how facebook + google censor & mess with us.. and how wiser choices exist

we are clearly not all aware of the way that social technology is being used to subtly influence our choices and how beneath the surface of the corporate logos and happy cat videos, lurk forces that most of us would not wish to be involved with in any way at all... from the prime creator of the ureka social network, speaking with a decade of relevant experience, some solutions and observations of how we can improve the reality of internet social networking, that benefit us all. 

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flash-back: the early days of social networking

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i began using internet communities (also known as 'social networks') nearly a decade ago, with tribe.net. for those who are unaware of the legend that is/was tribe.net, it was one of the first social networks and included groups, profile building, video embedding and connecting with others from around our planet. tribe.net still exists, yet it has long since been abandoned by most of us for the shinier and more functional social networks that so many of us are using today. the discussion topics on tribe were wide and varied, with a particular focus on the more esoteric and unusual areas of life that aren't covered by the mainstream media and corporate internet sites. tribe.net was an early model and is functionally simple, there (still) are no complex artificial intelligence algorithms being used by tribe.net, behind the scenes, to spy on and 'help' the users of the site. the activity on the site mostly arose from our own 'human neural networks' inside us - therefore the tribe groups were often creative, lively, inspired and generally friendly places - where real, honest relationships could be born.

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among the most significant benefits of tribe.net, were that almost no censoring took place. moderators of groups may have occasionally ejected a member if they pushed on others in the group too much (in several years of moderating a group there, i ejected only one member - in a case where someone was making violent threats for no clear reason). part of the cause of this open minded, open hearted and uncontrolled environment is that the majority of the users of tribe.net are the same ones that build the famed 'burning man festival' - where all rules are deliberately trashed in an explosion of dust, artistry and mayhem every year.

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meanwhile, myspace.com (now absorbed as part of rupert murdoch's media empire) and other social networks were expanding and offering different approaches to the question of 'how do we make social interactions online more fruitful?'. many people truly loved tribe.net; while the other, more commercially-oriented sites seemed fake and too controlled in comparison.

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eventually tribe was sold to cisco - a large corporation which is known, for one, for assisting the chinese government in hunting and torturing those that the government agents do not like - including members of the falung gong spiritual peace movement. from then on, tribe.net was left to rot and is now a shadow of it's former self. the controllers of the corporate version of reality had applied their agenda and dictated social interaction once again, as they have done in so many other areas of life, from food supplies, through to sports, entertainment, government, medicine, war/peace and so on.

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the present moment of social networking - 2014

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returning to this now moment: there are many different forms of social networks, from the giants such as facebook & google+, through to the multitudes of other, smaller, more focused networks that have been created using specialised software services or that are custom made (usually using open source software). however, the same old problems still exist - the same symptoms of control that have plagued life on earth for so long are still found to be reflected through many of the more popular and newer social software services, only now these symptoms have slightly changed form. the technology may be evolving, yet the dysfunctional consciousness remains present, to some extent. now, the big networks present a public face of being 'for the community' and do whatever they can to present an image that will be attractive enough to suck in as many of us as possible, while ensuring that they do not reveal enough of their fullest, true activity that the majority leave in disgust - for moral, ethical, financial or safety reasons.

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in short, the operators of these large mega networks are not operating with full integrity, they never have and they show no signs of changing soon.

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"but i like facebook and google, they're my friends..."

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well.. would a friend who wants you to be free and not control you:

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• prevent you from free speech for political reasons
• prevent you from sharing a photo of someone who has drunk too much alcohol or is unconscious
• prevent you from speaking with your friends about certain companies/groups that they were in dispute with or who they just don't like
• prevent you from discussing a piece of artwork because it represents part of the female body
• arbitrarily remove your words and silence you when you speak about human rights abuses, then not fully explain why
• prevent you from joking about government agencies
• prevent you from seeing 2 men kissing in the street (for your own safety)
• allow political parties to buy an artificially increased presence in your news feed

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i could go on and on with these.. and many of these are only the items taken from the 'censorship' section of the 'free software' advocate and prime-creator of the gnu/linux operating system, richard stallman's webpage about facebook.

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the privacy section from richard's page about facebook quickly begins to read like a script from a horror or sci-fi movie, written to describe a totalitarian, soul-less world where technology and psychopaths rule the rest of the planet as slaves. except that this is not fiction, these are the documented actions of facebook.

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some of the key points regarding the facebook team's handling of our privacy on their network:

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• the american goverment/miltary spy agency, the NSA is closely monitoring facebook (and other networks) and can freely collect all the information you share on the network and use it to build complex psychological profiles of you, for their own purposes. what could possibly go wrong there?
• facebook bought "what's app", which records the audio from your cell-phone's microphone without you knowing. what could possibly go wrong there?
• facebook systems monitor the text you write and then delete... and include that in their profiling of you.
• facebook systems automatically use facial recognition on your images and so too do the various policy enforcers of the corporate governments. what could possibly go wrong there?
• facebook has been involved with universities, running secret social engineering projects to see if they can alter your emotions. arguably this is an illegal activity and breaches human rights.

