• FluTrackers.com Inc. does not provide medical advice. Information on this web site is collected from various internet resources, and the FluTrackers board of directors makes no warranty to the safety, efficacy, correctness or completeness of the information posted on this site by any author or poster. The information collated here is for instructional and/or discussion purposes only and is NOT intended to diagnose or treat any disease, illness, or other medical condition. Every individual reader or poster should seek advice from their personal physician/healthcare practitioner before considering or using any interventions that are discussed on this website. By continuing to access this website you agree to consult your personal physican before using any interventions posted on this website, and you agree to hold harmless FluTrackers.com Inc., the board of directors, the members, and all authors and posters for any effects from use of any medication, supplement, vitamin or other substance, device, intervention, etc. mentioned in posts on this website, or other internet venues referenced in posts on this website.
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FluTrackers withdraws from Twitter - September 16, 2020 - Updated Nov. 2024

sharon sanders

sharon sanders

Editor-in-Chief & President
FluTrackers withdraws from Twitter.

Upon careful consideration FluTrackers is withdrawing from Twitter for the following reasons:

1) The climate on Twitter has significantly changed since 2009. It was once a mostly benign social media platform. Now the platform is a "Flame War" site. FluTrackers does not engage in these types of sites.There are copious amounts of negative dialogue on Twitter which could be characterized as extreme bashing. We have never allowed bashing on FluTrackers. We insist all conversation is civil. We respect human dignity - even when we disagree . In addition, I have seen instances where many participants on Twitter will pursue someone in real life: try to ruin them financially, get them fired, etc. I have seen this comment more than once: "Twitter, you know what to do", as a rallying cry to identify someone from a video posted on the site. Some of these people reported receiving death threats after being outed.

2) The amount of censorship on the Twitter site, which was originally marketed as a general platform for a free exchange of ideas on many topics, has exponentially increased. It appears that accounts are suspended for posting a tweet that is considered "fake news" by Twitter censors. It appears Twitter is a rubber stamp of some official government and main stream media accounts. Any tweet that does not conform appears to put the account at risk.

3) Moving forward we do not want to be worried about any of our tweets. We are in a pandemic and there is no time for any foolishness.


We want to thank all of our Twitter followers. Please bookmark our site and click on LATEST POSTS a couple times a day. If you would like to tweet any post you can use the "Tweet" button on the left side in each post.

Always use at least two sources for news. Be critical of everything. Use your common sense.

We are with you.
 
so, which of 1.),2.),3.) are we improving by leaving twitter ?

we could also block users, Ithis seems to be common recently

e.g. we're blocked by Daszak and ersaflavinkins, presumably because each one thinks, we were
in the other camp ;-)

they should change twitter into a forum
H5N1 was better than COVID , forum-wise
best was USENET before 2003, should be revived

are we still on facebook
 
gsgs said:
so, which of 1.),2.),3.) are we improving by leaving twitter ?

we could also block users, Ithis seems to be common recently

e.g. we're blocked by Daszak and ersaflavinkins, presumably because each one thinks, we were
in the other camp ;-)

they should change twitter into a forum
H5N1 was better than COVID , forum-wise
best was USENET before 2003, should be revived

are we still on facebook
Click to expand...

Just to clarify - gsgs is speaking about his own personal account being blocked.

The FluTrackers is only blocked by HealthMap. Always follow the $.

Also please see:

There is no more FluTrackers on Facebook - January 3, 2019
 
I have seen nothing from today's Senate hearings interviewing the CEOs of facebook and twitter that encourages me to make any effort to reinstate our participation on either of those platforms. I would also like some "follow up" regarding the allegations in the hearing that facebook, twitter, and google may coordinate content moderation efforts, either formally or informally.

There are many videos of these hearings to watch on youtube.
 
I just noticed via the analytics function on the FluTrackers twitter account that the Chief Technology Officer of twitter has followed us in November. Since we are not tweeting I am wondering why he followed our account.


paragfollows.PNG



Thank you for following Parag. Please return to your original format.
 
Apparently there are many leaving Twitter. Some are going to something called Gab. FluTrackers is not on this platform. I have tried to access Gab out of curiosity but, apparently, so many are joining that the site is overwhelmed. We still have our account at Twitter but are not providing any content. We are not cancelling our account. We are down a net 300 followers in the last day from what I assume are people cancelling their accounts. Since we do not fund raise it does not matter how many followers we have on any platform. But it is interesting.

It appears Parler has been deplatformed. i.e. Their server company kicked them off. Also, the app stores have cancelled their app. We do not have an account on this platform.

FluTrackers has no plans to join any social media at this time. We will run our own sites until further notice.


Published January 10

Gab gaining 10,000 users per hour, CEO claims, after Trump's permanent Twitter suspension

“The traffic just keeps growing," CEO Andrew Torba says

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technolo...ter-suspension
 
I read that Parler's server provider is Amazon. Their investment in that area is apparently much bigger than their warehouse/shipping/media business.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...g-the-groundwork-for-its-own-quantum-computer
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08553
Simulation of Quantum Many-Body Systems on Amazon Cloud


As such they are an infrastructure provider. I'm not comfortable with political censorship at that level. So far they have provided no evidence of claims the website did anything wrong legally. I don't belong to the site so can't investigate myself.
 
