Social Media Platforms Need To Be Regulated! NYU Prof Sees "Dangerous Issues For Society"

Authored by Vasant Dhar, NYU Sterm Professor, op-ed via CNBC,

Unregulated social media platforms pose significant societal risks. That"s what we found out after the 2016 election, when it became clear that social media had been used for political mass manipulation in the world"s oldest democracy.

We should not be surprised. Despite a large scale scientific study conducted by Facebook in 2012 demonstrating that users" moods could be manipulated via messages fed to them, it continued to maintain a position of "algorithmic neutrality" on content. Given what we"ve witnessed, this won"t do going forward.

The Facebook study of 2012 had sparked outrage and concern around the use of data for social experimentation without consent of human subjects. It was worrisome that data usage policies of virtually all digital platforms had become increasingly rapacious over the years, allowing them to do what they please with the data they collect assiduously. Facebook"s social experiment wouldn"t have been approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for university research involving human subjects.

But the outrage has resulted in little thus far. There was no regulatory body and there still isn"t one that addresses unethical or harmful uses of platform data even though the implications are arguably as serious as those involving national security. The very real possibility that a party with meager resources can potentially influence a democratic election represents an incalculable "externality" imposed on us through a trust vulnerability in our social media ecosystem.

Because trust is so important when it comes to our money, we have historically held banks and financial firms to much higher standards of compliance and control than other businesses. Financial institutions are required to follow well-defined processes with oversight and failsafe plans aimed at minimizing risk and maximizing public trust.

The terror attacks of 2001 ushered in stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations requiring such institutions know their customers in great detail. The 2008-2009 crisis resulted in further regulation aimed at mitigating economic instability and curbing the use of funds for financing terrorism and other illicit activity.

In contrast, the news industry is expected to largely regulate itself. We pride ourselves on our freedom of the press, and the freedom of expression. Indeed, one of the wonders of the Internet era is the empowerment of individuals as publishers on digital platforms.

However, unlike news organizations whose reputations ultimately depend on careful verification, we have allowed digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter to function without much regard to the risks of propaganda and bias they create. They are now promising us they will do better in the future by employing more people for fact checking. Would we have trusted the bankers with such a promise after the financial crisis and left them alone to regulate themselves?

An important lesson learned from the rise of digital platforms is that they disrupt industries by blurring the boundaries between them. Which industry does Amazon belong to? What about Google? Facebook? Apple? The answers are increasingly vague. And yet regulation continues to be siloed largely by industry, like finance, retail, and telecommunication despite their increasing irrelevance in classifying some of our largest and most powerful businesses.

KYC is critical to finance because every industry uses financial services. Since digital platforms are becoming similarly ubiquitous to virtually every industry, KYC requirements should be considered for them, similar to those for financial institutions.

Advertisements on mass media are plain for everyone to see, and political ads require disclosing who paid for them. Yet in the narrowcasting world of digital targeting it is possible for parties to target individuals with customized hate speech ads completely under the radar without the public or regulators ever noticing, or even without the platform designers being aware of their algorithms being used in ways they had never envisioned or intended!

Requiring KYC requirements on digital platforms is not new. Airbnb already does an automated KYC in real time through verification of government issued IDs. Social media platforms could be required to do something similar but with the added restriction of requiring foreign publishers to obtain legitimate U.S. issued IDs to advertise in the U.S. This would pre-empt the use of legitimate identities issued by governments who may be sponsors of illicit activity or harmful propaganda.

Secondly, we need better guidelines around the ethical use of data, especially around profiling and social manipulation. Business should follow IRB policies around the use of human subjects for social experimentation similar to university researchers, regardless of their stated data usage policies which most individuals don"t even read let alone understand.

For too long, regulators have turned a blind eye to the use of data, emboldening digital platforms to do as they please with no oversight. We need something more proactive approach, where social platforms disclose broadly their data mining goals and policies and demonstrate that they are not violating the implicit intentions of users who entrusted them with their data. These points are not intended to be critical of Facebook and Twitter, but a warning that social media platforms in general pose risks that need to be considered seriously by regulators in free societies.

There are no easy answers, but turning a blind eye to this new Internet phenomenon will continue to expose us to considerable peril in the future. The U.S. government and our regulators need to understand how digital platforms can be weaponized and misused against its citizens, and equally importantly, against democracy itself.

