The Importance of Alt Tech Platforms – a Success Story Guest Post, January 23, 2020May 11, 2020 Share this: Guest post by gab.com/NeonRevolt It was in February of 2017 when I finally decided I had been deplatformed for the last time. Some of my long term followers will remember those days: I had decided in the years prior that I was going to go all in on being a “thought criminal” and help meme Trump into office. I had humble beginnings, starting my brand/persona/page on Facebook, where I only had a handful of followers and where I would talk about the news and provide commentary, insight, and humor for whoever stumbled across my page. In truth, the page was something of a pressure valve for me; a place where I could speak my mind and not have to mince words, or dance around the PC eggshells so many of us encounter on a daily basis in “polite” society. But there’s a funny thing that happens when you stop caring what others think, and really set out to speak your mind: you find you’re not alone. In short order, I was quickly accepted and promoted by others who were working along the same lines, in the same digital space. People are hungry for good content, and when you’re creating good content, people will share it – including other content creators with big audiences. (And given enough time and growth, you’re eventually able to return the favor to other, smaller creators who are creating their own compelling content). Together we formed a sort of ad-hoc coalition, and by haphazardly and organically working together, we managed to create an alternative network of influence that was a complete alternative to the propagandist spin-factory that is the MSM, all while having a lot more fun! And beyond this, we were all pulling from the same wellspring of content that was driving so much of the news at the time (and which continues to be a force to be reckoned with): Chan-culture. Deep down inside, all of us creators were Anons at heart, and what we were attempting was the creation of a kind of guerrilla media force – whether we realized it at the time or not. It was this magical combinations of content curation, creation, and commentary that was unlike anything before it – and it was having a profound impact on the culture at large. This is, of course, why the powers in Silicon Valley and in Washington could not allow it to continue. I was surprised one morning – though in hindsight, I should have been – to wake up one morning only to find one of the pages in our little “coalition” had been nuked by the Facebook censors. They had posted a meme that had made someone, somewhere shriek for the last time, and now, Zuckerberg’s minions had descended and removed the pagewithout any recourse. All the content, all the followers, all the time invested: it was as though none of it had mattered. And then it happened again. And again. A new tactic emerged to combat this: pages started making “back-up” pages, and periodically reminding their followers to follow their backup pages, so that if the unthinkable ever happened and their pages were nuked from above, the audience would be able to still find an outlet. Usually, anywhere between half, to three-quarters of the audience followed along. But eventually, those pages got nuked, too. Depending on if the users had registered with new emails, new browsers, and VPNs, it was usually just a matter of time before the Zuckerbots sniffed the ban-evading users out once more, and simply banned them again. The formula at the time generally followed the three-strikes rule. If you received three content warnings within a certain span of time, you were shut down. What caused these warnings? Why, it was simply down to randos online reporting you for “offensive” content – like rats going to the secret police because you had whispered something out-of line with the Party leadership. In other words, if some blue-haired, fish-mouthed, bowl-cut, hand-wringing, gender confused individual found themselves unable to cope with the amount of spice in a meme you posted, they could complain to Facebook Corporate whereupon your meme was promptly transferred to some wage-slave stuck in a closet in Bangalore who had the unilateral power to determine if you were in violation of “community standards.” If you were lucky, you were shown the offending post and given a reason why it was removed. More often than not, however, you weren’t even told what the offendingcontent was; just that something you had posted had broken a rule somewhere, at some point, and if you kept breaking the rules, you’d be kicked from the platform. And up until that point, I myself had received two such “content warnings.” My page, with its content landing squarely and unapologetically on the dissident Right side of things, was a prime target for angry leftists who started to mass-report anything and everything I was posting. In essence, it didn’t matter if my posts actually violated any rules or not. The Leftists had an ideological ally in the censors, and their goal was to get as many strikes against pages like mine, in as little time as possible, so as to force us “thought criminals” off the platform entirely, and silence