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in fact, the list of complaints about facebook is so long that i am not going to list them all here.

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i will only add to the list here that facebook is owned and operated by individuals associated with some of the more controversial and ruthless names in the earth story, including those who own and operate monsanto, possibly the most hated group on earth.

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here, facebook is shown to be 'profiting' hugely from the 'theft' of video plays from other sites using 'creative' ways to gain page views and ad revenues:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

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is google (youtube) any better?

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in my own experience, no, they are not much better. i have seen my own comments on youtube censored and even worse than that: the comments are censored - yet i am not informed they have been censored and i am left thinking that others can read them. this is a direct violation of freedom of speech and is extremely duplicitous. i can think of no other websites that do this.

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• this thread and this thread in google's product forums cover this topic in some detail and there is also a page on wikipedia on the topic, that shows that youtube censors expression based on elitist principles and with the intention of stifling social change.
• google recently bought 8 robotics corporations in 6 months, including those that supply military robots.. so.. now we see a giant corporation that holds social data on a large percentage of the planet's population and is making killer robots... what could possibly go wrong there?
• gmail was planned from the start as a massive surveillance system, to make psychological profiles not only of Gmail users but of everyone who sends mail to Gmail users.
• youtube (google) has cut a deal with media corporations to deny fair use copyright rules
• youtube (google) has a history of deleting entire channels of video content if the messages point out corporate or government corruption or if the video contains other corporate agendas that some would like to hide.
• youtube (google) gives governments priority flagging rights for blocking videos for political reasons.
• google unquestioningly supports the eu rule to enforce denial of history and censoring data that is akin to 'burning books in a library'.
• google uses a complex web of fake shell companies to avoid billions in taxes each year:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jul1JUwhD6s

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being overpowered by hierarchies and machines isn't healthy

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true health requires true balance and true respect for free-will expression. full acceptance of free-will is also full respect of each other and of self.

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when hierarchic policies are created by agents of tyrannical governments and corporations that overpower and deny our free-will (by way of causing control, censoring, loss of connection - inspiring and inspired by a loss of personal empathy), what results is not community and is not healthy. what results in these circumstances is imbalance and a loss of a large amount of who we are - we are, as a result, hugely limited - whereas we need to be unlimited; potentially great changes are stifled and life is far less enjoyable than it could be and than it has always been intended to be.

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so while the mega corporations purchased the previously independently run myspace & tribe and while other groups invested 'billions of dollars' into facebook and other platforms - others among us could clearly see that the corporate approach is fundamentally a heartless and limiting approach, thus we looked for other solutions.

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can a vibrant, honest and healthy community truly be built when the space includes invisible security guards and hidden microphones with direct feeds into spy agencies... that are quietly being used to eliminate those who speak in particular ways or cross 'lines of acceptability'? 'lines of acceptability' that are not even clearly discernible to those within the community? ABSOLUTELY NOT. 

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the resulting community, is what has been seen on these networks already - which is a disjointed structure where true relationships are not so easy to build, where adverts for sniper rifles and breast implants compete for mind-space along side truly evolutionary and beneficial information from your friends - the friends you desire to communicate with.. the same friends that make up the community and without whom, facebook and google+ could not exist.

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while these networks do provide useful tools for connecting us together and can serve us in some ways - they are only doing so as a result of the innate qualities we possess as living beings - to create, share and communicate. yet, they do so at the expense of limiting us in ways which can easily and correctly be identified as 'evil' when the fuller details emerge and are comprehended in depth.

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so what are the other choices?

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i am the prime-creator of this online community (ureka.org), so i am well placed to comment here. i will explain the choices i am making with ureka.org that are intended to overcome the downsides to the massive social networks and i will explain why i am choosing them. (i have also added a small list at the bottom of the page here, of other social networks that i consider to be reliable replacements for the mega-corporate sites).

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why ureka.org doesn't suck!

