I decided to store important addresses, emails, phone numbers and contact details in this very state of the art pink book. This information is resistant to hacking and goes with me everywhere I have my wallet. It’s so convenient!
Always remember that they can manipulate everything you see.
As I’ve noted many times I still have both facebook and twitter accounts. The reason my account was never suspended is likely because I didn’t use them to post much of anything personal and in the twitter case I had no followers anyways. Sure, I came out against lockdowns and other mitigation measures early on. I got a sea of “but people are dying!” and “I dare you to go unmasked into an intensive care unit.” Crickes, I’ve been in intensive care units without a facemask on dozens of times. What changed? I would have been okay with saying last rites in the Covid ward as long as I didn’t have to wear a facemask while doing it.
Although I don’t update my facebook account with pictures or much of anything lately, I still do use the messenger app and have several people I kept in touch with exclusively through the site. I did post links to my substack and sometimes messaged people links to it as well. As I’ve said before if I have a single person reading my substack who knew me in real life and got here through my facebook links, they haven’t identified themselves to me. My experience is that people are quite lazy about moving to a new platform so you lose a large majority of them when you do move.
Right before I left Thailand in December my facebook accounts were apparently hacked. I received a notification on my old email address that had an account verification code which someone was able to access somehow. Then there was a new sign in notice from around Bangkok, followed by them changing the email address. I don’t check facebook very often so this was not realized until a few days later.
I figured this would be easy to fix. The system told me to sign in with a device I had used before to access facebook. I had three such devices. I tried using all three until they each got to a screen that said “Your account is locked.”
Long story short it took me two weeks to regain access to my one facebook account, by going through a manual identity check four times, and I only was able to restore access to Amy Sukwan on facebook last week. Both accounts were locked and apparently Facebook does not like protonmail. When I asked for access codes to be sent there they never arrived. This whole thing left me in a mad scramble to come up with alternatives for facebook’s messenger system. This opened me up the broader idea that NONE of these services are technically reliable.
For many years, we happily went onto Facebook and posted our cat pics, our family updates, the details of our lives. As an advertiser, 12 years ago, I found it valuable to learn who my audience was.
They were mostly 50-ish-year-old women who were into holistic health, with far higher education than average. (Congrats — apparently you’re pretty amazing, you’re so “above average” on so many different metrics. Yes, Facebook tells us about you. They even told me your median household income. I wish I was kidding. I do not actually have any idea how they would know that.)
Well, now we see the dark side of all this. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Facebook’s help, with depression or anxiety. They’re helping cause it.
Where Are the Alternatives, for Business Owners?
To those hundreds of you who tell me, “Just get off Facebook!”:
That’s a great thought, and trust me, I would love to. But imagine you’re a public figure, and you employ 13 people, and you’ve worked for 16 years to provide fabulous service and products for people.
GOOGLE? (It Intentionally Keeps You from Finding Me)
Google is no better than Facebook. In fact, in the three years pre-COVID, you may not know that Google choked out of the search results over 90% of the “organic” (search) traffic to my site.
My GreenSmoothieGirl site used to get 2 million visitors a year, from mostly Google search results. But starting in 2018, it just got choked down to nothing … before you ever heard the C-word.
You should realize that Google actively keeps content on how to be healthy away from you. You’ll be served rosy, positive content on every kind of pharmaceutical product imaginable.
I wasn’t the only one whose online “organic search” traffic tanked. It was happening to everyone in the “natural health” space.
My colleagues and I compared notes. We had conferences about it. We hired SEO auditors, quite expensively I might add, and we did everything they said — spending tens of thousands of dollars, or more — and our traffic never came back.
They told us, for instance, that we should get a “board” of MDs and PhDs to co-author our content with us. Because Google doesn’t think you can know anything about health or nutrition, if you didn’t go to medical school.
And I did that. All 12 MD / PhD friends I asked gladly said yes, and signed on as co-authors of my content. But our organic search traffic never came back, not even a little bit.
People don’t seem to understand this. And it has massive importance if you’re using Google to find content relevant to your health.
