Tag: SJW

Shadowbanned by SJWs

Twitter knows the SJWs can’t win on a level playing field, which is why they are attempting to silence the influential voices of the social media Right:

Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.

Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Among the users complaining of shadowbans are sci-fi author and alt-right figurehead Vox Day, geek culture blogger “Daddy Warpig,” and the popular pro-Trump account Ricky Vaughn. League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as adult actress and anti-censorship activist Mercedes Carrera, have also reported that their tweets are not appearing on the timelines of their followers.

It’s pretty easy to tell when you’re being shadowbanned because your notifications decline dramatically. It’s also easy to see it in the 28-day profile.

Notice how despite the number of tweets being flat and the number of followers increasing, the number of impressions and profile visits dropped significantly at precisely the same time. As it happens, that’s right when I noticed my notifications declining and people began letting me know that they weren’t seeing my tweets.

The reason mentions don’t drop as heavily is because for an account with less than 10,000 followers, many of my mentions are not made in response to my tweets and are therefore not affectived by the shadowban.

But never fear. Alternatives are on the way.

SJWAL: an epiphany

Bryan has been contemplating SJWs Always Lie and a second reading inspired him to a deeper understanding of SJW objectives.

Having twice read this book, and having for a while now been digesting its contents, I’ve come to a sudden and clarifying realization –

SJWs are not out to stop abuse — they are out to obtain a monopoly on it.

This explains why they so fervently and universally seek positions of power and to manipulate procedure to empower themselves. From gutting the right to due process in academia to making it impossible to obtain the identity of your accuser in the workplace, SJWs in academic administration and corporate HR are exercising ill-gotten power to destroy the livelihoods and lives of those who oppose their world view and odious conduct.

The organization they have captured such as Yahoo!, Twitter, and OSS communities are slowly dying deaths of a thousand distractions. Their specialty seems to spin narratives and organize against important developers who won’t carry their ideological water, or who oppose their encroachment. The best engineers in the world are leaving in droves due to maltreatment at the hands of politically-appointed executives and HR departments growing ever more vicious and unrestrained against employees. An SJW HR department, having gained enough momentum, will even strong arm the very CEOs and CTOs for who they are supposed to, at a minimum function.

He’s correct. In fact, they are out to obtain a monopoly on more than abuse, they are out to obtain a monopoly on power through the means of controlling information flow.

This was always true of Wikipedia, but it has become increasingly obvious through the actions of Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, and even Google. They are attempting to police the public’s thoughts through controlling the information accessible to it. It’s a soft form of intellectual totalitarianism imposed through seduction rather than force.

This is why projects like Brave and Big Fork are so vitally important and should be supported by everyone who values freedom, including the freedoms of speech, expression, and thought. And speaking of the latter project, we are approximately 2-3 weeks away from early access. Don’t ask for it now, because if you’re on the list, you already know what’s going on. If you’re not sure, then you’re not on the list and will need to be patient.

Shadowbanned!

Apparently the Twitterthorities have deemed that I, too, am a threat to the innocent minds of the Twittership:

Dharma Warrior ‏@India_empower
@voxday strangely, your tweets don’t show up on my TL. I have to visit your Twitter page to read ur tweets.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
It’s the Twitter shadowban. They’re trying to limit the reach of the Alt Right because we are too appealing.

I feel like Neal Patrick Harris at the end of the execrable Starship Troopers movie.

“They’re afraid… they’re afraid of us!” 

We don’t need to silence them in order to win. We only have to make sure that our voices are heard.

He didn’t read the book

Marc Andreessen discovers that an apology is never the end:

Facebook just lost an important legal fight in India, and now one of its board members has complicated its next steps. The mess started when Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen took to Twitter to criticize India’s decision to block Facebook from offering free but limited Internet access to poor areas. At one point, when a critic likened Andreessen’s position to “Internet colonialism,” he shot back, “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?” recounts the Wall Street Journal. That sentiment drew widespread condemnation and prompted Mark Zuckerberg himself to quickly distance himself from it. And in a series of tweets, Andreessen apologized for his “ill-informed and ill-advised comment.”

On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg used stronger language, describing the tweet as “deeply unsettling” and making clear that the company “strongly” rejects it. The controversy revolves around a program called Free Basics. As CNET explains, an Indian court declared that the concept violated Net neutrality rules because it would have provided free access to the Internet but only to a limited number of services.

