The first time I saw the link to infowars.com I wondered. What type of whacko site is this? Then I heard Alex Jones, and it started to make sense. There actually is a war on for your mind. The recent Presidential election in the United States has brought the war to a tipping point. Major media companies had to show their hands during the election in order to promote their paying customers. Both Trump and Clinton played the media. They used different methods, but both used it. However, Hillary Clinton crossed the line into 1984 with her methods of finding, deleting and rewriting records with the use of her for hire agency Correct The Record. Trump used the online media the most effectively. He captured the hearts of the ordinary Americans and got them to share his message of Making America Great Again virally across the nation.
Marketing companies like Google and Facebook took it to the extreme. By blocking sites that did not toe the party line. The paying party that is. Some ultra conservative sites are still blocked, banned and effectively censored from view by these sites.
Recently imageboard 8ch.net known as 8chan has started to push back against this blatant censorship by blocking the spider that copies all the data to Google’s servers from their website. This spider was originally designed to copy the data from websites in order to return search results. However, the administrators of 8chan noticed a discrepancy. Other OEM sites using Google’s back end returned search results to the infamous image board. Sites like Duckduckgo.com and Startpage.com, sites that use the data from Google’s servers, but don’t track users. Returned the proper search results for subjects on 8chan servers. The actual Google search did not correspond to them at all and did not display any results for anything on 8chan except for the most obscure results. Now this might happen if a site is very small, but 8ch.net is visited by millions of people monthly, and contains over 50 million posts with lots of information that people are searching for. It is impossible for 8ch.net not to show up in the Google search for many ordinary folks looking for the important information that is on the site.
8chan decided to fight back and blocked the Google spider from indexing their site from now on. This had little effect on 8chan, but the effect on Google, who was actually using that big data and selling the use of keywords from it to corporate enterprises was substantial. At the end of the day, only Google lost in this battle. Many of the users of 8chan, applauded the block of Google, as they feel more secure knowing their data is not being used by unscrupulous corporate entities.
The battle for your mind continues to rage on, within the IT community. You must be careful, and use your own judgement without blindly taking the bait from major media sources.