For instance, just try to go learn about the horrific side effects from Botox. I knew little about it, but then a lady didn’t show up to my Swiss retreat several years ago. Her face had melted after a Botox injection, and she was suffering paralyzing migraines.
I googled and couldn’t find a darn thing. You can try it. You realize that Google arranges the search results, based on the data they have on you, I’m sure. Your search results might be different than mine.
Finally, I found a huge Facebook group (believe it or not) where 25K women shared stories of the grotesque injuries – especially long-term neurological problems, that they experienced after their “safe-n-effective” Botox injections.
The group was called Botox Dysport (Side Effect) Support, but Facebook doesn’t put new content in my feed. And, several people have told me they cannot find the group, by searching on Facebook for it. Basically, I would have to be in it, and add you, or you’ll never see that, either.
Don’t join that group unless you’re prepared for total horror.
Kind of like the Died Suddenly Worldwide group, which Facebook keeps deleting. (It reinvents itself and gets to hundreds of thousands of members before it gets deleted again.)
Telegram Is a Dumpster Fire; Gab Is an Echo Chamber
I went to Telegram immediately in March 2020. I have a group there. Feel free to join.
It may work for you, but for people who make their living online, Telegram is a dumpster fire.
It doesn’t help my business whatsoever, and it’s “bot hell.” (We’ve blocked 1,500 bots in the last two years.)
People impersonate me, every day, in there. A group impersonating Dr. Peter McCullough has 10x as many people following, than Dr. McCullough’s real group.
Also, there’s no legit advertising, and it offers maybe 1% of 1% of the functionality of Facebook. Where we lead a number of communities, including my Alt-Investment/Crypto mastermind, and our thousands of detoxers.
Gab? Everyone there is the right-wing, preaching to the choir in their echo chamber.
I should note here that after a slow start I have had good results with Gab. I am active in a Thailand expats and friends group and also sometimes interact on a Homesteading and Off Grid patriots group. It can lean right wing for me, but I’ve always ignored that echo chamber no matter where I find it.
TikTok? Some of my colleagues are on there, but it’s the Chinese surveillance-of-the-whole-world tool, rounding up all our kids especially.
Twitter? Hmm, IDK how to use it. I’ve ventured on there since Elon Musk claimed it would return to free speech. I’m cautiously optimistic (follow me on Twitterhere).
I keep twitter for research purposes. I think I might be up 20 whole followers by now!
As Robyn writes about substack:
Substack — A Bright Light in the Darkness
I will say, Substack (so far) is a refuge, where I publish this as we speak, and I hope you’re subscribed, so my content comes to your Inbox twice a week.
I don’t know how long it will survive, as everybody who has something important to say, in the fight for freedom, is here.
I know some of you are thinking, “It’s probably a way to surveil those of us in The Resistance” — but, I don’t think so. There’s too much truth on this platform, that enemies of freedom want buried. Many people are waking up, and taking action, thanks to Substack.
I’m here until then, and God bless whoever owns this company. I’ve been canceled by PayPal, Venmo, and Square — but currently, Stripe allows content providers on Substack to be paid for their content. (Good content involves a lot of research and work.)
Substack sends you my new blog posts each time I publish, by email.
Another bright spot: John and I use the SwissCows anonymous search engine. I don’t know if one day we won’t have an alternative, but for now, we don’t find they’re sifting out all the content we WANT, from their search results.
There have been problems here and there with every system. I have had a few bots on Substack. Sage Hana has been ultra vigilant on that front, as there has apparently been a Phishing attempt by someone posing as Mark Crispin Miller. As a side note Sage’s story was meant to be an embedded link, but it failed to embed for whatever reason. There are occasional glitches which hopefully substack works out.
As mentioned in the comments by Margaret Anna Alice:
This is a new tactic that seems to be specifically targeting dissidents. The spammer sets up an imposter Substack account using the name and avatar of the dissident and then posts spam under that person’s name. So far, this has happened to Tess Lawrie, Walter Chesnut, el gato malo, and now MCM. I may be forgetting some, but the pattern is clear.
