After realizing Myspace was more then a fad, I decided to check it out and was amazed to find so many long lost friends just a click away. I immediately created an account to begin re-establishing contact with these old friends. I even convinced other people I knew to sign up with out even giving it a second thought.
I helped my friend Lorenzo establish a Myspace page for his podcast The Psychedelic Salon and we were excited to see it take off so quickly with hundreds of friends in just a few weeks. Then one day I went to update the show notes to his blog and the account was not available. I thought no biggie, a technical problem. Then noticed the show was missing from my personal pages friends list. After a little more research I realized we had been deleted and Myspace did not even have the courtesy to send us an email explaining why. I sent Myspace a couple of emails and received in return a couple of generic notices that the page had been deleted, it could not be restored and to find out why it was deleted read the user agreement. Which I did and to the best of my comprehension, we did not breech any of the terms set forth in the "user agreement" Then why were we deleted? That can be answered by asking the following questions.
Who is Myspace?
Myspace is owned by Fox Interactive Media \ Fox News Corporation. Thereby owned by Rupert Murdoch, the major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp). He is a long-time supporter of the Republican Party and friend of George W. Bush. Murdoch also strongly supported George W. Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. His publications worldwide tend to adopt conservative views. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. He is famous for monopolizing news and information outlets.
Myspace censorship
Myspace admittedly has only 300 total employees, only portion of which administrate over 200 million accounts which is growing at the rate of 230,000 new accounts per day (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace). It is evident that Myspace commonly deletes pages that do not fit with in their "paradigm" with out any intelligent consideration what so ever. They have a strict shoot first policy and don't bother asking questions at all. Myspace membership is a "privilege" not a right. The old wisdom that nothing is free, definatly applies to Myspace. You pay by allowing them to basically program your mind. They feed you their version of reality and since it comes in the guise of social networking commminty where everyone is equaly free to exchange ideas and information. Most of us, fall for it.
Brad Greenspan, whose company created Myspace in 2003 wrote:
"The shocking mass censorship of the over 100 million Myspace users that News Corp and Myspace are beginning to aggressively engage in today is simply evil behavior.. "When we started Myspace in 2003, we empowered users by giving them full control over their profile pages. Myspace has flourished by partnering with users and protecting their rights to express themselves and have freedom of choice on their profile page. News Corp’s moves to destroy and limit the freedom Myspace users have enjoyed is analogous to the strategies a dictator would employ after seizing control of a previously free nation.”
Greenspan continued, “If News Corp is able to continue its censorship and mass gagging techniques today, then tomorrow it should surprise no one when News Corp deletes mentions of competitive news organizations to their own Fox News by preventing users from typing CNN.com or ABCNEWS.com in their Myspace blogs. Or when Myspace wants to promote the music artists on its own label, it will simply block users from talking about or promoting similar artists.” (Source: censorspace.com)
What is Myspace, really?
This is the scariest question of all. Myspace is the largest private opt-in database on the planet. We willingly register ourselves, our thoughts, ideas and interests. We upload photos of ourselves, our children and families. We link ourselves to our friends, family, organizations, telling where we live, our relationship status, religion, age, sexual preference, employment, which schools we attended, etc. We feed all of this into the biggest computer networked propaganda machine ever developed all in the name of social networking. A machine owned and operated by friend and supporter of G.W. Bush and his "war on terror" All ready there are numerous reports extreme as people going to jail, because of the contents of their Myspace page? What will be next?
A few good sites dedicated to the Myspace censorship problem.
http://www.civic.moveon.org/pdf/myspace/Myspace censors Presidential candidate Ron Paul - see informeddissent.com
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