Internet Censorship is Now Rampant — It is High Time to Bookmark Your Alternatives

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The New Censorship

With every passing week, we are seeing growing censorship of the Internet. The key  mass media phrase of 2016 and 2017  has been “Fake News.” But much of what  is being called fake news isn’t, while much of what the mainstream media is pushing is indeed what is “fake.” Meanwhile, The Powers That Be are enforcing their view of “Community Standards” to quash free speech. I won’t re-hash this with a huge laundry list of particular incidents, because they are too numerous and have been well-documented. Rather, I will suffice with just a few summaries:

  • The Google search engine now routinely uses special algorithms to deemphasize some search engine results. Meanwhile, they over-emphasize others, in an overt “pay for play” arrangement. In essence, if your site is conservative, it often gets pushed far down the list of search results, out of view from all but the most doggedly persistent searchers.  (Most people don’t scroll down to see the second, third, or fourth page of search results.) Even religious sites are now being targeted. During the 2016 presidential election campaign cycle, Google was caught red-handed in corrupting the “auto-complete” feature of their search box.
  • YouTube (a subsidiary of Google since 2006) has become notorious for de-monetizing anyone who isn’t sufficiently pagan, homosexual, anti-gun, and/or leftist.  They now delete or un-index some speech they deem to be politically incorrect. Most recently, they have been “disappearing” many videos on civilian-owned firearms. If you search many topics using the YouTube search box, you simply will not see a lot of content that has been blacklisted or “pushed down.”  And unless you actively subscribe to some content, it will just disappear from view. Poof!  Down the Memory Hole.

  • Facebook is now deleting posts wholesale. And it isn’t just so-called “fake news” sites that are being targeted.
  • Twitter has been outright banning individuals that it deems offensive. Even the leftist USA Today has openly reported this. In a far more subtle move, Twitter’s carefully crafted algorithms now “de-thread” conversations that are deemed politically incorrect.
  • Reddit has been accused of large scale advertising fraud and censorship of conservatives. A bot called “censorship notifier” was  released on Reddit earlier this year. It was intended to scan for censored posts. But then the very existence of this tool was censored from Reddit discussion threads!
  • Amazon.com slashed its Amazon Associates revenue by an average of 45%, earlier this year. This has hit bloggers particularly hard. And they are retiring the aStore feature on October 27, 2017. All “Amazon Stores” embedded in websites will simply disappear at midnight on the 27th. By slashing revenue across the board, Amazon can claim that they are being egalitarian (and we can assume, simply greedy.) But the net effect will actually demonetize blogs. This is an effort to slowly bankrupt them. I believe that their goal is to push the attention of the populace at large away from blogs and back to the leftist mainstream media.
  • Many corporations and government agencies have installed Net Nanny style firewalls, with huge lists of website URLs that they deem “Inappropriate.”  SurvivalBlog.com is on many of these blocked site lists. While I concur that they have they have every right to block any web surfing “on company time”, it is not fair to block content during lunch hours, or after-hours.  I have heard from dozens of readers who have been slammed by these policies.  They complain that they  shouldn’t have their browsing blocked while they linger in their cubicles, waiting for highway commute traffic to die down. Perhaps the worst of all is the web browsing fate of sailors on ships at sea, and other deployed servicemen. For them, there is hardly any other alternative but to use .mil or .gov Net-Nannyed portals.
  • Wikipedia is notoriously  biased and run by leftist cabals. Those cabals systematically skew moral, political, evolution, Second Amendment, and even climate topics, throughout. It cannot be trusted.
  • Most of the popular “fact-checking” web sites (like Snopes.com, factcheck.org, and politifact.com,) are horribly biased and in fact could qualify for what the Russians call dezinformatsaya. (Disinformation.)

Some Alternatives

Despite all of this depressing news, there are now some great alternatives springing up.

