I’ve been reading about the pandemic the whole time.
I don’t think the news of the pandemics first came to my attention until just before I had a few weeks to go.
I’m talking about the first week of September, 2018.
That’s when I was actually able to watch the first episode of the new Fox series,Carnel Knowledge.
It was a fairly ordinary day for me.
I was on a plane home from a day job at a company that has an office in the US, and as the plane touched down in Dublin, the flight attendant pulled me aside to ask what I was up to.
“Oh, I’m working,” I said.
“What kind of work?” she asked.
“Well, you see, the whole world is on the edge of the black market,” I told her.
“I’ve got a lot of information on the web.”
“I don’t see how this is news to you,” she told me.
“This isn’t the internet.
This isn’t something that is available on the internet.”
I had only been at this site for a few months.
It’s been a few years since I’d been to a website that offered a search function.
I didn’t understand what that meant until I saw the title of the site.
“Carnelledia,” the headline read.
It said: “Categories of knowledge.”
“Categorically, I do not believe this is an accurate representation of the internet,” I replied.
“No one is saying that,” the flight attendants said.
They were not wrong.
“We are the internet, and we do not have a monopoly on information,” I explained.
“But we do have a right to know.
And you know, I think that you need to be able to make decisions about the information that you are accessing, and I think you need the right to do that without having to rely on the government.”
“That’s the kind of argument I think I have, but I am not going to give up.”
I knew the flight crews weren’t talking about censorship, but rather about how the internet works.
The truth is, most of the information we get online isn’t censored.
What is censored, however, is the information about what’s being posted on social media and elsewhere that is being passed along.
This is why the FCC has called on social networks to be more transparent about the content of their posts.
It is also why some of the biggest names in media are now joining forces to push back against what they see as censorship.
In a new report called “The Bigger Picture,” Vox Media, Vox Media Communications and The Verge, are publishing an exhaustive list of companies that they allege are colluding to control the flow of information online.
The report comes as more and more of us are getting our news from social media sites.
Vox Media’s report, for instance, notes that the company “is among the top ten most visited news aggregators, having a global reach of 1.5 billion users per month.”
In terms of the amount of content on the site, it says, “The top ten websites on the aggregator are: The Verge (1.2 billion users monthly); Buzzfeed (1 billion); CNN (1,000 million); CNN Money (743,000); BuzzFeed (4 million); Business Insider (5 million); Buzzflash (3 million); TechCrunch (2.3 million).”
That sounds pretty big.
And yet, the Verge found that only 14% of content posted on BuzzFeed’s site was pulled out of BuzzFeed’s platform.
The Verge report goes on to state: “For more than four years, BuzzFeed has been using bots to create fake accounts for fake accounts of journalists to impersonate, and to filter and remove content based on their personal information.
BuzzFeed’s data breaches are not limited to BuzzFeed employees; they’re part of the larger data breach at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Dropbox, and other sites.”
That’s a lot to process in one week.
The Vox report goes onto state that BuzzFeed “has been using fake accounts to impersonal journalists, and that fake accounts are being used to filter, remove, and flag content.”
In the wake of that report, Vox also wrote that BuzzFeed’s “owners and owners of News Feeds have publicly stated that they do not intend to continue the use of bots for content moderation.”
Vox’s report goes further to say that the report goes into detail about how BuzzFeed’s own data is being manipulated to “create fake accounts.”
“It is clear that BuzzFeed is being used as a conduit for the information it collects about people on the Internet,” the Vox report reads.
“BuzzFeed’s owners and owners who own and operate News Feed, and the publishers and advertisers who sell content from News Feed sites, know that this is happening.”
The report goes through a list of names and details about