Why I Left Facebook, and where to find me online

by MWD

I’ve always thought it was pathetic when people scream “I’m leaving Facebook!”….or MySpace, or however far you want to take it back….I even saw this before the World Wide Web, on newsgroups, in 1990. But it’s only pathetic when people’s reasons for leaving are the usual “No one likes me! And people are mean to me!” Those are not my reasons for leaving Facebook. In fact, a lot of people like me on Facebook. I have 2200 “friends” on there. And a lot of them are people I enjoy talking with.
I find it interesting that you can’t just delete your Facebook account. It takes 14 days. Reminds me of a nanny waiting period to buy a gun. Facebook knows how annoying it is, and like the drug dealer giving out free samples to a junkie who gets off junk, Facebook says “You’ll be back…..” and tries to entice you not to leave. Sort of how some states make you be separated for a while before they’ll “grant” you a divorce. Anyway, if you do want to leave Facebook, here’s how to do it. (Skip step one there, and before you delete your account, delete all your photos. Who knows if Facebook will decide they own those at some point.)
So, if you’d like to know why I’m leaving Facebook, and where you can find me, read on…..

WHY I’M LEAVING FACEBOOK, EFFECTIVE NOON TOMORROW (12/19/2012):
1. Facebook is starting to act like The State. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has updated their “user agreement” to say that they can sell any of your photos and not pay you. And they can use photos of your face. They could sell a photo of you smiling with a gun to an anti-gun campaign. If you’re overweight, you could end up in the “before” photo for a weight loss pill. etc. etc.
In saying that they can change their user agreement this drastically, and that you’ve already agreed by being a member, they are acting like The State with its “Social Contract.” That is, Facebook is acting like the government. Even though Facebook has backtracked due to public outrage, that sounds to me like what politicians do right before an election. Do I really wanna trust someone who figuratively says “Well, we were gonna rape you, but you complained and people are watching, so we’ll wait and rape you later”? (It’s ironic that so many statists are among the outraged, because they don’t realize this is EXACTLY how all governments behave.)
2. I waste a lot of time on Facebook. I used to write books that I was paid to write, but I spend so much time on Facebook that I’ve stopped writing books. You could say “Why not just spend less time on there?” but that’s like giving a junkie a brick of drugs and saying “just use this once in a while.” While this is my problem, not Facebook’s problem, my solution is to leave. I’ll probably go through “withdraw” for a little while, but then I’ll go back to actually producing things instead of wasting time on Facebook.
3. Facebook is censoring people. They are suspending accounts of people who do not tow the mainstream media line on current events.
4. Facebook is hypocritical. They are suspending accounts of people who post political ideas that Facebook does not like. Then they tell those people “Facebook is not a place for politics”, when in fact, Facebook was spamming me for Obama right before the election.
5. Facebook is spying on you. Of course these days, you are being spied on everywhere, all the time, by governments and corporations, but Facebook is the worst of the worst. And their privacy settings are useless.
6. I don’t want to talk to a lot of the people on Facebook. But they want to talk to me, and foist their opinions on everything at me, and they’re usually wrong. It’s annoying. But it goes beyond annoying sometimes. I’ve had death threats simply for my political beliefs from strangers who would never have even heard of me if I weren’t on Facebook. Like I said in one of my books ten years ago, “The great thing about the Internet is that everyone in the world can talk to you. The horrible thing about the Internet is that everyone in the world can talk to you.” This is more true on Facebook than anywhere. It’s set up for that. None of those people would bother trying to find my e-mail and bug me, but on Facebook, that’s just part of what people do. It’s part of the business model.
7. FACEBOOK USERS AS A WHOLE SEEM FAR MORE INTERESTED IN SPREADING FEAR THAN DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT. This statement isn’t singling out any individual users, and there are exceptions. But as an entity, the collective mind of Facebook is far more into yelling “THE SKY IS FALLING!” than putting on a hard hat to protect their head from falling sky pieces. The final straw, for me, was when I posted two things on the same day…The first was a link to an article about new ways the government is planning to read your e-mail. The second was a link to an article we wrote on setting up encrypted e-mail so the government can’t read your e-mail. The thing about government reading your e-mail got 170 likes and 76 shares. The piece about actually DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT got ten likes and 3 shares. To me, that says all you need to know about Facebook and why you shouldn’t be on there. Most people on Facebook would rather live in a fear-spiral echo chamber than actually DO ANYTHING to protect themselves. I call it “Fear porn”, and it’s not a type of porn I’m interested in consuming.
8. I’d rather spend my time and effort building my own sites than building someone else’s business model for free. Especially when that “someone else” is a company like Facebook that has no respect, and apparently has absolute contempt, for its “customers.”
WHERE TO FIND ME:
I’m not leaving the Internet. I love the Internet. I’ve been on it since 1990 (before the World Wide Web), and I’m still going to be around. I just hate Facebook. You can find me on Twitter, here. You can find Freedom Feens, my thrice-weekly podcast with Neema Vedadi, here. You can subscribe to that via RSS or iTunes, and post comments on the site, and I sometimes comment back. You can subscribe to the torrent link here. (Please seed Feens episodes for when the Central Scrutinizer declares free speech illegal, deletes our website, and throws us in camps.) You can find my interview podcast, Anarchy Gumbo, here.
You can find my past media here, and my e-mail address here. (Though please submit news items for the Feens here, rather than via e-mail.) You can find my encrypted e-mail and PGP key here. If I know you well and you use private i.m. via Pidgin, you probably already have my Pidgin address. I don’t give it out to many people.
Only about five people have my phone number, and I don’t talk to people much on the phone, but you can call the Feens number during our live shows, info is here. During Feens Live shows, I’m also on the Feens chat page (my user name is MichaelFeen), and I occasionally pop in there at other times. I write for the Freedom Feens blog (the thing you’re reading right now), and you can comment on here, and I sometimes comment back. I’ll also start posting photos of my cats here sometimes, that was always a favorite on Facebook, and I know it helps power the Internet and keeps the tubes from getting slow.
Skype is not a good way to find me except during the Feens live shows. I never turn Skype on unless I’m doing a show, and I never check my Skype messages. I am on YouTube, but that’s a bad way to contact me. I rarely answer on there, but you can enjoy my videos. I have a Google+ account, but I never check it and will probably be deleting that too.
You can listen to us 24/7 (and occasionally live) on Freedom Feens Radio.
Even with all the above, that’s much more manageable than being on Facebook. Facebook is a time suck.
There is a Freedom Feens Facebook page that’s run by fans, but not by me. Apparently there will be some Feens updates there.
So anyway, that about covers it. Enjoy Facebook if you stay. It’s useful for some people. But I’ve got things to do, and roads to build.
–Michael W. Dean

