The War on Free Software Reporters - Part II - Antisocial Mobs
IN this relatively short series we wish to discuss how various GNU/Linux bloggers got "canceled" over the years. We know them, we saw what happened to them, but we'd rather not name them. It's not the names that matter but the modus operandi.
In Part I ("Why Techrights Cannot be Censored (and Won't be Censored)") we focused on DDoS attacks, i.e. on technical attacks, not social or legal attacks.
Today we focus on social methods, social engineering, and of course social control media.
Some people who used to run sites about GNU/Linux got "canceled" and vanished. In 2020 I identified some of the culprits, which are antisocial despite their label. It's not just social control media, which is low quality and where it is too easy to take things out of context. Later in the same year I started making videos every day because I realised videos, unlike text, are a bit harder to take out of context or isolate from subtle cues, nuance, body language, tone and so on.
There are also social engineering-type attacks and we covered some of them before. Microsoft is an "expert" at those. In my case, consider this meme about how I feel about it.
As a reminder, Microsoft kept chasing me both online and offline. In fact, after they contacted my university and phoned my employer Bill Gates bribed them and then they tried to 'bribe' my webhost, they sent trolls to IRC etc. They just won't leave me alone; anything like blog comments, some social control networks and even our own IRC network would be leveraged to smear, intimidate, misrepresent, and incite.
What company other than Microsoft behaves like this??? █