  1. For your web searching, dump Google!  Not only is it now horribly biased, but it keeps a log of all of your search phrases for a very long time.  Instead, I recommend using ixquick, also known as StartPage. It is less biased, and also promises to keep no search phrase histories. To always remember to use it,  I recommend that you re-assign ixQuick as your browser’s default search engine.
  2. To remove one more revenue stream from the ravenous Google octopus, I recommend ditching gmail and instead getting an e-mail account at Reagan.com.
  3. For social media, instead of Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, et cetera, I would recommend that you bookmark GAB.
  4. For viewing video blogs (vlogs) from firearms enthusiasts, I recommend that you begin to ignore YouTube and Vimeo. Instead, bookmark sites like full30.com and theguncollective.com.
  5. For all other videos, remember that ixquick has top-left corner buttons marked “Web”,  “Images”, and “Videos”.  Searching under “Videos” there, you can avoid the overt bias of YouTube’s search box. The results will be all over the Internet–not just on YouTube. Just be forewarned that some the search results might direct you video sites that also include p*rn videos.
  6. Stop depending on social media to keep track of news! Their “news” selections are skewed and filtered. Instead, bookmark news aggregation sites that match your worldview.  Some of my favorites are TheDrudgeReport, NewsMax, WorldNetDaily, and Yer Ol’ Woodpile Report.  BTW, you will also find lots of news pertinent to preppers and survivalists aggregated in the daily columns here at SurvivalBlog.
  7. Instead of Snopes.com, factcheck.org, and politifact.com –all leftwardly biased. I recently heard about a conservative alternative –at least for current events news–called NewsBusters, but I haven’t yet delved into it.
  8. Instead of Wikipedia, use Conservapedia and InfoGalactic. (The latter is an intentionally unbiased “branch” of Wikipedia.)
  9. In general, you should subscribe directly to your favorite web sites/pages/blogs/vlogs/podcasts. But some sites don’t have a subscription feature.  (We don’t, to preserve your privacy.) For those, simply bookmark them and put them in your browser’s top bar buttons. I may be biased, I’d prefer it if you made SurvivalBlog.com your browser Home Page.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I should clarify that America has not yet reached the stage of The Great Firewall of China (or that of the new GreatWallLite). But it is clearly moving in that direction. Censorship can concurrently be both overt and subtle.  Do your best to work around it. That way you will be seeing all the news out there–not just a filtered subset of the news.  The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world want to treat the Internet like an enormous mushroom farm.  That is, they want to keep us in the dark and feed us manure.  Don’t let them succeed.

It is high time to take some prudent countermeasures by at least bookmarking some alternative sites. And what if things eventually get worse? Be ready. Start practicing with using a VPN account, and install a darknet browsing tool, such as The Onion Router (Tor.)

Unless you are proactive about avoiding censorship then you may become the victim of it, possibly without even realizing it. Stop being treated like a mushroom!- JWR

 

 


26 Comments

  2. In #9 above, you comment that Survival Blog does not have a subscription feature to preserve readers’ privacy, and you suggest bookmarking. The problem with bookmarking is when you’re trying to scan thru ~400 news sources per day. Another alternative is to use an RSS feed reader, like feedly, which is how I got to this post today.

  4. Thanks for your suggestions for dumping Google. I would like to comment on Reagan email. I’ve had it for several years and am not happy with its function, especially on my IPhone. There is a hefty $40/year charge and for that, you’d think they would be able to improve the email.
    Thanks

  6. on a report today about tyra patterson the news reported she made a 911 call in 1994 years before september 11, 2001 and years before 911 existed. Just the facts mame just the facts.

    1. 911 has existed in some form long before 1994. I can remember 911 being advertised in the local phone book clear back in the 70s. What is different is that there generally was no location information tagged to the call (enhanced 911 or e911) and the call centers were not unified. Sometimes the call was redirected to the police or the sheriff, sometimes to the fire department and sometimes to a specific call center. Nor were the calls always recorded.

      1. I guess my point is that on September 11, 2001 I remember that morning so well because it was such a beautiful fall morning and no one ever thought that 9-11-01 was anything more than something that would end in football games at the end of the week. 9-11 was not connected to disaster. Even though my point is small the media should not have said incorrectly said this. Thank you for your wise comment.

    1. Yes. I’ve moved away from Startmail/Ixquick because their search results are drawn from Google. Google does not see you searching because of Startmail’s proxy walls, but Startmail’s search results are just as biased because of their use of Google. I find DuckDuckGo better and more varied search results.

  8. ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are two encrypted services that offer a max amount of protection and are free (for the basic services). DuckDuckGo is also a search engine alternative that is accessible from government computers (since ixquick is not). My two pennies.

  9. I use DuckDuckGo for my search engine, Proton mail for encrypted email, and IP Vanish for my VPN service. I deleted my FB account and stay away from Google. When I do use Google Maps I am not signed in, so it does not know it’s me.

