use the material? What was that, ‘the people have a right to know clause?‘

As I see it: “as a voluntary initiative it is for individual countries and companies to decide how to honour their pledge” that pledge is (as I personally see it) nothing more than another way to grease the wheels of the EU gravy train. When we add “nations to bring in laws that ban offensive material and to set guidelines on how the traditional media report acts of terrorism“, so we get non mandatory actions linked to censoring of the traditional media, and you wonder why I was laughing? All this whilst a mere two days before that we got: “The case has been appealed, and in the time since two federal Courts of Appeals have ruled in separate cases that viewpoint discrimination on government social media pages is illegal.” Even as we see that they are separate issues, the stage of ‘Courts to Government Officials: Stop Censoring on Social Media‘ sets a larger stage and sets the stage where there is a much larger issue not addressed. So as we look at the term ‘viewpoint discrimination’, we see places like Heavy.com who had extremist video (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2016/05/01/homerun-by-ukip/), in May 2016. there in the article ‘Homerun by UKIP‘ I added a link to an ISIS video that remained viewable for well over a year. And that was something that was openly searchable. So at what point will we get a true status change? These places need the clicks to get their cash and many of them will not care how they get their money, their traction, their visibility.

So as we see “The US has reportedly refused to sign up because of concerns about freedom of speech“, we will see these people move to US servers, as there is free speech, as such this entire effort is largely wasted, when the larger players on social media are not willing to play ball, when we see that shifting stories and videos can move location in seconds, we see a gravy train switching tracks again and again, never resolving anything. Yet, they mostly agree on Huawei being a national security threat (without documented evidence), all that whilst the Cisco mess is presently well over 1000% worse (and documented).

This is all about money and it is time that we wake up and realise that as soon as something can be made to currency, it gets free reign. That is the consequence of debts that go into the trillions. And the traditional media only stopped after the outrage, after the cost of publishing started to grow that is when they stopped. In this I have nothing against the actions of Jacinda Ardern, they make perfect sense, but the Intelligence community could have clearly explained the traps of lone wolves, the traps of a media stage that is out of control. It is also nice to note that the presence of Justin Trudeau and President Macron was encouraging (according to Emmanuel Macron), yet these are two politicians with the ratings that are deep into the basement, any positive news that mentions them is political currency for them, so I wonder what their attending stake is in the end.

In this Jacinda Ardern makes one mistake (unintentional). As we see: “Facebook had made a changes to its livestreaming, announced at the same time as the summit, under which the Christchurch terrorist “would not have been able to livestream his act of violence”“, might be true to some point, yet there are so many other streams (like 4Chan), so even as the wave towards a viral video goes down in the reach to maximum (see the Medium article), the moment the links get spread through all media, the race is on and the multimillion views are almost guaranteed, optionally with a few minutes delay from slaughter happening, to slaughter watched. And after the event the world en mass will likely be watching. That is the impact of viral views and the ca$h for those cashing in on the advertisement on those pages. Because as the views go over the millions, the ads will get visibility and the dollars come pouring in stacks of them per tenth of a second. When you realise those numbers, you see the first part in why this is not getting resolved, and the danger merely increases as lone wolves get to make themselves martyrs for a cause they never understood, shouting a name they were never part of giving extremism even more visibility.

Unless you take these glossy propagators of what they call news off the 0% VAT (read: GST, BTW and so on) list, this will merely continue, for the media circulation is everything. Consider that we hear 4 days ago that ISIL was using Instagram to promote jihad and what does the Telegraph do (at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/11/isil-extremists-using-instagram-promote-jihad-incite-support/), they used the picture of a smiling ISIL fighter as well. I think we can agree that this is like mopping the floor whilst the tap is running at full, we merely shift the mess and never end up with a dry floor.

You merely have to look at the Google failure and search: ‘Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi‘, he is not a terrorist; he is labelled as a ‘political leader‘. So how exactly will we end up seeing forward momentum, true forward momentum not presented momentum whilst we see that others label terrorists as political leaders. The pledge is worth a mere €0.01 and I think we are all still getting screwed on the deal at that price.