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

How Google’s search engines use faked results to manipulate people’s views of jihad

A timely post about from www.jihadwatch.org about Google and Islam. This follows this post about the Clinton Foundation. This follows this article about American energy independence and preventing money from going to hostile countries. For more, you can read two very interesting books HERE.You can follow me here.

How Google’s search engines use faked results to manipulate people’s views of jihad

By Robert Spencer 92 Comments

This post by Jihad Watch tech expert Marc offers extraordinary insight into how Google skews its presentation of information in order to manipulate people into accepting half-truths and falsehoods that serve the Left’s agenda. He explains how Google deliberately manipulates its results when one searches for the word “jihad” — and doubtless this is just one of countless examples of how Google advances the Leftist/Islamic supremacist line while burying the truth.

“How Google’s Search Engines use faked results for social engineering,” FreeSpeechDefense.net, September 4, 2016:

So how does it work, I’ll use one example, a simple Google search for the word “Jihad”, but first I’d like to give you some background on how Google search is understood and intended to work. My knowledge comes from a variety of sources, but is in line with the well known public authority on the subject of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), an employee and till recently the public voice of Google and its search engine, Matt Cutts, he now works for the Pentagon (yeh, I know). Google has published an “overview” of how it all works, but that’s a lot to get through.
So in a nutshell, Google is looking for the freshest, most authoritative, easiest to display (big screen and mobile) content to serve its search engine users, it crawls them, caching (grabbing) content, looking at the speed of download, the textual content, counting words to find the relevance, checking what it looks like on different sized devices. It also looks at what other sites link to it, both number of and “quality” of those links. When I say quality, it wants to see how authoritative the linking in sites are. They also have a number of algorithms in place that block the listing of “spammy” sites, but spam would not be relevant here. Additionally they also have recently claimed to boost sites using HTTPS to promote security and privacy (fox, henhouse – lol).
There are a few exceptions which I don’t think anyone could have issue with, a search for a single word might bring up a dictionary or encyclopedia, but more often, they add Wikipedia to the list of results, especially if it’s a busy wiki page with constant updates.
There is a way to beat these results and get to the top, and that’s by paying for the Google Adwords service, these ads at the top are clearly identified with a little “Ad” button, that is not the case here.
I am not in the US, so used a VPN to proxy my research from the US, as searches from other locations provide different results.
So search the word “jihad”, and you will see at the top of a list of 32 million results a list as this:

A dictionary definition

Wikipedia

A link to a page of the “Islamic Supreme Council”

A link to “Jihad Watch”

So we know how the dictionary definition and Wikipedia got there, but how did the “Islamic Supreme Council” and “Jihad Watch” get 3^rd and 4^th place? JihadWatch.org I know well, I do the server and site management, following SEO best practice, here are the major pertinent reasons for its high listing in such a competitive search, 32 million is huge in this game:

Robert Spencer, an accomplished author is a prolific blogger, adding a minimum of 10 posts of current jihad related news stories of the day.

