You may have noticed the refreshing absence of ads on these pages of late. If not, maybe the big red banner clued you in.
It's not complicated. Great Googlymoogly has it in for opednews, for reasons probably only their algorithm knows for sure.
Malwarebytes, so far a widely trusted app that has been running on my system for years, started out as an antivirus in the days when the Big 2 OS providers were pretending not to know the meaning of "firewall"; they just sent me a link to their website, prominently listing an article called "How to Remove Google From Your Life"
It reads like the usual techie puff-piece, but what's interesting is that it appears at all. Certainly their market at least overlaps with the techus giganticus?
Troubling thought: maybe they, too, have been absorbed...
But who cares? I do. I'm delighted that the ads are disappearing! But appalled that voices are being capriciously silenced because some program found some forbidden key word on some web page. And if that's not why, the implications are much worse.
The surveillance capitalist monster has been treating opednews shabbily after receiving nothing but benefit from this site. And the ads they used to put on these pages were disgusting. I got online from my cellphone one evening, only to find an image of a man's photo-shop-enhanced beer-gut taking up fully half the tiny screen. And it wouldn't go away when I scrolled, I had to read around this garbage!
So it's personal: googlymoogly has been sucking attention from my heartfelt sentences for years with these obscene distractions, and I never knew until I went to the site from a device that it didn't automatically sign in.
And this is a far-reaching problem. I work for a county public school system as recording secretary for several school boards, as well as a couple of municipalities. Everybody is on Drive accounts. Public records, legal offices, state agencies, public schools. The school buildings are piled high with chromebook laptops for the kids to do their homework on, and take all their tests, and sign up for lunch.
How is a person supposed to maintain document integrity when these private corporations are hoovering every scintilla of information out of every simplest mouse-click and keystroke? They own the desk, the blackboard; when will they get around to the water fountain and the bathroom? Cause they both leak, and contain PFAS "forever chemicals." And while they're at it, when will be be able to call the doctor, and actually speak to a human being with some medical education, instead of having to slog through intermediaries just to get an appointment this year?
But there's no profit in that.