*  *  *

Scared yet... you should be... you"ll be begging for governemnt to regulate the freedom of speech out of social media soon enough... because it"s for your own security... or democracy itself is at stake - right? </sarc..>

Adoption, Not Just A Game For Brangelina

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Who would have guessed that US Patent No. 3,906,166, granted in 1975 to Martin Cooper of Motorola would completely change the world?

My kids tell me that was a long time ago, which I suppose it was....

Here"s global cell phone penetration over the last decade. Not bad...

With hindsight we can look at this adoption phase and marvel, but let"s not miss some key points.

Specifically, how radically phones have infiltrated so many aspects of our lives. And no, I"m not talking about Sally who"s addicted to the endorphin rush she gets from hitting refresh on Instagram to see how many "likes" her stupid photo of her chicken-avocado salad is getting. I"m talking about real isht. Life changing isht.

Like the millions of Africans who now receive anti-malaria texts from football hero Didier Drogba:

It’s 9pm, are you and your family safe under nets? This is Didier Drogba, sleep well.

Ah... the humble mobile phone — doing more to fight Malaria than the UN, the WHO, or any government ever has. Power distributed and decentralised.

Or...

The Indonesian midwives" mobile phone project, which has drastically reduced infant mortality rates as villagers place more trust with midwives who can now talk to obstetricians and gynaecologists in the cities and provide better care.

Or...

Farmers, who prior to the mobile phone used to walk in blazing heat for up to two weeks to get to market, where they"d sell their livestock.... and sometimes wouldn"t because demand wasn"t there.

Those same farmers now use mobiles to determine ahead of time market prices for their goods before deciding where best to trade their livestock or crops. Not only that, but receiving live pricing of livestock and crops allowing them to more accurately plan and run their farming practices. Power distributed and decentralised.

And speaking of farmers in the third, world it was back in 2003 or 2004 — I can"t remember exactly — when my lovely lass (before she succumbed to my charms and became Mrs. Chris) and I were traveling in Kashmir, and I vividly remember realising then just how powerful the mobile phone really was.

We were chatting to a peasant rice farmer, I"ll call him Ranjeet. Because his father had done it before him, and his fathers father before him, and he himself had been at it for over 30 years since, Ranjeet was doing the only thing he knew: He was growing rice.

And like his forefathers before him, Ranjeet simply took whatever price was offered by the Delhi traders when they turned up at harvest time. Together with his fellow rice farmers in the village Ranjeet had no way of knowing whether the price he got from the traders from Delhi was fair or not.

Enter the mobile phone.

He, together with fellow farmers, had all clubbed together and bought a WAP phone. Remember those?

It was man"s first crack and connecting a mobile phone to the internet.

Ranjeet and his buddies would huddle around the phone, getting live pricing from the rice market in Delhi. And whoo... boy, had it made them mad. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.

Try telling that to Ranjeet, and he"d have punched you in the face. So when those slimy rice traders from Delhi rolled into town to buy Ranjeet and his buddies" rice, these dirt poor peasant farmers could no longer be hoodwinked into selling it at deeply discounted, "kill my family, make me starve" prices any longer. Power distributed and decentralised.

For most of us, we"re lucky enough to live in a developed country where we don"t think about this stuff.

The mobile phone helps us do many of the things we were already doing, but now we just do it without getting off the sofa.

But for those in emerging and submerging markets mobile phones help people do things they could never do before. They are, in other words, not a luxury but a necessity.

Ask folks today, and I"ll bet they"d sooner leave home without their underpants on than leave home without their phone.

What else?

Education. The mobile phone has revolutionised that, too. I was reading that in Vietnam 75% of the kids use their phones for educational purposes. This is good news because it means that Brangelina and Brangelina wannabes won"t have to adopt starving illiterate Vietnamese orphans any longer.

It was Malcolm Gladwell, the author, journalist, and speaker, who said:

Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation.

I"m going to put my neck out and say that the mobile phone has probably done more to break isolation and reduce poverty than almost anything else in the last 50 years.

So What?

Well, the mobile phone is similar to how to think about blockchain, and of course the most powerful (to date) blockchain is Bitcoin, which I spoke about last week. One changed the world. The other will change is changing our world.

