Dial Web 2.0 for Censorship
I admit, I almost fell for Web 2.0. But this morning I had a rude awakening.
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My article on Newsvine was censored. Hundreds of Digg articles were censored. Web 2.0 has just shown its huge weakness – its unaccountability.
See, normal news media is supposed to uphold a standard of quality. If news breaks about accounting errors in one of their sponsors, they’re supposed to investigate and report. But with social media, the crowd doesn’t have the power to stop censorship or accountability. It’s up to the gatekeepers.
And those gatekeepers have a huge interest in keeping their sponsors happy. Web 2.0 allows the gatekeepers unprecedented power to manipulate the news. Just look at hundreds of articles disappearing from Digg in one day. Do you see the Associated Press censoring hundreds of articles in a day?
Web 2.0 is really about the silent destruction of freedom of information on the net. Individuals no longer own the majority of traffic, it all flows through the group votes of Digg and Reddit and StumbleUpon. When we can’t verify the accountability of these, we get what we have now, a bunch of crap.
Social media just destroyed itself today. Never again will I work for someone else’s media network, like I did at Newsvine. Social media is too dangerous, it won’t ever work the way it was supposed to. It was a pretty dream though.
So it goes, another round of censorship on the ‘net. I’ve had it happen to me before, but I just figured it was an isolated incident. With this though, I’m getting over the internet. It started out as an excited medium, but now it’s becoming pure shit. Corporate interests and censorship everywhere. I’ll see you in the real world, where we can still speak our minds and say numbers without fear of lawsuit…
For now.
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