It’s part of the domain name, that always gives a massive boot (searching “free speech defense”, my tiny, low volume blog always comes top).

Doing a jihad site:jihadwatch.org shows that the word “jihad” is mentioned on the site 35,000 times, proving its main focus of discussion is “jihad”.

A search for just jihadwatch.org shows that it is mentioned on 631,000 other sites pages (linking in), proving it is very authoritative and often referenced.

Jihadwatch.org is currently the 10,488^th most popular website in the US, this fluctuates, but not much.

The site uses HTTPS and a responsive (mobile friendly) theme, so it looks great on any device.

So how about the “Islamic Supreme Council”, I’d never heard of them. I asked a few people who have studied Islam, they hadn’t either, so lets look at the comparative statistics:

The site is run by Sheik Kabbani, a Naqshbandi Sufi. It has additional posts added a couple of times a year, the latest news panel lists an event in 1996.

It has “Islamic” in the domain name, understandable that Google maybe has confused the two words. /sarc off

Doing a jihad site:islamicsupremecouncil.org shows that the word “jihad” is mentioned on the site 123 times, whereas searching the word “Sufi” brings up over 200 results proving it’s main focus of discussion is not “jihad”.

A search for just islamicsupremecouncil.org shows that it is mentioned on 79,000 other sites pages (linking in), showing it is as 1/10th as popular/authoritative as jihadwatch.org.

This is confirmed with an Alexa popularity search, showing it is the 307,832^_th most popular site in the US.

The site does not use HTTPS, and it is very mobile unfriendly, using technology from a previous millennium (I’m not kidding, it’s using web standards from 1999 if you look at the source files).

So what’s up? How does the site get this boost, if you search the word Sufi, the “Islamic Supreme Council” isn’t even listed in the top 10 pages. Funny thing about the meaning of the word “Jihad”, to the fast majority of Muslims they themselves know of two meanings, the Google dictionary definition at the top of the results is correct:

(among Muslims) a war or struggle against unbelievers.

the spiritual struggle within oneself against sin.

Often differentiated as the greater and lesser Jihad, but Sunni and Shia Muslims, who make up the vast majority of Muslims, understand when the word Jihad is used alone they mean the violent kind, world conquering imposing of Sharia law, blowing stuff up and cutting heads of infidels, and they accept the lesser Jihad as a false construct, but that’s another debate, you can read more here at wikiislam.
But what is unique about Sufis, a tiny minority of Muslims, if in fact they are Muslims, as the vast majority of Muslims do not accept Sufis as such, and many Sufis themselves do not identify with being Muslim, is that they are unique in only having this peaceful, lesser Jihad, being somewhat pacifists, ironically often violently targeted for their beliefs in Muslim majority countries.
So in conclusion, how are you being socially engineered by Google? Anyone doing a search for Jihad will think they are seeing an opposing, authoritative view of Jihad Watch’s, but the “Islamic Supreme Council” is of no authority, it’s poor in every way. Nonetheless, the Googler will read all about all this peaceful unrepresentative Jihad, trusting Google will live by their moto “Don’t be evil”. Former Google CEO and current executive chairman Eric Schmidt once said, “it was a dumb rule merely because the word ‘evil’ isn’t really defined, and Google doesn’t quite know what evil is.”
So how about another site which might be more of an authority on Jihad in the US, cair.com (Council on American-Islamic Relations) is constantly being updated, is far more popular at 146,590th place, actually probably even more so, as it has a vast network of sites. A search for jihad site:cair.com gives 342 results, and is mentioned and linked to a whopping 60 million times, it’s mobile friendly and has HTTPS enabled, and it’s not even on the top 10 pages of results for a search on Jihad. Odd, that except their own political agenda is for Americans to believe the Sufi understanding of Jihad is a common Muslim understanding, rather than their own aggressive one, with proven ties between CAIR, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Some would say “a war or struggle against unbelievers” Jihad was CAIR’s main purpose, advertising that fact doesn’t help their agenda, much better American Googlers read the Sufi version for them. I think I have described in detail how this subtle manipulation works.
It’s not a secret. Facebook has been at it also. The connections with the Obama administration and now Hillary Clinton are well documented. My enemy’s enemy is not my necessarily my friend, but here is what Julian Assange has to say on the collusion between the US administration and Google.