Like the impact of the mobile phone before it, it"s going to be HUUUGE!

HUUUGE! I tell you!

Now, I"m going to suggest that Martin Cooper was an amateur, compared with Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever the hell she is. This is because blockchain technology has the potential to do what the mobile phone has already done but on steroids.

Applications are already being built in: Asset management (trade and processing settlement), insurance (claims processing), payments, title registry, deed registries, personal identification, distributed cloud storage, and an entire squadron of other applications far too long to mention here.

Many will scoff and laugh at it... and many do. This is how it must be, but I warn you. To ignore this is like ignoring the impact mobile phones were going to have on society when the first mobile handset went on sale in 1973. Completely revolutionary and disruptive technology would be neither revolutionary nor disruptive if it didn"t... how do I say this... disrupt.

And it"ll be fought hammer and tongs, especially by those who see it as a threat to their own business models. Hello Jamie :-)

But ultimately new technologies become overwhelming, and even those who poo poo it will be dragged kicking and screaming into its clutches because the utility function is too powerful.

And we should all be as happy about this as these guys.

Because power in the hands of many is always everywhere better than power in the hands of the few.

To the future... and a jolly fine weekend. Thanks as always for reading!

- Chris

"Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else." — Clayton M. Christensen

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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Detroit"s Digital Divide: Low Income Citizens Build Their Own Internet

The city of Detroit, in the U.S. state of Michigan, has experienced an impressive economic and demographic shift over the past 50-years.

Deindustrialization coupled with depopulation has stripped the city of it’s economic strength cascading it into turmoil. Global competition from automakers shifted manufacturing jobs out of the area. As businesses left, communities decayed, inducing a terrifying surge in violent crime. Urban rot came next festering from within and eventually sending the city into bankruptcy in 2013 where it reemerged in 2014.

Five-years later, Detroit has gotten worse – not better - and the city is having trouble providing basic utilities for its residents.

In particular, the city along with internet service providers are failing to deliver high-speed internet to a significant part of the low income areas. 

That is why one community group of technology geeks have banded together to create an internet of their own.

Equitable Internet Initiative (EII) is a program that teaches Detroit residents how to build high speed WiFi networks. EII says Detroit is one of the top 5 least connected cities in the United States coupled with 60% of the city residents that do not have access to high-speed internet. The group aims to stop the growing digital divide that is leaving many low income residents behind and forgotten in the inner cities where there is only death and destruction.

EII has trained teams in the North End, Island View, and Southwest Detroit to setup infrastructure: a church that functions as a hub and internet service provider which then a signaled is beamed to communities that don’t have access to high-speed internet.

Residents who want internet from EII have to meet two requirements:

1. can’t afford internet


2. don’t already have internet or <10 Mbps

Once the requirements are met, EII will send a team to the residential location and install an outdoor directional antenna and an indoor router with a setup time around one-hour. EII recognizes that access to high-speed internet is a worldwide problem and if that is not fixed a “digital class system” will develop.

EII wants high-speed access for everyone..Popular Mechanics also said,

The EII offers a radical proposition that would allow people to get Internet outside of a major telecom. But it’s got its own money concerns. Initially, it worked off a federal grant. When that money dried up, the deal with Rocket Fiber made it viable again.

 

But that partnership will not cover the costs of more and more internet connections growing in perpetuity. Jenny Lee, the executive director of Allied Media Projects, the group behind EII, raised the question in a recent article. “How do we do this in way that doesn’t replicate the inequities of other utility companies? Are we going to be the equivalent of water department coming to shut you off if you don’t pay your bill?”

 

One way the group hopes it will prove its worth is by creating apps. Its Next Gen Apps program teaches students coding basics like CSS, HTML, Javascript, and Node.js. Combined with the EII’s efforts to provide internet in their areas, there’s a hope that people will truly make the internet their own.

Bottomline: Detroit is a prime example of citizens working together for survival in a post collapsed bankrupt city. The one question we have: how long until government shuts down this private internet?

 

Media Says You’re to Blame for Shootings Unless You Report Odd Behavior

Via The Daily Bell

“How do we fit the latest tragedy into our political agenda?” The media wondered. “Gun control is so cliché. And even though the tragedies get bigger and bigger, we still have little luck!”