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(circa - the artificial year number: 2014)

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• the purpose for the existence of ureka.org is to assist with creating balance, harmony, healing, love, compassion, unity and to support the manifesting of our true desires. this is the anti-thesis of the commonly greed motivated and imbalanced corporate agendas. the reason for this is simple - this is what i know i need and i know this is so desperately needed across the planet, in general.
• this is a free expression zone: one of the limitations of censoring 'controversial' words and people is that we never evolve the issues involved. if we silence those among us who think differently or who have issues to resolve with others in society, these issues are denied and may then boil over into violence and bigger problems that cannot be as easily remedied as they may be through being actively accepted and engaged in an open way. i already KNOW that free expression is a requirement of health and i know that denial of free expression hurts us in ways that are not currently perceived by the ones who seek to control and overpower others. i know that for me to seek to control you is to actually harm you and i do not intend to harm anyone. 
• there are no adverts: commerce is one of the very few activities that is NOT allowed in the terms of use document here. the intention of inspiring a healthy balance cannot easily be achieved by exposing us to a stream of adverts that may include the types of subliminal mind-control tricks that so many adverts do indeed contain. if you truly need a thing or a service, you 'should' hear about it through it's success and not as a result of the size of the marketing budget involved.
• all funding comes from donations and co-creative acts: such as making t-shirts and exchanging them for what is needed. if funds aren't available, the activity doesn't occur. while this model/structure is still not totally tested, this is the preferred approach here; rather than to seek to perfect some kind of 'mental/digital greed virus' that spreads like an s.t.d. and can be used to complete the world domination master plan of an empire building, secret-society! this keeps the site as neutral as possible and does not open the potential to greed inspired censoring or attempts to manipulate us and our desires. -> so you won't see a group of fake-tanned promo girls on the streets, hassling you to use ureka.org. (and you won't see me wearing a hooded robe at stonehenge on a dark evening.) ;)
• technically, the design of the site is intended to be a truly useful information system, that supports learning, sharing and connecting with others. most of the existing, large networks do not demonstrate a full appreciation of the potential for learning that social networking presents us and have no obvious intention of expanding their features to support our enlightenment (youtube still does not even allow comments that include links to external websites!). social networking presents the possibility of catalysing rapid evolution through sharing and learning and i will not throw that opportunity away in favor of the types of farm simulating games that other networks are known for.
• the code that is used to run ureka.org is open source: so there are many web-coders all sharing and fixing the code, and their actions benefit ureka directly (thanks to the elgg community). so new code will be created and new features will become available to the community here, even if i don't create any new code myself. so the community will improve for free. this means that the site can be maintained with minimal costs and many eyes are available to look for errors and to fix them. plus, when i create new code it is available to others, including you, to use in your own social network - if you choose to do so. so through supporting ureka.org, you are also supporting an expanding freedom that supports everyone else in creating their own social networks.
• videos can be added here from an ever growing list of other websites, so you are not limited to only using a single source.
• the community here is not hierarchical and is truly community driven - so if you have a great idea for a new feature, you can share it and maybe it will be added. you can even write a plugin for the elgg framework and it may be added to ureka.org! when was mark zuckerburg or eric schmidt last seen commenting on the social networks they run!? a community that is run by people who are not even actively part of the community is totally backwards in comparison to what is possible.
• the intention is to evolve the community to run using peer to peer technology: so there will be no massive data centers required as the site grows and potentially no way for the data to be mined and exploited - even if i wanted to (which i don't). n.b. the plan for the evolution of ureka.org is to be decentralised - yet presently the site runs in a standard way, with a central web-server (currently located in holland). decentralisation would be a significantly more practical way of running a large network, since every network member shares the load of running the network.

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i could continue, yet this page is already long enough and i trust you have by now read enough to receive clarity on the direction here. yes, there are minor bugs in the software here, yet we can and do fix bugs much more easily than replacing a highly imbalanced corporate psychology of domination, empire building and over-riding of the desires of others in favor of (false) perceptions of social and political 'gains'.

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other networks i can recommend and that you may injoy

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i have searched the web for english speaking social networks for my own use and so far have not found many that i like and would recommend. most are either too closed/controlled in the ways i have already described, or they are not complete enough or functionally useful to recommend at this point. however, here's a small selection of some of the best:

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• diaspora - shares many of the same principles as i do here. diaspora is already decentralised, respects freedom and your privacy. the network is a general network with no fixed intention or topic, other than to be a social network. the features are effective and a method of using @ symbols and hashtags is available (as with twitter, ureka and other networks). the technology is relatively new though.. and i have found that the decentralised aspect causes me to be disconnected from others on the network.. which is counter productive. (let me know if you know what i may be missing!)
• minds.com - another network that is based on the elgg framework. minds is also at a relatively early stage of evolving and yet is succeeding in making the ocean of social media content available in a receivable way. the focus is more on content than on networking features at this point.
• steemit.com - added as of 2016. an inspired way of combining financial motivation with sharing ideas with others. every post has the potential to attract/earn cryptocurrency and the creators of the site respect anarcho principles of liberty. one to watch!

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if you've got any comments then i'd appreciate reading them and as all-ways you are welcome to and requested to share this with your friends using the share button at the top-right of the page.

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to unity, balance & health!

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ura soul.