Corporate censorship of pro-male human-rights websites
Some people seem to think that the censorship directed against Fathers for Life, its affiliated blog, and against my other websites (the latter being community oriented), involves someone taking them down. That needs to be clarified.
Nothing has been taken down. There are two (perhaps more) insidious methods that are being used to censor Fathers for Life and its affiliated blogs, but the problem extends far beyond Fathers for Life (more about that farther down).
- Filtering and blocking such as that being done at the present (and who knows for how long that has been going on) by O2 (a major, European, multinational communications services provider) and by Symantec (makers and vendors of Norton Antivirus and of filtering and blocking software, such as that used in parental control packages), (See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship#Internet )
- Changes in ranking algorithms that search engine providers apply to web sites and the topics of the web pages they cover when indexing websites for their search engines. A high rank results in hits for searches for a given website or web page being shown high on the search-return list, while a low rank will result in the listing being shown much farther down on a search-return list, perhaps so far down that few, if any, people will bother scrolling down far enough on the list to even see the entry on the search-return list.
I don’t know to what extent one influences the other, but the second method is a far more effective and far more pervasive one than the first. I estimate that, for instance, Fathers for Life receives now about one tenth or less of the traffic volume it should be receiving.
Not only Erin Pizzey’s web pages (Erin Pizzey is the founder of the first modern battered women shelter, 1971, in Chiswick, London, England) are being affected by the corporate censorship but all of the website of Fathers for Life is, except for two sub-domains, both containing pages by women activists, Dale O’Leary and Louise Malenfant (deceased, April 2006):
You can see what makes me say so, by comparing the traffic trends for the ten most popular file directories at Fathers for Life.
Some of the evidence that I feel I have for what search engine providers are doing is explained there. Google would be the culprit, as about 90 percent of the visitors coming to Fathers for Life find the website via search engines, and most of those visitors, by far, arrive due to having used Google Search.
There is no way Google will admit what they are doing, as that would involve explaining how they apply their ranking algorithms and what changes they made to them over the years. Therefore all of the evidence I have is circumstantial, nevertheless strongly incriminating.
Consider what the total traffic volume history was for the website when I began using Google Analytics in October 2006, cobbled together from web-counter statistics with the help of MS Excel.
While from October 30 to November 5, 2006, the website had a total of 40,238 page views, the number of page views had increased to 140,698 for the week of December 9 – 15, 2006. Compared to about 75,000 visits a week in October of 2006, presently the website receives in the order of 4,750 visits a week, about 6.3% of what the traffic volume was then. Furthermore, that is even though the volume of the information is far greater, and its quality and format are far better, than they were then.
This web page shows what the traffic-volumes for the most popular web pages at Fathers for Life were around that time, and it has been steadily going downhill since, in little spurts, now and then, at times coinciding with the annual Christmas slump in traffic — which then obscured what was being done, with every one of those actions leaving a lasting effect, all of which added up to the ranking of the website of Fathers for Life being now down in the dumps.
Here is the link to a graph at the bottom of the page, a graph that shows the total numbers of visits and page views at the time to the website of Fathers for Life.
All of that is far too big for me or any of the people aware of it for now. It needs involvement by a search-engine optimization expert.
I am not concerned about any of this because of loss of income. Except for providing free ad-space for a few pro-male authors, I run absolutely no ads for anyone and earn absolutely no income from any of my websites or blogs, not a single cent.
No, my concern is almost exclusively that, as of now, at least about 90 pro-male and pro-family human-rights websites throughout the world are being silenced through corporate censorship in the same fashion the website of Fathers for Life is being silenced.
#Censorship #Family #Feminism #MensIssues #OrganizationalNews
See also:
- More on the 2013 03 15 Hacker Attack on Fathers for Life
- Erin Pizzey popular on Reddit
- Does Reddit help to raise awareness on men’s issues?
- Parenthood needs a village before becoming inhuman
h/t to avoiceformen.com May 5, 2013
Symantec, O2 still censoring/defaming MHRA sites
by John Kimble
In case you weren’t aware, Symantec and UK telecoms company O2 are currently still blocking men’s human rights sites and labelling them as “hate sites”. Previous reports of the cessation of such disgraceful behaviour were based on an erroneous article at The Register and the truth of the matter is that at no time were any of the sites in question unblocked….(More)
Tom Smith commented (via FB message):
I was not talking about an index of mine but about search indexes that search-engine providers construct to enable search engine users to find all web pages they may be looking for, without a search engine having to search the Net. That saves very much time, and that’s why you have such short response times when you make internet searches.
Your search query goes to a file that contains a search index, an index of key-words linked to URLs containing those key-words your search string lists, and those URLs and an excerpt from each page (usually the contents of the meta-field “description” in the HTML code of a given page) or a phrase containing one or more of the words contained in your search string is then listed on the search-return list that is the search engine’s response to your search query.
The question is as to whose web page should be listed first on that list, whose second, and so on. The search engine provider’s ranking algorithms determine the list order, and that is where the rub lies with the second point I mentioned.
Depending on the content of a given web page, it could ranked high, low, anywhere in between, or not at all, which latter would be the case if the page has politically-incorrect content. The assignment of those ranking parameters that the search algorithms employ is being done by humans.
It is quite obvious that those humans employ directives (actually or potentially biased) and also have ways to employ their very own personal biases that are being motivated by who knows what.
No one in the general public knows exactly how that all works, other than knowing the very general principles of the whole process. No one knows or can verify that proper ethical standards are being used in the whole process. All of that is out from under public scrutiny.
The search engine providers are therefore in a position of control. They can control what we get to see of what there is to see.
Now back to the first point I had mentioned, the point concerning filtering and blocking. Filtering and blocking is used at the source of a connection request, such as at my or your PC if we were to employ parental control, and if someone not able to unlock parental-control constraints would attempt to access, say, a porn site or a hate site, or a site that is merely categorized as such.
Anyone wishing to address how such websites could be blocked would a.) join a consortium or have an agent who classifies specific web sites according to their content. Some websites would be classified neutral (harmless for all ages and interests) or fall into the category “porn” or the category “hate”, etc. etc., and b.) sell parental control software that enables specific users using that software to prevent their kids from accessing the websites so categorized.
The same principle is used by corporate users of filtering and blocking software, so as to prevent their employees from accessing porn or hate sites (and of course other categories of websites) during working hours on company equipment. The default condition is “blocked” for any website that falls into any of the objectionable categories.
No one can claim that either parents or corporations are doing anything illegal by employing filtering and blocking, but the classification process is something else. For instance, Fathers for Life and its affiliated blogs are not hate sites, but they are classified as such. They contain information that is far more benign and far less hateful and derogatory but far more educational (although often not politically correct) than virtually all of the stuff that is accessible by kids on TV, either through programs or commercials, and advertising may be what this is all about.
I have absolutely no idea what role advertising plays in the filtering and blocking, and in the search-engine algorithms. I suspect that it does play a role. After all, advertising is the bread and butter of the search-engine providers. It would not surprise me at all to learn that Fathers for Life is being penalized also because it does not display advertising.
Whatever the reasons for the censorship, in my case, the results of about 25 years of hard and continuous work are going down the drain. There is no way at all I would have done any of that work just for my own use, but now I have been effectively silenced. That hurts. It hurts about as much as it did when more than half of our family’s assets went down the drain after I paid them over to my ex-wife and she had squandered all of that within less than three years (while I paid for another twenty for the mortgage I had to take out to give her what she promptly squandered).