“I have an idea!” Exclaimed one outlet, “We can convince people that if they don’t report their neighbors and family members to authorities for acting subjectively crazy, then they are to blame for crazy people’s actions!”

“Yes!” Agreed another, “And we can tell them that ‘micro-aggressions’, criticism of the government, and just getting a bad feeling from someone are all worthy of reporting to the authorities!”

And just like that, the media was able to turn their frowns upside down. They exploited the good crisis in the name of the progressive dream. It’s easy to keep citizens under strict watch when fellow citizens do the policing for you! And they all lived happily ever after, sewing fear and mistrust into the fabric of society. The End.

Snitch to Absolve Yourself of Guilt

You may think these events are engineered, or rather that real tragedy will be used to push political agendas. Either way, perhaps the old gun control push is out of style.

A possibly more sinister attempt is underfoot to get Americans to turn on each other. Be suspicious of anyone that makes you feel icky. Rat out your neighbor. Being politically incorrect is just one step shy of a shooting rampage. That is the message.

And if you don’t call the police to report suspicious behavior, you are just as guilty as a mass murderer. That is the story the media is selling.

Instead of ignoring, mocking or laughing off the people in our society who seem disgruntled, angry or somehow “off” we must report them. We need to take a more active role in not just paying attention to the people who give us an uneasy feeling, but in taking the next step by alerting law enforcement when we have uneasy feelings or are worried about a person’s potential for violence.

That’s right, the true problem is that we haven’t been proper social spies.

But if the problem is mental health, this will only exacerbate it. When people feel restricted, they literally go crazy. If someone seems angry and disgruntled now, imagine how they will feel after you report them as a suspected terrorist.

How many people on the edge might be pushed to violence when they find out that their neighbors alerted the authorities to their “potential”, whatever that means, for violence?

Coercion is linked to mental illness. When people feel trapped, a small minority will act out violently.

Imagine if you feel that your neighbors are constantly judging your quarks, and calling you crazy. This could easily move more people on the continuum towards violence. This would just be yet another injustice they feel they have suffered at the hands of an oppressive society.

What kind of person does the mainstream media consider a potential candidate to be the next mass shooter?

Let’s take snippets of information about the last mass shooter. Let’s generalize those behaviors to assume anyone guilty of such acts is a potential killer.

“He was the king of microaggression,” his brother, Eric, said…

The other thing that set Paddock apart was his “irreverence toward authority,” Mr Alarcon said.

If you hate political correctness or are anti-authority, you might be a terrorist.

Other suspicious behaviors: not being sociable with neighbors, and not being talkative at bars. The media wants to make sure people are all together, keeping an eye on each other. Don’t let someone be a loner, don’t let anyone keep to themselves. You must probe and prod. The desire for privacy is suspicious. What are they hiding?

There are always clues. Threats posted online, angry or violent sentiments conveyed in conversations, guns purchased, and ammunition stockpiled are among them.

Do you know anyone who has posted rants on Facebook, seems angry sometimes, or is just a little too into guns? Probably a terrorist. Report them.

For More Snitching to be Effective, Criminalize More Behaviours

So you snitch on someone for acting suspiciously. The police interview him, he hates society a little bit more, and then the police let him go. They can’t charge him with anything because he hasn’t done anything illegal.

The media thinks the solution is to simply criminalize behaviors which they think could lead to later crimes.

Should we criminalize stockpiling ammo? Should acting crazy be a crime? Should we start locking people up on suspicion, or for being disgruntled at the government?

The whole mental health thing is a terrifying possibility. What if they start locking people up based on some arbitrary definition of what constitutes crazy? Of course, we know exactly what will constitute crazy. Saying anything critical of the government.

We also must take a hard look at our laws and consider much more stringent penalties for making terrorist threats. Given the crisis we face, perhaps we should abandon the mentality that mass murderers and terrorists are innocent until proven guilty. Threats alone should be as intolerable as actions. Promising to commit these abhorrent acts should be grounds enough to bring them to swift and harsh justice before they act.

The laws against making terrorist threats are a joke. There are people in prison for posting violent rap lyrics on social media.

It is already illegal to make threats. But what is the media suggesting? Locking people up and throwing away the key?

