Can an election campaign succeed without social media accounts?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
If an election campaign can't succeed without a social media account then democracy is already dead. Long live artificial intelligence. The algorithms will herd us around like sheep. Those are the same algorithms that co-opted British schoolgirl Molly Russell to commit suicide. Where are the algorithms taking your vote and is it a place you would want to go?
After I started publishing blogs about the Debian suicide cluster, whereby a number of tech workers have taken their own lives, people have noticed that some social media networks are graylisting links to my blog and refusing to let people share these factual articles. Coincidentally, many of the social media companies and Google are built with software created by the victims. The volunteers who took their own lives worked on this software, without payment, while owners and managers in Silicon Valley became very rich.
None of my blogs contain any details about suicide methods, personal details about the victims or any other inappropriate content. The blogs examine the workload and the social context around these deaths. Elon Musk promised he was going to make Twitter completely free of censorship. One of the first things that Musk did after acquiring Twitter was to ban the very journalists who published critical commentary about him. We can see that over $120,000 of money that may come from Google was used to stop me publishing critical commentary about the suicide cluster on sites related to Debian.
Social media companies were very outspoken about censoring the former US President Donald Trump. In most cases, social media networks do not tell the community when they are censoring certain people and web sites. It is all done secretly using graylists. If you share a link to a blog about inconvenient subjects, it will look like your post is successful but your followers will not see that post in the aggregated feeds from all the people they follow. They will only see your more controversial posts when they come to your personal page on the platform. This eliminates the possibility that certain topics can achieve a viral spread on social media.
Nonetheless, the world worked before the creation of social media. If you really want an expert from the Irish diaspora to work for you in this district, please consider some of the following actions that are more powerful than a share on social media:
- Print some copies of my brochure and distribute it in your your workplace, school, shopping centers, public transport and anywhere else
- Organize a meeting to review candidate profiles with your neighbours and friends
- Send me an email invitation about any hustings or town hall events on any topics in your community
- Use an RSS feed reader to receive updates from my blog
- Block out time in your calendar for voting on 7 June. Create a reminder.
- Agree to meet your friends or neighbors on 7 June and vote together
If you do want to share my campaign on social media then please feel free to do so. I'm not telling anybody else to stop using social media. But if you really want change, you need to go the extra mile to have discussions about this campaign.
Have a look at the words of Victoria's former transport minister Alan Brown. He notes that the Government felt the pressure of action in the community. They abandoned plans to close our railway line. We can bring that power to save the Galway-Sligo railway from total destruction. Governments are not afraid of social media. A like on social media doesn't have anywhere near the same power as a queue at the ballot box. If you want to make change, you need to get your friends out to vote and replace the people in charge. █