our voices. It was only a matter of time before I got that third strike, because when your yardstick for acceptable content is, for all intents and purposes, whether someone else is “offended” by what you posted – you’re always, inevitably going to offend someone, somewhere onplanet earth. So I knew I needed to start branching out.I immediately made a back-up page on Facebook, but I wasn’t content with this. If they were able to nuke my original page, they’d eventually nuke the others – as I was already seeing happen to some of the like-minded pages I had enjoyed up until they were banished to the eternal recycling bin in the sky. I started exploring other platforms and began mirroring my content to them. I needed to find a good fit, and I figured if the content was there, the people would eventually come.There was MeWe, Minds, Twitter (from which I’ve also been banned twice – with no reason given either time) and… you guessed it: Gab. I had been an early supporter of Gab from the time it had first rolled out, but now I was going to use it to post all my Neon Revolt content and was determined to bring my oldfollowers to this relatively new platform.It didn’t happen overnight. I went from over 10,000 followers on Facebook (and with shares, my posts would routinely reach hundreds of thousands of individuals) to just 400on Gab, with relatively minimal interaction at first (especially when compared to what I had experienced on Facebook). Not exactly an inspiring number – but remember, Gab was only about a year old at the time. Still very young.So I’ll admit; at first, I went back to where my audience was: Facebook. I figured I could tough it out, word things carefully, and generally evade the censors. And for a while, this strategy actually worked. But then came the rate-limiting. My posts went from hundreds of thousands of views, to ZERO, overnight. These posts didn’t violate any standards, to be clear – but Facebook had decided that no one should see them; not even my most dedicated readers. If they wanted to see them now, they would have to manually come to my page, because the content was no longer propagating to their feeds. Since I hadn’t been breaking any rules, and Facebook had no grounds to ban me, instead they opted to effectively shadowban me. That kind of tactic is supposed to crush your spirits and make you feel like you’re shouting into the void, where no one can hear you, until you just give up and go away.For someone like me, it just made me angry. I fought back by crossposting content to my backup page, and again on these other backup sites…And it’s important to note that it was around this time I started posting about an individual you may or may not have heard of… someone by the name of “QAnon.” I didn’t realize it at that time, but this is what finally triggered the unthinkable for me. I booted up my page one day, only to find I had been forcibly logged out of Facebook. When I logged back in, I had a pile of “violations” sitting for me (many of them empty, mind you), and I was informed that my page, my profile, my backup page (which they had evidently tracked down), and everything with it had been completely wiped from theFacebook platform. All of it, almost two year’s worth of content and interactions, had been nuked in an instant. I was pissed. But I needed to play this smart.I waited a few days and watched as some of my favorite pages poured out the F’s for their fallen homie.And then, I made a new page with a slightly altered name – but for a different purpose entirely. I wasn’t going to stay here. I just needed to be recognized by a handful of dedicated readers before I made my move. I reminded my readers (who quickly found me again, thanks in part to these other still surviving pages that realized I was back) that I had off-site backups, and that I was no longer going to be posting on Facebook any more. Over the course of a few days, I started my own site at NeonRevolt.com, where I, and I alone, controlled the rules and could post anything I wanted without fear of censorship.And out of the handful of social media platforms I had tried, I decided I liked Gab the best – with its Free Speech guarantee and 3000 character limit – and that would be where I would post the majority of my content from then on. How many would follow would yet to be seen, but I had made the decision that I was not so much a thought criminal any more, as much as I would be a digital pioneer. My success on these platforms would be determined not by the whims of some unelected tech oligarch sitting pretty in Silicon Valley, but by my own efforts and determination. I hadmade the shift to the “builder” mindset, and I would spend every day for the next two years laying digital “bricks,” one on top of the other. Little did I realize how important this would become in the coming years. As I mentionedearlier, so many of us were Anons operating on the Chans at the time – which had themselves become a force to be reckoned with during Trump’s election – with Trump himself posting to /pol/ on at least one occasion that we can verify (which has since gone down in Chan history, in case you’re not aware: https://qmap.pub/read/2567). And anyone who was present there at the time can tell you that wave after wave of insiders kept appearing: from FBIAnon, to MegaAnon, and more, /pol/ was quickly becoming asemi-secure way for anonymous insiders to provide important disclosures to the public. As someone immersed in Chan culture, I was following many of these as they happened. And then came QAnon. Q is, to date, the biggest insider account to ever appear on the Chans, having first appeared on /pol/, then moving to his own boards on 8chan, and in just the past few days, on 8Kun. I’ve been following him from the earliest days in 2017, when I began posting about his intel drops on my little Facebook page for the simple reason that… they interested me!That same Facebook page would soon be censored by the powers-that-be. Where before I had simply posted memes, commentary, and news, I quickly became immersed in the “Qdrops” – the posts the Q left in his wake full of intel – even if I wasn’t always quite able to locate the threads on time before they expired, or understand the entire content of the drops. I was hooked early on, and wanted to share with my audience, my readers, and my pals. The Chans themselves are notoriously difficult to navigate, and extracting good info from them can be a challenging task at times. Luckily, this is what I specialized in. And if people had someone to guide them, to help point them in the right direction – especially when such high level information was being dropped – that has considerable value for so many, who may otherwise lack the time or expertise to navigate such a forum. And this is where Gab comes back into the picture, because while my articles, which are generally about as long as this one you’re reading right now (though a bit more complex, in terms of raw information being presented) are great in and of themselves, Gab provides a unique set of advantages and tools found nowhere else on planet earth – especially for a “thought criminal” like myself. See, what’s just as valuable as content – if not MORE valuable – are networks. The enemies of humanity know this, and this is why they use underhanded tactics likeshadowbanning, and outright censorship to try and induce network decay in their ideological foes – precisely because they do not want “alternative influence networks” springing up on their platforms, challenging their political and cultural hegemony. This is now doubly true in the “post-Trump” era, and as Gab News covered recently, this now even extends to Trump himself – with Twitter altering the fundamental functionality of their platform to make sure that no one can like, share, or reply to “offensive” content shared by world leaders. Heck, it’s why Twitter also just made the decision to ban all political advertising on their platform – which we all know really means that they’re only going to give a platform to the radical Left while pretending to remain “impartial.”And within the broader QAnon community, I’ve seen rampant censorship and deplatforming for the longest time now. One particularly tenacious QAnon follower, who goes by the name @IncarnatedET on Gab, has had over 13 different accounts banned on Twitter now, and all for posting perfectly fine, clean, standard, inoffensive Q-related content. This censorship is intentional, because the censors at Twitter know that if they can knockout enough ““nodes” in the network, they can induce network decay, and eventually cause networkcollapse. But what most people fail to grasp here is that the goal isn’t total censorship. It’s about keeping you in a perpetually weakened posture and playing from a defensiveposition – instead of going on the offense.And I don’t even care if you follow Q or not; whether you think he’s a LARP or not. These tactics are being leveraged by these Big Tech companies against anyone to theRight of Marx; anyone who doesn’t toe the ever-shifting “Progressive” Party line I decided a long time ago that I wanted to support tech companies that actually supported me, as a human being, and my fundamental right to Free Speech. It didn’t matter if they agreed with me or not; I wasn’t looking for corporate endorsement. I just needed a level playing field.So I started building on Gab, where to date, I’ve amassed over 23,000 readers and, I think it’s safe to say, have become one of the most followed users on the site.My Great Awakening group here on Gab, which is dedicated to researching topics related to QAnon, has one of the most active and engaged communities on the entire site, withhundreds of posts from thousands of users flowing across it 24 hours a day. Gab itself has become more vital, more profitable, and more enriched because of the Qcommunity making use of the tools provided by Gab. And this is what you get when you have a team who offers a level playing field to EVERYONE, on the basis of protecting Free Speech. There’s actually nothing unique about what I’m doing (other than I put in the work every single day). These tools are available to everyone. And I know for a FACT that some in Gab’s administration do not personally agree withsome of the things I say. They may think Q is a LARP or think