#seek truth

Sometimes you'll notice changes being quietly made to your favorite internet services. Be it a video platform, your search engine of choice, your favorite social network, or wherever you go to buy the things you need or want. Sometimes you'll also see changes in advertisements that were, suspiciously, only relevant to your own unique situation.

You know it in your gut that something definitely changed, but it was only worth mentioning in conversation. "This changed for me, did it happen to you too?" Some of these changes are experienced by everyone all at once, but others are limited to specific groups, and sometimes are rolled out in staggered waves, meaning only some people are affected at different points in time. By the time the change is fully implemented - when every person targeted for this change is affected - it doesn't even matter anymore. The companies making these changes could report them publicly if they wanted to, and all people could do in response is be annoyed by it but eventually accept it and move on. The idea of "boiling the frog" comes to mind.

Our services have been getting worse in some ways, better in others, but there's undoubtedly some changes that are bad for everyone but the companies supplying these internet services (and sometimes, secretly, the governments of various countries around the world).

For me, personally, I've noticed changes to Meta (Facebook), to Google (and its services, Google Maps and YouTube), to ChatGPT, to Twitter - oh sorry, to "X", and many more. These changes are relatively small and are mostly unnoticeable... but I noticed them, just like all the other little changes they've quietly rolled out over the years. However, these changes feel a bit more insidious.

With Meta (Facebook for me), it was that they started suppressing accounts that frequently posted political content. This became most obvious during and after the 2024 election.

With Google, it was how it seems to bury certain content that's relevant to your given search, such as proof - one way or another - that something was happening with our politicians that's valuable knowledge to the public, but apparently isn't relevant enough to be on the very first page (or is simply hidden away entirely). This isn't even mentioning that Google modified its maps service so The Gulf of Mexico now reads The Gulf of America...

With YouTube, it's how it prioritizes click-bait, rage-bait, heavily-one-sided discussions of political topics, rather than pushing the very proof (or at least the very best evidence) that paints the clearest picture these overblown discussions are about. It's clear they're prioritizing watch time and engagement instead of truth.

With ChatGPT, I knew they had to control their generative text AI behind-the-scenes for certain situations (naturally you don't want your service to be generating stuff like "kill yourself," hate speech, lies, etc...), but recently it seemed to change its sources when looking up news online, to the point that it now paints a favorable image of Trump and his people.

And Twitter... sorry, with X... well, I shouldn't even need to explain this one, but I will try. The richest man in the world bought Twitter, changed how some of the back-end works, dramatically changed which voices were suppressed and which ones were heard, allowing hate speech and misinformation to spread freely on the platform, even promoting misinformation directly by retweeting it... there's a lot to it, but just know that Twitter used to be less shitty than it is now. Now it's really bad.

The point I'm making is that a lot of these changes happened around or soon after the 2024 election, and the people controlling these companies showed up to Trumps inauguration. On top of their million dollar donations to Trump, they're also doing work on his behalf to mask what awful things him and his people are doing while simultaneously promoting the things that make them look good. In short, information is becoming less accessible.

All of this, of course, is ignoring what Trump and his people have done to our government-provided websites and services, like removing the constitution and more from whitehouse.gov, how they're scrubbing decades of data from the CDC, etc...

The worst part about all this is I don't know if I could even prove anything anymore. These changes have made it difficult to know what services can be trusted going forward.

These are terrifying times. If the censorship was bad before, it's so much worse now.

Although I'd usually go out and protest with these signs, I've decided not to do it with these ones. I'd practically be an actor or an NPC, repeating the same visual joke over and over. These are my first signs I won't protest with. At least, for now.

Nonetheless, don't forget to fly your flags upside-down, boys and girls and non-binary types. Stay safe, and fuck Trump & Co!

At what age

Do I become vintage ?

When