To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
Frederick Douglass
One aspect that excited me most about the World Wide Web the first time I logged onto AOL in 1992 was the potential to reach the world with your message. A few years later and upgrading from AOL to a local ISP that offered free webspace I created my first website. No earth shattering messages were posted but I did feel akin to Gutenberg and the printing press. I’ve helped many people, businesses, and organizations share their messages over the last two decades. The ability to share your voice to the world, at your fingertips, on a platform you control is priceless. Click To Tweet
In 2002, while attending MacWorld in San Francisco I was introduced to a couple of board members of the EFF. The EFF is a foundation that is dedicated to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows.
I have followed their work ever since and always kept a close eye on censorship, privacy, and security worldwide on the Internet. Fast forward a few years and the rise of social networks have seemingly overtaken the platform for posting messaging across the Internet. I was one of the first people to be on the face book, due to the fact of it originally being closed to certain colleges and universities. I worked at a university that had access at the time. This began my love/hate relationship with social media.
Social media sets an even lower bar for people to be able to put their voice out there to the world. But at what cost? In the early days, you posted, followers saw it, and interacted with it. Now, you post and who actually has access to it? What is added to it? Are you shadow banned? How are these services free? There is so much that is misunderstood about privacy, your data, and how all this actually works.
Back to our quote by Frederick Douglass and how this plays into current news. You may not agree with Donald Trump’s thoughts, messages, speech, etc but you should be concerned with the collaborative silencing and banning of his social accounts. I totally understand it is not a violation of his first amendment right of free speech it is simply him “violating the terms and conditions of the TOS”.
If you are sharing your message and voice on social media you have no control over the platform and you stand in a vulnerable state. You may be censored, you may be banned, your message may be silenced. You have no power because you are using a service run by a private company.
This is why it is so important to get back to the early days of the WWW. Don’t rely on social media, run your own website. There are tools that will allow you to setup a nice-looking, easy to use site. Learning from the collective shutdown of Parler, you also need to understand the hosting and tech stack that powers your site.
We can help from start to finish, giving you an easy to use site that is hosted on a secure, free-speech friendly host. Contact us today for any help that is needed!