That’s what we need, to do away with innocent until proven guilty. Everyone is guilty according to the media.

Why not just skip the extra steps, and arrest anyone who doesn’t fit the media/ government definition of normal? Citizens will be properly assimilated, or citizens will be reeducated.

Russia Provides New Internet Connection To North Korea

Authored by Martyn Williams via 38North.org,

A major Russian telecommunications company appears to have begun providing an Internet connection to North Korea. The new link supplements one from China and will provide back-up to Pyongyang at a time the US government is reportedly attacking its Internet infrastructure and pressuring China to end all business with North Korea.

The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening. Internet routing databases map the thousands of connections between telecom providers and enable computers to figure out the best route to a destination.

Until now, Internet users in North Korea and those outside accessing North Korean websites were all funneled along the same route connecting North Korean ISP Star JV and the global Internet: A China Unicom link that has been in operation since 2010.

Global Internet connectivity to Star JV. The orange denotes the China Unicom connection and blue the TransTeleCom. The graphic shows the Russian connection coming online around 0900 UTC, a short period of instability then a stable connection with two networks. (Dyn Research)

“The addition of Russian transit would create new internet path out of the country, increasing its resilience and international bandwidth capacity,” said Doug Madory, who analyzes global Internet connectivity at Dyn Research.

The new link comes at an interesting time.

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that US Cyber Command has been carrying out denial of service attacks against North Korean hackers affiliated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The attacks attempt to overwhelm their computers and the Internet connection with traffic making them slow or impossible to use.

The US cyber attack was due to end on Saturday, reported the Post. That means the new Russian connection went online just after the US Cyber Command attack ended.

TransTeleCom, or TTK, is one of Russia’s biggest telecommunications companies and a subsidiary of the Russian railway operator. Fiber optic lines are laid alongside the railway and, according to a map on its website, on a route from Vladivostok right up to the North Korean border. 

A map of the TTK network shows a link running right up to the North Korean border.

That’s presumably at the Friendship Bridge, a railway crossing over the Tumen River that connects Khasan in Russia with Tumangang in North Korea. It’s the only connection between the two countries.

The Friendship Bridge connecting Russia (right) and North Korea (left). Photo: GoogleEarth.

This isn’t the first time North Korea has had alternate routes for Internet connectivity.

From 2012 for about a year, a second link to Star JV existed via Intelsat, an international satellite telecommunications operator, but in recent years the Chinese link has been the sole connection to Star JV.

Relying on one Internet provider has always left North Korea in a precarious situation.

More than once the link has been the target of denial of service attacks. Most were claimed by the “Anonymous” hacking collective, but on at least one previous occasion, many wondered if US intelligence services had carried out the action.

North Korea has few Internet users, but access to the network is available at major universities, to foreigners via smartphone, at government departments and major companies. Elite families are also suspected of having access. The cyber units of North Korea’s military also enjoy access.

The link is also vital for overseas researchers and academics who rely on access to North Korean state media websites for information.

Facebook Engagement-For-Hire Economy Has Generated More Than 100 Million Fake Likes

After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week confirmed allegations that the company had sold at least $100,000 of ads to a Russia-backed troll farm – igniting a firestorm of liberal sanctimony as pundits like Rachel Maddow proclaimed that they had finally found the “smoking gun” proving that Russians had swayed the election in President Trump’s favor – researchers at the University of Iowa have pulled back the curtain on the seedy underbelly of Facebook"s illicit influence-peddling economy.

In a study reported by USA Today, the researchers described a thriving ecosystem of websites that allow users to generate millions of fake "likes" and comments. Working with a computer scientist at Facebook and one in Lahore, Pakistan, the team discovered a thriving community of 50 sites offering free, fake "likes" for users" posts in exchange for access to their accounts, which were used to falsely "like" other sites in turn.

The results have been staggeringly effective:

“The scientists found that these “collusion networks” run by spammers have managed to harness the power of one million Facebook accounts, producing as many as 100 million fake "likes" on the systems between 2015 and 2016.”

Why is this a problem? The answer is simple economics. As USA Today explains, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to favor posts that garner a lot of likes, amplifying their visibility and possibly driving legitimate engagement. Many social media “influencers” rely on their followings to justify marketing partnerships with brands and other lucrative deals.