  11. Other conservative sites for news. I have capitalized to break up the sites into more easily remembered words:
    AmericanThinker dot com (EXCELLENT site! Cannot recommend highly enough)
    TownHall dot com
    IOTWReport dot com (I Own The World – news with a snarky twist and humor)
    ThisAintHell dot us (military related)
    Pigazette dot com (more snark)
    WesternRifleShooters dot WordPress dot com (very hard right, not to be confused with AltRight)

    I am currently using DuckDuckGo as my search engine, and Bravo as my browser

  12. Sir,
    As a message to the readers: I had been using briefly “Ghostery” as a search engine (thanks to another reader). “Ghostery” is a search engine that allows you to see the names of the “trackers” Imbedded in a website.
    These “trackers” provide information to third party sites. This information provides these sites with a person’s browsing habits to create an individual profile of the user. This is most commonly used for marketing practices.
    However it is not clear who these third party sites truly are.
    A person’s browsing habits are stored and sold to the highest bidder. This becomes an existential threat if the laws of the land enact new censorship laws. This is especially worrisome if the laws are retroactive.
    This has already happened with the DOJ soliciting information about visitors to the infamous Antifa website.
    I am impressed that this website has the least amount of trackers for any survival/prepper oriented website.
    By my survey they are 2 I’m bedded, the average of other popular sites are between 18 and 20. This speaks volumes to the integrity of the curators of this site.
    I humbly agree that a person should take proper safeguards against such intrusion. Especially considering that once was considered “normal folk”
    IE: Christian, heterosexual, gun enthusiasts ; Survival oriented peoples are now being “red flagged” to some degree.
    Thank you for your honesty and integrity

    As a sidenote, I recently became a fan of Matt Bracken and his work and efforts. Bracken is a former Navy SEAL and now author. He seems like a logical fellow who imbues a great deal of sensibility and at some times humour to his work; his work provides real value for the reader in my humble opinion.
    Bracken about 2 days ago was banned for 30 days from Facebook for posting supposedly negative comments.Facebook was one of the tools he used to reach out to those concerned with survival.
    Where do we go from here if logical,balanced,sensible people are censored?

    1. Startmail just “grabs” from Google. Google cannot see your searches because of Startmail’s proxy wall. However, Startmail DOES reflect the biases of Google, so your search results will be highly censored, like the article says. DuckDuckGo is more like the “old days” of search.

  15. I use Startmail for email. The only problem I have is that to use a credit card for the subscription (about $5 a month) it forces you to create a new VISA account, which seems to me just another giant target for hackers.

  16. As to Ixquick: It says it is enhanced by google. It also goes on to explain how it works and why it is private.

    I use FireFox with a combination of Ghostery and No Scripts. No Scripts can be somewhat difficult as much of what you are looking to read or see on many web sites requires certain scripts to run. If you leave both on full bore, you are not going to read or see very much of what you are looking for. With Ghostery I have seen as many as 70 to 80 trackers on one page. It would be nice to be able to surf without being tracked everywhere you go. With both it is also very difficult to know which scripts or trackers (sometimes the same thing) to turn on so I can read or see what I’m looking for in the first place. With No Scripts if I click to temporarily run all scripts on a page, more scripts show up that also block what I’m trying to read or see. If you’re not careful you could end up turning on 30 or 40 scripts, makes life both difficult and rather disturbing in a creepy sort of way.

    Search engines: I have finally switched over to duckduckgo, for now. Planning to play with Ixquick as well to see which is more effective.

    Amazon: I used to be an Amazon Associate. I found there was just too many ways for Amazon to avoid actually paying for the sales made by my traffic to them. I’d dump Amazon in a heartbeat for my own purchases if I could find a viable alternative.

    Email: Never download your email, always read as webmail. Automatic downloading is just asking for a virus to infect your computer or phone. In the 12 years I have had this computer I have never had an active virus, and Norton has managed to find any dormant or latent viruses that could have infected me but didn’t. Thank God.

    No rant today. Have a blessed day folks.

  17. Please place the entire body of each post in the RSS feed. This was the format several years ago and was much more convenient as the entire post was readable (on PC, phone, etc.) without having to click the link and wait for the entire post to load.

    1. @Mike,
      We’d love to do that. Sadly, the reason the whole body was taken out and replaced with just a synopsis was the blood sucking leeches. Literally hundreds of fly-by-night survival blog types that were nothing more than a gateway to Amazon affiliates were using our content to attract readership in violation of our copyright terms. We fought them for a while and then realized it was a losing battle. Now RSS feeds only have a summary.

  19. I definitely concur with the folks talking about Google results in ixquick. I do use ixquick, but I am aware of the shortcomings–i.e., it shows the same biases as Google. I did a search on “Supreme Court, The 2nd Amendment and the NRA” without the quotes, and the first page was full of hits were all anti-gun articles on sites such as Politico, wikipedia, Slate, etc. intermingled with a handful of NRA or other somewhat pro-gun articles. To be fair, this same mish-mash was presented by other search engines, but still, be very wary. FWIW, it was only by putting quotes around that phrase that I could get the actual article of that title as the first hit.

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