Bonum Certa Men Certa

Why RSS Feeds Are Far Better Than Social Control Media and So-called 'News' Portals

Video download link



Summary: Be in control of who and what you follow; don't let filtering middlemen get in the way because manipulation of minds (some might call it "indoctrination") is simpler when media is consolidated or few giant corporations can (and oftentimes do) control what you can and cannot see/hear/read, either for their financial gain or for owners/partners

THE very broad issue of Web censorship is better understood by those who experienced it not in the access sense ("I cannot access X, Y, and Z") but in the "I'm being censored!" sense. For instance, for over 6 years the EPO has blocked Techrights, which EPO insiders tell us "almost everyone" at the EPO reads regardless (e.g. from home or a mobile phone connected to a mobile network). Inside the Office (or Office network) Office Presidents Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos have both blocked the site, not for containing falsehoods but precisely the opposite. They want workers to only see sponsored falsehoods, i.e. articles that Office management pays for (marketing/PR), not things that expose true corruption at the Office.



A book storeThe video above focuses not on anything EPO related but my experiences in social control media, which over time 'monetises' manipulation. The media giants have always sought to restrict or control who gets a voice and who hasn't a platform (even if the ideas are perfectly legitimate). In the age of social control media they do the same thing 'at scale' (muzzling millions of people and deceiving billions of people).

One way to bypass this growing problem is to directly subscribe to trusted sites. This is where RSS feeds come handy. When it comes to "Planets" which syndicate many RSS feeds in one place, the issues associated with social control media creep in again; whoever controls a "Planet" gets to decide who has and who hasn't a voice/reach/audience. Hence we suggest directly subscribing to sites/blogs, not "Planets". From an efficiency perspective, it's alluring to just plug one's RSS reader to few third-party aggregators, but that would be missing the point. Those third-party aggregators then have tremendous power over dissemination of (mis)information and mischievous agenda occasionally introduces itself, e.g. change of management or so-called 'anti-harassment' teams with creative interpretations of the word "harassment". They don't accept criticism of self-assessment/introspection.

"The media giants have always sought to restrict or control who gets a voice and who hasn't a platform (even if the ideas are perfectly legitimate)."In the next part I'll share a long list of RSS feeds for GNU/Linux and Free software news, reviews, howtos and so on. It has been years since I last published such a list. It takes time to edit it, converting from OPML to HTML syntax. I'll also show a spontaneous example of how I use the RSS feeds.

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