It’s amazing how Mark Zuckerberg continues to find ways to be a prissily annoying little punch-face. I don’t care how rich and influential he is; you couldn’t pay me to trade places with him. His spineless, parasitical existence strikes me as an absolute living hell.

Women, science, and sex

The SJWs in science are setting up their favorite damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario for male scientists. If you don’t bring young women along with you on your trips, you’re a damnable sexist. And if you do, you’re a sexual predator.

On a cold evening last March, as researchers descended upon St. Louis, Missouri, for the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA), a dramatic scene unfolded at the rooftop bar of the St. Louis Hilton at the Ballpark, the conference hotel. From here, attendees had spectacular views of the city, including Busch Stadium and the Gateway Arch, but many were riveted by an animated discussion at one table.

Loudly, and apparently without caring who heard her, a research assistant at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City charged that her boss—noted paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond, the museum’s curator of human origins—had “sexually assaulted” her in his hotel room after a meeting the previous September in Florence, Italy. (She requested that her name not appear in this story to protect her privacy.) Over the next several days, as the 1700 conference attendees presented and discussed the latest research, word of the allegations raced through the meeting.

Richmond, who was also at the meeting, has vigorously denied the accusations in a statement to Science and in email responses. (He declined to be interviewed in person or by telephone.) The encounter in the hotel room, he wrote, was “consensual and reciprocal,” adding that “I never sexually assaulted anyone.”

Although the most recent high-profile cases of sexual harassment in science have arisen in astronomy and biology, many researchers say paleoanthropology also has been rife with sexual misconduct for decades. Fieldwork, often in remote places, can throw senior male faculty and young female students together in situations where the rules about appropriate behavior can be stretched to the breaking point. Senior women report years of unwanted sexual attention in the field, at meetings, and on campus. A widely cited anonymous survey of anthropologists and other field scientists, called the SAFE study and published in July 2014 in PLOS ONE, reported that 64% of the 666 respondents had experienced some sort of sexual harassment, from comments to physical contact, while doing fieldwork.

Even a few years ago, the research assistant might not even have aired her complaint, as few women—or men—felt emboldened to speak out about harassment. Of the 139 respondents in the SAFE study who said they experienced unwanted physical contact, only 37 had reported it. Those who remained silent may have feared retaliation. Senior paleoanthropologists control access to field sites and fossils, write letters of recommendation, and might end up as reviewers on papers or grant proposals. “The potential for [senior scientists] to make a phone call and kill a career-making paper feels very real,” says Leslea Hlusko, a paleontologist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley.

It will be interesting to learn if the female scientists entering the field will be sufficient to make up for the male scientists they drive from it. The history of social justice convergence indicates that not only will they fail to make up for it, but that all actual scientific activity will cease once a critical mass is reached.

It’s rather remarkable that the Richmond situation is being portrayed as him sexually assaulting her when she was in his hotel room. I suspect that the charge of sexual assault are nothing more than her trying to cover for the fact that she was more or less cheating on her husband. They were out drinking with their colleagues, all of whom would have known that she went back to his room with him.

Remember, it’s much better to be deemed a sexist than a sexual assailant. Don’t mentor women in person, don’t go out of your way to help them, don’t befriend them (particularly if you find them attractive), and don’t go out to dinner with them alone. If you can’t avoid it due to work, insist on lunch. Definitely don’t go out for drinks or to a club. Don’t hug or kiss them, and don’t let them touch you except to shake your hand. Don’t ever give the SJWs an opening to take you down.

The SJWs would love nothing better than to try to do to me what they’ve done to everyone from Jian Gomeshi to James Frenkel. They can’t, because I never give them even the slightest molehill out of which to make a mountain.

The SF gatekeepers strike again

Both Sarah Hoyt and I have previously written about the ideological gatekeepers in publishing, a situation that has persisted for at least 20 years and has continually gotten worse over time. The SJWs in science fiction deny it,of course, and they’ve been able to get away with doing so because most authors are afraid to talk for fear of their careers being destroyed.

But the ability to publish independently is eliminating that fear:

I launched a book this week and I went Indie with it. Indie means I released it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. I had to. My Publisher, HarperVoyager, refused to publish it because of some of the ideas I wrote about in it. In other words, they were attempting to effectively ban a book because they felt the ideas and concepts I was writing about were dangerous and more importantly, not in keeping with their philosophical ideals. They felt my ideas weren’t socially acceptable and were “guaranteed to lose fifty percent of my audience” as related back to me by my agent. But more importantly… they were “deeply offended”….

apparently advancing the thought that a brand new life form might see
us, humanity, as dangerous because we terminate our young, apparently…
that’s a ThoughtCrime most heinous over at Harper Collins. Even for one
tiny little chapter.

Here’s what happened next. I was not given notes as writers are
typically given during the editorial process. I was told by my agent
that my editor was upset and “deeply offended” that I had even dared
advanced this idea. As though I had no right to have such a thought or
even game the idea within a science fiction universe. I was immediately
removed from the publication schedule which as far as I know is odd and
unprecedented, especially for an author who has had both critical and
commercial success. This, being removed from the production schedule,
happened before my agent had even communicated the editor’s demand that I
immediately change the offending chapter to something more “socially”
(read “progressive”) acceptable. That seemed odd. How could they
possibly have known that I would or would not change it? It seems
reasonable to ask first. And stating that I would lose fifty percent of
my readers if I wrote what I wrote, well, they never seem to mind, or
worry about losing readers, when other writers publish their
progressive-oriented personal agendas on modern morality when they’re on
the “right side” of history regarding the anti-religion, gender and
sexuality issues.

They don’t worry about those issues because they’re
deemed important, especially when they’re ham-handedly jammed into the
framework of the story. They must deem it a public service, especially
if there is a corresponding Social Justice outcry. It’s for the “greater
good” and the critics are just bigots anyways. Isn’t that what they
always say? That anyone else who doesn’t think the way they do is just a
bigot and a phobic of some kind. What a boorish way to dismiss a
counter-viewpoint. Thinking like that made the concentration camps
possible. So, maybe they were so upset by what I’d written they forgot
to be professional? They merely demanded that I rewrite that chapter not
because it was poorly written, or, not supportive of the arc of the
novel. No, they demanded it be struck from the record because they hate
the idea I’d advanced. They demanded it be deleted without discussion.
They felt it was for… the “greater good.” That is censorship, and a
violation of everyone’s right to free speech. They demanded it be so or
else… I wouldn’t be published.

That’s how they threatened a writer with a
signed contract.

I refused.
I am a writer.
No. One. Will Ever. Bully. Me.
Ever.

I’ve had four – FOUR – book contracts either paid off or canceled myself because a gatekeeper inside the publishing house disliked the ideological content of a book that the editor had wanted to sign. In fairness, this hasn’t always been an SJW gatekeeper, as Media Whores was killed by a conservative publishing house after they learned that I was not solely targeting the left-wing media whores, but had written a chapter on Bill O’Reilly.

But in three out of the four cases, it was an SJW playing thought police. Publishing, as an industry, has largely been converged, which is why so much of it is so unreadable these days. They are genuinely less interested in selling books and making money than advancing their social justice cause.

New heights of convergence

Twitter, as per the second law, doubles down on social justice convergence:

To ensure people can continue to express themselves freely and safely on Twitter, we must provide more tools and policies. With hundreds of millions of Tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power. It requires a multi-layered approach where each of our 320 million users has a part to play, as do the community of experts working for safety and free expression.

That’s why we are announcing the formation of the Twitter Trust & Safety Council, a new and foundational part of our strategy to ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.

As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust & Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly. In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organizations including:

  • Feminist Frequency
  • GLAAD
  • The Anti-Defamation League

It’s as if they are literally Hell-bent on self-destruction. This is truly remarkable! I have never been more confident about the Alt Right’s ability to seize the cultural high ground. There are more opportunities presenting themselves than we can possibly address at once.

Convergence at GitHub

We don’t use GitHub; although GitLab does have a Code of Conduct it does not yet have any other signs of SJW infestation. But the convergence at GitHub, which was apparent when its former CEO was forced out in 2014 over a “sexual-harassment scandal by a female employee who quit”, appears to have shifted into a higher gear.

  • Cofounder CEO Chris Wanstrath, with support from the board, is radically changing the company’s culture: Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard.
  • Its once famous remote-employee culture has been rolled back. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. This was one reason why some senior execs departed or were asked to leave, one person close to the company told us.
  • Others tell us that key technical people from the old days like CTO Ted Nyman and third cofounder PJ Hyett are mostly absent from the office and not contributing much technically.
  • GitHub has hit “hypergrowth,” growing from about 300 to nearly 500 employees in less than a year, with over 70 people joining last quarter alone.
  • Some longer-term employees feel like there’s a “culture of fear” where people who don’t support all the changes are being ousted.
  • In addition to previously reported executive departures, Business Insider has learned that Ryan Day, VP of business development; Adam Zimman, senior director of technology partnerships; and Scott Buxton, controller, have all left in the last six months. Buxton departed in January.

