SOCIAL MEDIA - 21st CENTURY STASI

Commonly referred to as the Stasi, The Ministry for State Security or State Security Service, was the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever known. It was famous for honey-trapping people, encouraging neighbours to spy on & report each other. It kept meticulous records on all its citizens & it was responsible for many disappearances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

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I came back to the UK from off-grid living and teaching in Spain in 2008.
I wasn't exactly happy about it but the financial crash had been so severe there that my private evening school pupils had decreased until their fees no longer paid the costs of keeping the school open.
I sold my small fruit farm at a good price and headed out of the glaring sun towards a sad grey day in UK.

It was not long before I found myself moving from pillar to post, dragging my desolate dogs and cat around this country, trying to find a community that might suit us.
I didn't know how depressed we all were.
Maybe I didn't want to face the fact that I had made a huge mistake and taken us away from Valhalla, never to be that happy again.

My son recognised that we were all severely down hearted & recommended that I should make use of my computer and open an account on Facebook. I resisted the idea at first. I had heard that it was nothing but a bitchfest.
Eventually he persuaded me and I tentatively began to read posts and articles on that social media platform.
I was surprised how political it was.
I started in 2010 simply by commenting occasionally.

By 2013 I had also tinkered with Twitter but was happier with the format of Facebook and the apparent lack of restrictions.
I could rant on for many paragraphs and add images to illustrate.
In 2017 the atmosphere on social media took a dark turn.
We were no longer free to say what was on our minds.
Gradually people were being censored, punished and ultimately their accounts were closed.
I had a strong sense of foreboding that much of my most precious writing could disappear on a whim of some unknown algorithm or Facebook employee, implementing the "community guidelines" a little too officiously.

That's when I discovered the wonders of blockchain & blogging.
I set about transferring everything I considered important to a Steemit account & when I finished this task I had uploaded more than 600 articles! I was astonished.
Obviously these did not attract much attention but that was not a problem. I viewed my account there as an archive.

Since then I have been through multiple Facebook bans of 30 days duration for some of the weakest reasons imaginable. I had 5,000 friends and 10,000 followers but I was not commenting or writing according to the prescribed narrative.
The noose was tightening.
I began to write more on Steemit and to share the results on Twitter where they were more positively received.
I decided to develop my Twitter following and forget about Facebook in 2018.
Even when the bans expired I did not return there.
It had become cluttered, distracting and had such a strong air of "big brother" that I recoiled from its advancing authoritarianism.

Twitter was a lively place at that time and I loved the inventive names some people used there.
I loved the way the 280 digit restriction forced me to be far more succinct than I have ever needed to be.
I admire the way some old hands created tweets that said so much so neatly.

In 2020 we hit what seemed to be the worst year of our lives.
We had nothing but horror and bad news daily, exacerbated by a totally owned mass media which had no idea how to do journalism any more.
We were lied to every day and they knew that we knew they were doing it.
We declared ourselves Citizen Journalists and started doing our own investigative work.
What did they do?
Declared us to be the purveyor's of "fake news"!

We were told that our opinions were "dangerous" and anti-social. Our research was not "peer-reviewed" and from dubious sources.
Every insult is designed to bite chunks out of our self esteem and discourage us from competing with the newspapers and tell-lie-vision channels.
To add further insult to injury the social media platforms progressively tightened their "community guidelines" until they have now become a steel wall with razor wire. We could better describe them as a Gulag or Stasi controlled environment.

From 2020 we were no longer permitted to say what was on our minds.
No longer welcome if we opposed the prescribed narratives, on ANY issue.
We experienced physical lockdowns and house arrest without ever having committed a crime worthy of this imposition.
We were terrorised by exaggerated reports from Government advisors and it all smacked of a global coup as we witnessed the same diabolical restrictions being forced on every country in the world, with very few exceptions.

We were expected to believe UNQUESTIONINGLY that the world was under attack by a virus.

If we disputed the decisions made "for the greater good" and had the temerity to suggest that there may be other explanations for the mysterious disease and deaths we were censored and punished.

PUNISHED.

Think about this for a moment.

When did using your brain ever merit PUNISHMENT?
When did critical thinking become the harbinger of censorship?
I was reminded of the word heresy and the behaviour of the Roman Catholic Inquisition.

If authorities were so sure of their reasoning, why couldn't they defend it against genuine criticism?
Why did we have to be shut down, shut up and, as was quoted in the Times and by Reuters, TAKEN OUT if we are opposed to vaccination.

Sinister is not a strong enough word for what I was seeing in 2020.

Like many, I battled on throughout 2021. Both Twitter and Facebook shadow-banned my articles and regularly excluded me with their jail time. I shifted my writing to Hive.blog and Discord.
On New Year’s Eve, the final day of 2021 at precisely the same time (8pm) both Facebook and Discord permanently banned me for “violating their community standards” - of course neither of these platforms provided specific charges against me.
Twitter had already destroyed 3 successive accounts on the grounds that I had attempted to avoid their lifetime ban. Hive.blog had been taken over by powerful mysterious accounts which were down-voting everyone I liked. I decided to quietly leave there by simply stopping writing. The account still exists but is nothing more than an archive for my records.

Happy New Year Fran.

This was how 2022 began for me. I took it all as a glaring neon-flashing warning sign.

On January 5th 2022 I joined GETTR and spotted a number of articles being shared there published on Substack. I looked into it and liked what I saw.
I had never heard of Substack before that day.

Nervous that my writing on Hive.blog might be removed, I quickly created copies of the most popular articles I had written and began my efforts here on Substack.
I am impressed by the statistical analysis and the email delivery service. Shadow-banning does not happen. If people do not open my emails, that is their free choice and not because Big Brother has decided that my work is fake news or misinformation.

Looking at the above journey you can see that I have been chased from pillar to post shedding followers all the way. Obviously that is part of the reasoning behind the bans.

Only the compliant are permitted to build an audience uninterrupted.
People like Steve Kirsch, who when asked to consider my research, chose to sneer about my readership of less than 700 souls rather than actually open the evidence I had offered him.

He followed this by banning me from commenting on his Substack for 100 years!

What type of person behaves like that?
A member of the Stasi perhaps?

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My electro-magnetic radiation meter has been registering high continuous pulses for a month now. It is causing constant headaches, hair loss, tooth loss, visual problems, intense itchy skin, swelling in my legs and feet and diarrhoea. I am sleeping more than I am awake. I think it is safe to say that I am a targeted individual and the weapon being used on me is targeted microwaves probably from a satellite or drone.

Yesterday I received word about my friend, Ramola D being detained for 6 days for a mental health assessment. The circumstances were enough to make anyone insane. She looks remarkably unaffected in the interviews she has given since.

You can read/hear all about her experiences here.

Remember what I said about the Stasi in my opening paragraph here?

”It was famous for honey-trapping people, encouraging neighbours to spy on & report each other. It kept meticulous records on all its citizens & it was responsible for many disappearances.”

It is early May of 2022.

I expect far worse to come.