And in what the researchers described as a recent development, the scammers have found a way to “turbocharge” the process by automatically looping in third-party applications like Spotify. Previously, this process had to be done manually in resulted in far fewer likes.

After joining the community, users who are in good standing can essentially generate likes and engagement on demand.

“When you become part of this network, you can say ‘Give me likes on this post and as soon as you request it, you get thousands of likes on a specific post,” said Zubair Shafiq, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who documented the automated networks.”

“Users think it’s relatively benign, but actually they’re handing over full control of their Facebook account,” said Shafiq.

“They can also access all the information that’s available on your profile, see your posts, get your friends list, even read your private messages. We can"t tell if this information is being collected and sold to others,” he said.

In another example of the company’s penchant for dissembling, Facebook told USA Today it had stamped out the type of activity described in the research. The company added that it is investigating smaller-volume techniques that could be used for a similar purpose, and said it would take every action necessary to ensure that all activity on its platform, which the company claims has more than 2 billion monthly active users.

But an independent investigation by USA Today promptly confirmed that Facebook’s claim was bulls---.

“However at least some similar techniques still function as USA TODAY was able to join one of the networks and get 50 likes on a post to a newly-created Facebook page within one minute.

The services operate outside of the United States but hide their locations. They also disguise the fact that people who use them are engaged in activity prohibited by Facebook.”

Compounding the ridiculousness of Facebook’s denial, USA Today also found that the sites operate relatively openly.

“The sites operate openly, and researchers found them by entering a Google search for phrases such as "Page Liker." Among the 50 so-called collusion networks listed researchers listed was djliker.com, which described itself as "a social marketing system that will increase likes, comments and increase visits to pages.”

The sites rely on a “freemium” business model, profiting off of ads posted on their sites, but also from subscription fees from power users.

“Their business model is basic: They make their money by posting ads on their sites and also selling "premium" services that allow users to get even more "likes" than they allow their regular users. Some also allow users to create fake comments that can be added to the post of their choice.”

The research will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Internet Measurement Conference in London in November. Nektarios Leontiadis, one of the study’s authors, is a threat research scientist at Facebook.
 

Error 404: Visualizing The Internet&#039;s Digital Decay

In 2005, one of the most intriguing advertising stunts of the internet age was hatched.

As Visual Capitalist"s Nick Routley explains, Alex Tew launched the The Million Dollar Homepage, where anyone could “own a piece of internet history” by purchasing pixels-plots (minimum of 10×10) on a massive digital canvas. At the price of just one dollar per pixel, everyone from individual internet users to well-known companies like Yahoo! raced to claim a space on the giant digital canvas.

Today, The Million Dollar Homepage lives on as a perfect record of that wacky time in internet history – or so it seems. However, the reality is that many of the hyperlinks on the canvas are now redirects that send incoming users to other sites, while over 20% of them are simply dead.

Here are the links that still work on the Million Dollar Homepage today:

The revealing graphic above, via John Bowers, raises the question – how do hyperlinks disappear, and what implications does this “digital decay” have?

DIGITAL DECAY

The internet is stitched together by an incalculable number of hyperlinks, but much like cells in an organism, the sources and destinations have a finite lifespan. Essentially, links can and do die.

Most “link rot” is the result of website restructuring, or entities going out of business and pulling their website offline.

A high-impact example of this is when Yahoo! pulled the plug on GeoCities, one of the first popular web hosting services. In one fell swoop, roughly 7 million websites (containing a plethora of animated gifs, auto-playing midi files, and traffic counters) went dark forever.

Links can also die because of more deliberate reasons, as well. In 2015, the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, Ben Smith, came under fire for deleting thousands of posts from the site (including content that was critical of Buzzfeed advertisers). Journalism has traditionally acted as a public record, so this type of “decay” has serious implications on the credibility of media brands.

WHO CARES?

This idea of a public record is at the heart of why digital decay is an issue worth addressing. Once millions of links simply burn out, what will people in the future know about society in the early-ish days of the internet? What record will remain of people’s thoughts and feelings in that era?

I worry that the twenty-first century will become an informational black hole.

– Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer

Perhaps more urgent are public records that live in the digital realm. Supreme Court decisions and academia lean heavily on citations to build their arguments. What happens when those citations simply vanish? A Harvard study found that 49% of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions are now broken.

Even that ubiquitous resource, Wikipedia, has serious issues caused by digital decay. Over 130,000 entries link to dead pages – a troubling development, as linked citations are what lend entries their credibility.

BACKING UP THE INTERNET

A handful of people are taking steps to archive the internet.

The most well-known solution is Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions webpages over the past 20 years. Even the The Library of Congress – which is well known for archiving digital information such as tweets – contracts Internet Archive to do its web crawling.

The academia-focused Perma is another example of a company looking to create permanent records of the web sources (particularly citations).

Many of the weird and wonderful forums and hand-coded homepages of early internet lore may be gone, but we’re finally taking steps to combat digital decay. As awareness grows, avoiding an “informational black hole” may be possible.

The Mainstream Is Circling The Wagons: "They&#039;re Coming For All Of Us...It&#039;s An Orchestrated Attack Against Truth"

Via Mac Slavo of SHTFPlan.com,

Within hours of the election of Donald Trump the mainstream media, their politico counterparts and social media operatives began spreading the narrative that the President was only elected as a result of the dissemination of fake news. The term itself became a rallying cry for everyone from major search engines to massive social media websites who said they would create fact checking teams within their organizations to ensure only legitimate news and information would be listed on their respective platforms. Soon, the leftist media began spreading lists, none of which were backed with any actual evidence, of supposed “fake news” purveyors and Russian propaganda websites. The lists included some of the most highly trafficked non-mainstream websites and aggregators around the world. As these Silicon Valley behemoths and popular news organizations mobilized, so too did mainstream advertising agencies, one of which quickly pulled advertising from the purported king of fake news, conservative leaning news organization Breitbart.com.

The battle was clearly on. And to this day, it continues in earnest. Legitimate news is being buried in feeds and search engine pages, while the effort to directly attack the revenue of alternative media websites continues to expand.

Several weeks ago Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com penned an alert in which he reported that a shadow organization had contacted him with an offer to either help them take down Infowars founder Alex Jones, or be destroyed. Adams, being a long-time proponent of free speech and liberty, took to the internet to expose them instead. Naturally, the skeptics laughed it all off as another conspiracy theory.

Except just days after Natural News posted the warning, Infowars was suddenly dropped by one of the world’s largest online advertising agencies, reportedly costing the network some $3 million in revenue. And within a week of that attack, the largest search engine in the world delisted some 140,000 NaturalNews.com pages from their search results.

While this may seem like no big deal for the average reader today, what these recent actions demonstrate is that a conglomerate of traditional news media, big business and political operatives are actively working to suppress the reporting of information that runs counter to the mainstream agenda.

First they come for the purveyors of truth and information that has remained hidden from the masses for decades. Next they will come for those who publicly discuss their views and and ideas on social media and other forums. And while you may not fall into any of these two categories, make no mistake, as SGT Report warns in the following must-watch report, one day they will come for you, too. 

They’ll be coming for all of us… Because this is an orchestrated attack against truth… I cannot imagine living in a time in the United States of America where this is allowed to stand…

As of this morning Google has reinstated NaturalNews.com, though the original reasons provided by Google, which claimed this was a technical issue involving a small number of outdated pages on the website, were unable to be duplicated by numerous well known SEO websites and cyber sleuths. Curiously, as Health Ranger Mike Adams notes in his statement on the censroship, the very same technical issues actively exist on mainstream websites like CNN and Huffington Post, though their pages have yet to be delisted in the same manner as Natural News.

Based on the evidence, we are hard pressed to find any legitimate reason for why Mike Adams’ 140,000 pages would have been delisted, save for the fact that this was a direct attack against his alternative viewpoints on health, politics and a number of other issues. And though Google as an organization may not have been fully aware of the reasons behind the delisting, someone had to push the button. That the button push came just days after the aforementioned warning Mike received to either play ball or be destroyed is highly suspicious.

There is a concerted effort to shut down views and ideas that run counter to the status quo. Today it has come in the form of silencing the most vocal critics. Tomorrow, they may try to silence you.

Mike Adams discusses the delisting and reinstatement of his website on The Common Sense Show: