The tech giants are about to experience The Streisand Effect. You might remember the big star suing someone for posting coastal California pictures that included her mansion.
In 2003, Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for distributing aerial pictures of her mansion in Malibu. But Adelman was no paparazzo—he operated the California Coastal Records Project, a resource providing more than 12,000 pictures of the California coast for scientists and researchers to use to study coastal erosion. At the time Streisand sued Adelman for $50 million, the picture in question had been accessed a whopping total of six times—twice by Streisand’s lawyers. Nonetheless, her lawsuit stated that the photos explicitly showed people how to gain access to her private residence.
Of course, news outlets around the world reported on Streisand’s outrage, and before long, the photo on Adelman’s website (below) had received well over a million views. The photo was also picked up by the Associated Press and was reprinted countless times.
She and her lawyers lost the suit, but far more significantly, her stupid attempt to preserve privacy had the opposite effect IN THE EXTREME.
Twitter, Google, Facebook and a couple others cooked up a plan to take down a free speech competitor GAB.
Gab’s founder, CEO and staff took the high road, ignoring the assault until after they had helped law enforcement catch and build a case that would keep a vicious criminal out of polite society.
Those stupid smug puppies have no idea what they started. Early this year they gathered in San Francisco (now the human-excrement-on-the-sidewalks capital of the world) to brainstorm and scheme on how they could control the 2018 election. Forging ahead, they eliminated thousands of popular accounts and eliminated links to others who disagreed with their new-world-order, socialist, satanist, elitist dreams.
GAB is a social media platform a little, tiny bit like Twitter. People share thoughts, photos, links to important events, commentary and whatever else they want to share with the World. The differences, however, are HUGE. Instead of secret controls, GAB is open source… This means any geek anywhere in the world can parse through the programs that run the GAB platform to see and expose to the world anything untoward the developers put in their programs.
Obviously a model Big Tech eschews. They sure as heck don’t want you knowing what they do with the information you give them.
So they tried to take GAB down. They eliminated hosting for Gab’s website. They even tried to steal the domain itself.
In a battle of wits between corrupt geeks and honorable ones, the latter smokes the former. Ugly just doesn’t attract the best partners… and the “tech giants” are about as ugly as anything in today’s world.
I encourage you to visit GAB. It will take time to find and establish new raltionships, much as any other social media platform. However, in this case it will be worth it both long run and short run.
See you there.
I am, by the way, known to the GAB universe as “Bitterroot Bugler”. Say “Hi”.