WordPress and Censorship.

I have been on WordPress, and have blogged here ever since Blogger annoyed me enough to abandon my Blogger blog to start one on WordPress. 

I am a believer in free speech. Not because I want to swear at people— I DO swear, in my own barnyard, usually when I step in some ’S’ or see an animal F-ing with the wrong female. But I try to talk civilized around regular people. Nor because I want to talk about S-E-X in front of the public, including other people’s children. I have as dirty a mind as anyone, but honestly, why should I share? Everyone interested probably has a dirty mind of his own, why should I degrade myself to entertain others? You should all think up your OWN impure thoughts.

But we live in a world where anything can be worthy of censorship. Last election cycle in the US, asking the wrong things about the election results made the Facebook gods mad. Lately I got a link taken down because it gave explicit instructions on how to make healthy home-made baby formula. Oh, the horror!

I heard from a writer friend, Jon Del Arroz, about a woman who wrote a book with a ‘black’ main character. This woman, apparently, identifies as ‘white.’ So she got cancelled. 

When you can be censored for anything and everything even the possible color of your skin, real writers stand up for freedom. But, not so loud. We don’t want to be cancelled prematurely if we can help it.

I have some friends who use Substack, including authors Declan Finn and Rachel Nichols. When I went to the Substack site, I was afraid they might be kind of ‘woke,’ but I haven’t heard of anyone getting censored like they are on Facebook or Twitter.

I have never had a post taken down on WordPress. Once, when I wrote a post examining whether Mohammed was a false prophet, WordPress got a complaint which they passed on to me, suggesting I might like to modify my post. I did nothing, they did nothing.

But I don’t trust that will be true forever. After all, Twitter was once free enough that a certain US president had an account there. 

My new Substack newsletter, at the moment, is taking the place of my MailChimp newsletter which I didn’t use often enough. You can subscribe to my newsletter, get the posts there in your email inbox, and read or delete them at your leisure. 

I hope you will at least take a look at my Substack newsletter— it’s at  https://nissaannakindt.substack.com . And think about your own internet presence. Are you at the mercy of one big ‘woke’ corporation? If you are, no matter how compliant you are, you can be cancelled at any moment, for reasons that may not make sense, if you are even given a reason. Expand your reach a little. Be in more places than one. Until you get world famous, the censors won’t trouble to ban you everywhere at once. Dance between the raindrops. It’s a way to be a little more free.

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Follow me on Gab, a free-speech Facebook/Twitter alternative:  https://gab.com/nissalovescats

Why Go on MeWe? #freespeech #censorship

Why go on MeWe, an alternate and more free-speech-oriented social medium? Imagine this scenario.

You have a new book coming out and you are trying get the word out to your fans. You usually use Facebook. But, surprise! You’ve just got suspended from Facebook.

What did you do? You don’t have to do much. You said an ordinary think that half the people in the country might say, or shared a meme with it, or quoted the wrong Bible verse, or you commented the wrong comment on someone else’s post like the above. I have heard of grandmothers getting suspended or banned, even though Facebook is their main way of staying in touch with grandchildren and other relations.

That’s a good reason not to depend on the pro-censorship social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pintarest) and build up something up off the reservation.

My own chosen alternative media are MeWe and Gab. Both have their problems. And one major thing we writers have as a problem is that it’s hard to get some of our fans to follow us to an alternative social media. But Facebook, for one, seems to be out to chase away its user base with their constant attempts to control the conversation about a stolen election, a vaccine that doesn’t work, and about ‘extremism.’

Since many use their MeWe (or Gab) as a backup, I think we need a greater number of contacts on an alternate than on our pro-censorship media accounts.

I have:

431 Facebook friends.

1404 Twitter followers.

194 MeWe contacts.

172 Gab followers.

To get started on MeWe: open an account, using your real name or pen name— whichever you use for writing. Put up a profile picture and a cover photo like on on other social media.

Join groups. Most groups have the problem that people post stuff— often off-topic spam— and then run away. Don’t be like that. Interact with what other people post in a friendly way. Do that for a few days in each group. And when you make your first post, don’t make it a book spam! Instead, ask a question for other people to respond to. Be a group nurturer, not a group spammer.

Here are some groups I am in:

Heinlein’s Rules for Writers (I’m the admin)

Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance

Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans

Christian Speculative Fiction Writers

Space Opera Writers (no promos)

MilSciFi

And you can always use ME for your first MeWe contact: https://mewe.com/i/nissaannakindt

The biggest hint— use MeWe every single day that you use ANY social media. Use MeWe first. Post links to every blog post you make there. Post a little something every time you visit MeWe. Share memes, but also say stuff for yourself— and not all book spam. Have an ‘author persona’ that’s interesting to follow— or weird, or funny, or angry about crooked politicians or anti-Christian elements of society, or anti-semitism.

OK, as working writers does that mean we have to give up Facebook and Twitter in protest of censorship? Or boycott Kindle Direct Publishing even though it’s a major income source? No. We can still make our money off the pro-censorship forces. My own blog posts get posted automatically to my Twitter through a trick of WordPress. (They promise to do the same for Facebook, but that doesn’t work and I’d have to revive my almost-dead FB author page.)

What about you? Are you on MeWe? Please share your link so I can make a contact request to you. If you have other free-speech social media to recommend, let us know about it.

Fighting Censorship: CTRL ALT Revolt.

 

http://www.amazon.com/CTRL-ALT-Revolt-Nick-Cole-ebook/dp/B01BKWKBCS/

Once upon a time, science fiction was the genre for the thinking man. Now, some thoughts are forbidden— thoughtcrimes— at least as far as megapublisher Harper Collins is concerned. In ONE CHAPTER of Nick Cole’s book, a Thinking Machine decides that if humans abort their own young, they might react to the advent of Thinking Machines the same way. It wasn’t a major theme of the book. Just a moment. But it had to be censored. Read more about the story here: http://www.nickcolebooks.com/2016/02/09/banned-by-the-publisher/

But there are some things to Celebrate about this sad situation. Nick Cole turned to self-publishing, and his book is now available to the public both in Kindle and in paperback version. As Stephen King, a left-wing writer once said, if you find that they are banning a certain book, READ THAT BOOK. As trad-publishing becomes more and more centralized in just a handful of companies, we need to become indie readers, and not just suck off the politically correct publishing teat.

Another thing to Celebrate is that it is SO easy to fight back against censorship these days. Even if you are a ‘nobody’ as far as the world is concerned. You can just start Tweeting Nick Cole’s blog post (link above) and sharing it on Facebook and blogging about it. For that matter you can Tweet/share THIS blog post. You don’t need to leave your house or even get dressed. Just do it!

This is a post in the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop. You can find the blog hop here: http://lexacain.blogspot.com/2015/01/celebrate-small-things.html

Do you have a Facebook author page? I have one, here: https://www.facebook.com/nissalovescats/        Please visit sometime! There are kitten pictures. And you can share a link to your author blog and I will like it if possible.