it’s just one big “conspiracy” or whatever. And that is ABSOLUTELY fine! Why? Because they ultimately recognize my right, and my readers’ right, to Free Speech, and they’re willing to protect it – even if they don’t endorse or agree with it. That’s the imperative that comes with Free Speech: you protect all legally protected speech, because if you don’t, it becomes a slippery slope and before you know it, you’recutting out people’s tongues, and digitally depersoning people like @Jack and Zuckerberg are doing every single day around the world. This has inadvertently made Gab one of the most important sites for curated QAnonrelated content in the world, and, I believe, the reason Gab was systematically deplatformed over a year ago. But thanks to the persistence of Andrew Torba and the entire team at Gab, Gab came back online, more resilient than ever. And thanks to their perpetual innovations and iterations, if worst ever came to worst again, I could simply spin up a version of the Gab source code and migrate all that data to a new server in the course of a day or so. Gab has become anti-fragile as a result of the attack.8chan, which you’ll recall was the home of QAnon, was also systematically deplatformed following a series of attacks wherein shooters posted “manifestos” to 8chan, prompting service providers to cut ties to them virtually overnight.8chan is currently showing signs of live again, having been reincarnated as 8kun – a Japanese play on words – though it’s taken considerably more time and effort for that to appear in any form online – a testament to Torba and Team’s persistence. But my opinion is that it’s no coincidence that the two biggest Q-related sites were both systematically targeted by the Deep State. And every day, this network and its influence grows and expands. Why? Because they can’t control us. I believe that Gab is playing an important role in history – even if some don’t fully realize it yet. Just by simply offering a truly neutral platform – that alone offers advantages seenalmost nowhere else online today. And could it be any other way for a truly Free Speech platform? If Hong Kong protesters one day all decided to leverage Gab, or if the Gilet Jaune in France all moved to Gab – Gab would become, overnight, one of the most important tools for those brave protesters. As it stands, it has the QAnon community; a community which has shown itself to be brilliant, doggedly persistent, and dedicated above all else. There’s no doubt in my mindthat this community is changing the course of history.And there’s no better proof of this than the recent book I published entitled Revolution Q: The Story of QAnon and the 2nd American Revolution. The goal of the book was to helpthe masses understand this thing we call QAnon, while also providing valuable information for those who are already on-board, who have been following along. It was no easy task, and ended taking me almost 500 pages (on top of the 500 articles I’ve already written) to communicate all I felt was necessary for this volume. And the end result was a work so provocative, so startling, that the only way it could be published right now was via the relatively new means of crowdfunding. And the only way to gain crowdfunding success is if you can leverage a pre-existing network of individuals who will answer the call for support. Turns out, I had been building just that, on Gab, every day for the past several years. Andwhen I finally put out the call, they answered. Oh boy, did they answer. The end result of it all was a massive campaign success over on Indiegogo, with over 5,000 books going out to backers as their rewards. The success of this book is, in part, because Gab allowed me to create an Alternative Influence Network. And now that influence gets to step out, into the wider world, and affect the narrative in ways that, frankly, those entrenched in the media and in seats of power, would have liked to prevent (if for no other reason than they don’t like competition). But again, Gab just offered a level playing field. Anyone could have used the tools Gab offered. But right now, the simple fact of the matter is I am where I am today, because I put the work in yesterday. I’m often shocked by how “big name” personalities who have had success in, for instance, the Twitter space, fail on Gab. But in truth, it’s their own fault. They show up expecting great fanfare and are disappointed when they don’t immediately get it. Almost inevitably, they give up and return to the digital ghetto that is Twitter, because at least there, they get the attention they so desperately crave. See, to these types, they don’t see the work itself as important and noteworthy. They seethe attention as the be-all-end-all (which should tell you something about them and their goals).This is absolutely the wrong mindset to have.Gab is still a relatively young social network, all things considered, and if you want to have success on Gab, you absolutely need to approach it with a long-term buildermentality. Maybe the day will come when a personality can just hop on here and have a billion followers just for showing up, but that hasn’t happened yet (and