Sage Hana had this response in part:
From the Newspunch link:
"The World Economic Forum has announced it has recruited hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to control the internet, policing social media and forums for “misinformation” and conspiracy content which will then be systematically shut down.
According to Klaus Schwab’s WEF, misinformation on the internet is an “infodemic” that is “potentially deadly” and requires a “cure.” The definition of misinformation, according to the WEF, is anything they disagree with. This means the information warriors will essentially be engaged in the act of shutting down dissent.
Conspiracy forums and Youtube comments sections are being targeted by so-called “digital first responders” who pretend to be ordinary users of the platform, but are actually working to disrupt proceedings and support the ideology of Klaus Schwab’s WEF."
I don’t have any ready answers to all of this, but I keep as many backup channels open as I can. Just yesterday an email from Mr. BlueSphynx did not arrive in my gmail: I say this because apparently he’d sent it days before and then sent it again. I only got the second one, at which point I saw both.
Always recognize that transmissions can be intercepted or not received. Some of this can be simple bad internet. Some years ago I was arguing with my husband because when I had been away from him in America he often didn’t answer my calls. I accused him of all kinds of things with mixtures of insecurity and indignation. But then one day my husband made the point that he’d never gotten some of these calls. We sat down together at our bungalow in Thailand with my Skype trying to call his Skype 5 feet away. About 60% of the time nothing happened on his end. About 10% of the time there was no ringing but a missed call would log in on his side anyways. In all cases it just sounded to me like his phone was ringing and ringing and he did not answer. Only about 1/3rd of my calls were going through, probably due to bad reception in the area.
That doesn’t even bring in bad intent. I am sure I have had results manipulated and artificially suppressed. I suspect some of my substack posts including in messenger that were made on facebook were made invisible. The bots and the phishing problems are likely to get worse.
But these big tech sites are still important as both bridges to others and for their scale. If I want to sell my car in Phuket, Thailand, or I want to learn about homeschool pod options in Las Vegas, Nevada, there’s a facebook group for that. They developed leverage because of their sheer number of users.
Perhaps it’s time for some more face to face meetings?
The reason Facebook and Google remain dominant is because people continue to use the services. If people were to abandon them en masse, the effect would be huge. Even people who are well aware of You Tube censorship, and know better, continue to use it.
The business model is monetization of our attention *through* their lens. There’s no way around it: until a huge number of users walk away, the juggernaut remains.
We should also have no illusions about digital privacy. There is good evidence that Signal was seeded with intelligence money. It may be more secure than FB Messenger, but it almost certainly is compromised. Same goes for Proton—it is likely more secure than Gmail, but almost certainly, back doors and keys exist. Same for cloud storage There are providers that can help secure information from pedestrian hackers, but they shouldn’t be seen as hermetic at all.
It sucks, I know. But we have to dispel the illusions.
The Amish. Perhaps they're Luddites. Perhaps they're falsely looking for salvation. But they've eluded big tech and vaccines. They are the remnant, that without a führer, flies humanity's tattered flag.
The reason Facebook and Google remain dominant is because people continue to use the services. If people were to abandon them en masse, the effect would be huge. Even people who are well aware of You Tube censorship, and know better, continue to use it.
The business model is monetization of our attention *through* their lens. There’s no way around it: until a huge number of users walk away, the juggernaut remains.
We should also have no illusions about digital privacy. There is good evidence that Signal was seeded with intelligence money. It may be more secure than FB Messenger, but it almost certainly is compromised. Same goes for Proton—it is likely more secure than Gmail, but almost certainly, back doors and keys exist. Same for cloud storage There are providers that can help secure information from pedestrian hackers, but they shouldn’t be seen as hermetic at all.
It sucks, I know. But we have to dispel the illusions.
The Amish. Perhaps they're Luddites. Perhaps they're falsely looking for salvation. But they've eluded big tech and vaccines. They are the remnant, that without a führer, flies humanity's tattered flag.