Holding Up Traffic

I might as well just have shut up shop today as far as the web is concerned - traffic has been completely choked off by Google and the main social media sites.  Why?  Well, because it is election day in the States and they are all running scared of Trump and his bullies and the possibility that they might accuse the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google of bias if they allow people to see what could be perceived of as articles and posts critical of Trump.  Believe me, this isn't paranoia on my part - it has been happening to sites across the web for the past month, or so, culminating in today's complete shutdown.  News sites, political commentary blogs, social media posts about US politics have all seen massive reductions in traffic - those of us with satire sites publishing stuff parodying Trump, well, we've all but vanished from view as far as the casual browser is concerned.  There has been a manipulation of web traffic on a massive scale - internet suppression, if you will.  It really is quite terrifying that anyone can intimidate search engines, social media and the like, to the extent that they effectively close down free speech and fair comment.  Satire is suddenly lumped in with 'fake news' and seen as seditious. An absolutely ridiculous situation.

So, what can be done about this situation?  Well, we can hope that the US electorate consign Trump and his cronies to the dustbin of history today.  But I've learned not to bank on such things - there are a depressingly large number of people still prepared to vote for the fat fraud.  The thing that we can do as individuals, though, is to break the power of the craven internet giants.  Simply stop using them - believe me, there are plenty of other search engines out there which deliver better results than Google, (DuckDuckGo, Startpage or even Bing, to name but a few) - they also tend to carry far fewer and less obtrusive ads.  As for social media, well, it is something I have little time for, other than trying to generate traffic for my sites (although, in reality, despite it being much vaunted as a driver of traffic, Facebook has never really delivered and, since their election jitters, have basically stopped showing my stories to followers - again, I'm not the only one experiencing this).  Besides, everyone should surely know by now that all Facebook is interested in is harvesting your personal data for profit, selling it to advertisers or worse.  Twitter isn't quite as bad on this front, but tends to be full of bots getting spurious (usually right-wing propaganda) hashtags trending.  Boycotting these sites, or at the very least, using them more sparingly, might not seem like much, but if enough people do, then real change can be effected and maybe, just maybe, we can change the web from being the corporate cess pool it increasingly feels like and start steering it back to the sort of community it used to be.