if I had to guess, will only happen after Trump arrives). No, the formula for success on Gab is simple, actually: Offer value. Offer it consistently, every day, multiple times a day.Repeatedly tell your followers on other platforms to follow you on Gab. They need to change their use patterns, too, and once they do, it becomes a lot of fun! Stand out (primarily through the content you offer – but also through things like branding). Post exclusively on Gab (even though it may “hurt” somewhat to give up the audience you may have on other platforms). Interact with the followers you do have here – especially those all-important first followers. (Don’t tell them to show up if you never plan on interacting with them. They’re people, not a currency for you to acquire). Interact with other big pages – but again, on a human level. Repost, like, etc. When you give, you receive. But don’t farm them out like a famewhore. This has to be genuine, organic, and savvy; otherwise, you dilute your own messaging. Repeat this every day – for years, if necessary. Oh, and buy Gab Pro when you get the chance. This will enable you to do things like make groups and post longer videos – as well as support the site which supports you. (I recently upgraded to the Lifetime membership, myself). Realize there’s no easy substitute for consistency, hard work, and genuine interaction with other people. And ultimately, have fun with it, otherwise you’ll burn out. Gab can be tremendous fun, and that’s honestly what keeps me going some days. Sure, you may have had a trillion followers on Twitter at one point. So what? None of that matters now, because @Jack can shove you down a memoryhole any time he wants to, where you’ll never be seen or heard from again. Besides, for all you know, he might have been messing with your follows/likes/comments and showing you fake data to make you think you’re doing better than you actually were. By fully embracing Gab and the tools it offered, I was able to help foster a community here – one of the most engaged and passionate communities I have ever seen – and buildsomething that now steps out of the online world, and into the real world space, where it can now serve as a counter to all the entrenched lunatics on the Left, and offer people profound explanations for the conflicts and turmoil they see swirling around them. See, the Radical, Lunatic Left wants you to feel alone at the end of the day. They want you isolated, cut off, sad, desperate, depressed, and whittling away the hours on their mobile apps, so they can show you ads, sell your data, and generally treat you like a cog in a big censorship and surveillance machine. Some may be surprised here to learn that Facebook originally started out as a Pentagon project called “LifeLog” and that the storyof Mark Zuckerberg coding it up in his dorm room is a fabrication. Likewise, Twitter’s codename was “Deepdream.” Both of these are Deep State projects with the goal of totalsurveillance and control – whereas Gab, with its open code and protocols, is the exact opposite – dedicated to serving the user, not controlling, monetizing, or surveilling them. And that is what fundamentally makes Gab so important. There’s nothing quite like it on the internet today, and its literally one of the last bastions of Free Speech online. It’s also empowering users by innovating every day, because when networks of like-minded users are empowered, it enables them to band together and change the world. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of the dystopic systems of control being pushed by the Bolshevik turds floating in Silicon Valley bowl. I’m sick of allowing these frauds to control the national conversation with impunity. You want to hit them where it hurts?Hit them in the wallet by opting out entirely and building outside of their territory. You’re free men and women. You’re pioneers. Your destiny is determined by one thing: your determination. So never waver in standing for freedom, because the only alternative is to live as a peasant in their digital fiefdom. And do it while you still can, because right now, these unelected Tech Oligarchs are working on building the systems that they hope to control future generations with; with Zuckerberg now talking openly about things like brain chips. It may sound like science-fiction, but it’s not. “Thought criminal” just became literal. Because do you really want the likes of Zuckerberg poking around your gray matter? Supporting Free Speech and traditional American values is more important than ever, and supporting the companies that enshrine these values as fundamental is the only way we can win moving forward. If we don’t support people like Torba and sites like Gab now, there will be no choice left in the future; just one big system of control run by the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter,all leveraging whatever mad science some leftover CIA spook cooked up in a DARPA lab somewhere. All of which is to say… Get On Gab! And while you’re at it, maybe consider picking up a copy of my book, Revolution Q. -@NEONREVOLT Free Speech neonrevolt
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