And what are all these changes? The usual diversity-and-inclusivity nonsense.

One insider criticized GitHub’s “social impact team,” which is in charge of figuring out how to use the product to tackle social issues, including diversity within the company itself. It’s led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact, who joined GitHub in May after working as a diversity consultant.

While people inside the company approve of the goal to hire a more diverse workforce, some think the team is contributing to the internal cultural battle.

“They are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are ‘white’ which makes things challenging,” this person said.

Sanchez is known for some strong views about diversity. She wrote an article for USA Today shortly before she joined GitHub titled, “More white women does not equal tech diversity.”

At one diversity training talk held at a different company and geared toward people of color, she came on a bit stronger with a point that says, “Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.”

I suspect there is more than a little confusion between correlation and confusion taking place there; Facebook is fully SJW-converged, therefore full SJW convergence equals revenue growth, profit, and massive equity overvaluations.

But, as Mike Cernovich noted, it’s the SJWs at the venture capital firms who are aggressively pushing this by throwing large sums of money at the converged firms and inflating their values. Does that model still work? Probably not now that the Federal Reserve is out of bullets, but we’ll see.

The Third Law at work

Oliver Keyes of the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t like the fact that people have noticed his attempt to enforce SJW thought-policing on the R Foundation:

In which Oliver Keyes Sciences the Shit Out of the Arseholes on his Blog.

Every time you make a web request (with some exceptions we won’t get into here) browsers send along to the new page or server the place you’re coming from. If you click from here to this Wikipedia link, the Wikipedia request logs will show you came from my website.

Similarly, if you come from another site to my website, most of the time I can work out where that other site is. So I took the referers for people leaving comments. Then I turned them into human-readable text, stripped out those referers with fewer than 5 distinct users, and the results look a little something like:

suck it, MRAs

Unsurprisingly, Vox Day’s readers are arseholes. Not just some of them, but all of them: every one of them who managed to painfully peck at their keyboard and hit save was a pillock of the highest calibre, contributing absolutely nothing of value to to the conversation.

But given that it is Mr. Keyes who is speaking of “arseholes”, one should probably consider the source:

In a shocking decision today, the English Wikipedia’s highest volunteer governing body, the Arbitration Committee, has defrocked a Wikimedia Foundation paid contract staff member, Oliver Keyes, for “conduct unbecoming an administrator, and for bringing the project into disrepute”.

This morning, August 12th, the seventh straight unopposed vote to remove the administrator tools from Mr. Keyes was leveled by Scottish arbitrator, AGK. Recall, that Examiner reported several weeks ago that Keyes had uttered some rather crude and offensive remarks on Wikimedia Foundation discussion channels — including a suggestion that another Wikipedia editor should be set on fire, and a recommendation that someone should stab a particular woman in the throat with a pen, then look on “as her attempts to wave for help got increasingly feeble”.

This brings the Third Law of SJW to mind: SJWs always project. Which raises the obvious question: why is this guy still working at the Wikimedia Foundation? Does the Wikimedia Foundation endorse stabbing women in the throat?

An SJW has a point

It’s time to fork OSS. Not just one project, the entire community needs to be forked so we can let the SJWs see if they can develop software by doing nothing but policing one another’s behavior. After all, we’re told that this is the most important part of software development.

Storm Henry ‏@hnrysmth
I see the Gamergate people getting more involved in this CoC debate and I see the dev community members welcoming & signal boosting them

Storm Henry ‏@hnrysmth
I want to make it super clear how messed up this is. When that circus comes to town bad things happen.

Storm Henry ‏@hnrysmth
I also see developers, especially in the PHP
community, who are just openly Gamergaters on their main accounts under
their real names

Storm Henry ‏@hnrysmth
Defo wanna see consequences for the guys
bringing GG into the OSS community. Wanna see some Lanyrd speaker
profiles abruptly stop at 2015.

Storm Henry ‏@hnrysmt
an easy thing you can personally do to help if you’re a developer is unfollow/block the guys who you know are buddying up with gamergate etc

Storm Henry ‏@hnrysmt
precedent needs to be set: you can have full access to the OSS
community, or you can chill with the organised harassment community. not
both

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You’re absolutely right. It’s time to fork the entire OSS community.