We are down another 100 net followers for a total of a loss of about 400 in the last few days. We now have 25,300 followers which is pretty good for not tweeting since September! lol
 
It's your Twitter anniversary! Celebrate with a special Tweet created just for you

-----------------------------------------------------

I have never seen this before (since 2009). Maybe they are trying to pump up the remaining accounts. lol
 
Social-Media Algorithms Rule How We See the World. Good Luck Trying to Stop Them.
What you see in your feeds isn’t up to you. What’s at stake is no longer just missing a birthday. It’s your sanity—and world peace.
By Joanna Stern
Jan. 17, 2021 7:00 am ET

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we lost control of what we see, read—and even think—to the biggest social-media companies.

I put it right around 2016. That was the year Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. Ruled by robots programmed to keep our attention as long as possible, they promoted stuff we’d most likely tap, share or heart—and buried everything else.

Bye-bye, feeds that showed everything and everyone we followed in an unending, chronologically ordered river. Hello, high-energy feeds that popped with must-clicks.

At around the same time, Facebook—whose News Feed has been driven by algorithms since 2009—hid the setting to switch back to “Most Recent.”

No big deal, you probably thought, if you thought about it at all. Except these opaque algorithms didn’t only maximize news of T. Swift’s latest album drops. They also maximized the reach of the incendiary—the attacks, the misinformation, the conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.

“There are bad people doing bad things on the internet—QAnon, white supremacists—it’s not that Facebook, YouTube and other social-media
sites allow it on their platform. It’s that they amplify it,” says Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The worst-case scenarios are no longer just hypothetical. People are shown things that appeal most to them, they click, they read, they watch, they fall into rabbit holes that reinforce their thoughts and ideas, they connect with like-minded people. They end up in their own personalized version of reality. They end up inside the U.S. Capitol.

Certainly social media isn’t alone to blame. And when the blame does fall on social media, the robots aren’t the only ones culpable. The silencing of President Trump’s Facebook and Twitter accounts revealed the opposite: The humans running these companies still have final say over what does—and doesn’t—appear. (And last I checked, we can still opt out of using social media at all.)

But at the heart of it all, this is still a gigantic technology problem: Computers are in charge of what we see and they’re operating without transparency...

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/social...rld-good-luck-trying-to-stop-them-11610884800
 
It appears that google has extremely prioritized acceptable media in their search engine results. It appears that government sources are first, then followed by acceptable main stream media, followed by lessor main stream media, then random main stream media. Anything "flublogia" is hard to find. For example using the search terms: H5N1 avian flu. Crof's H5N1 blog was on the first page of google search with these terms since about 15 years. Same with Avian Flu Diary. I specifically did not pick COVID-19 terms because that topic is saturated.

Page 1:

wAAACH5BAEKAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==
​

wAAACH5BAEKAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==
​

wAAACH5BAEKAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==
​


Michael Coston's blog Avian Flu Diary finally appears on page 14 of a google search with the following seven year old post despite the fact that he is a leader in the world on the latest H5N6 news for 2021:

PNAS: H5N1 Propagation Via Migratory Birds - Avian Flu Diary

https://afludiary.blogspot.com › 2014/12 › pnas-h5n1-...
Dec 24, 2014 — Covering Pandemic and Seasonal Flu, H5N1 `Bird Flu, Emerging Infectious Diseases, public health, community & Individual preparedness, ...


Vincent Racaniello's Virology Blog appears also on page 14 with an 8 year old post:


A single amino acid change switches avian influenza H5N1 ...

https://www.virology.ws › 2013/06/11 › a-single-amino...
Jun 11, 2013 — Influenza virus initiates infection by attaching to the cell surface, a process mediated by binding of the viral hemagglutinin protein (HA) to ...


No H5N1 blog by page 15. I give up. What is happening here? Has google search engine re-calibrated search result priorities so that only government mantra sites are found in the first few pages? If so, this is really counterproductive. As far as I can tell H5N1 blog and Virology blog are highly COVID-19 pro-vaccine. Has google has swept the internet with a broad brush to eliminate COVID-19 "misinformation"?

As for FluTrackers - we provide information. Our continuing recommendation is for people to consult their medical practitioner for all medical questions. We have a scientific library that is loaded with vaccine information including trials, prospective candidates, problems, efficacy, side effects, etc.

So if the google search engine is selecting whole classes of internet formats and pushing them to the back of the line - I would like to remind google executives that you too will be called to the post COVID-19 tribunals.

As a result of this observation, reluctantly, I am going to test our traffic from twitter this week to see what is going on there.
 
I spoke to Mike Coston about this and we are not changing our ways.

FluTrackers will remain the same. We will not capitulate to "flavor of the day" mantras. We are not a political or religious site.

We still do not take any government or corporate $. We are all volunteers from around the world.

We still are not asking for any donations in this pandemic.

Take care of you.
 
It appears traffic to us from twitter is unimpeded. So for now I will continue to tweet the site. They are using us, so we will use them right back. Mike Coston says he found our H5N6 post about the new case yesterday on page one this morning. By the time I check we were down the line somewhere.....who knows where....not anywhere near page one. So apparently google search engine indexing runs in cycles?

Anyway....

We have received many favorable comments for returning:












Patricia Bruijning
and 9 others liked your Tweet

Thank you for all of the supportive comments!

The Team at FluTrackers :)


-----------------------------------------------------



Emrah Kırımlı.
@EMRAHKIRIMLI
·
2h
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Will we track this season?

--------------------------------------------


Carol Gold
@caroldgold
·
11h
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Welcome back. You are the reason I saw the approaching tsunami in January 2020.

----------------------------------------------




Mike Rinaldi
@ponzo54

13h
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Please stick around! I first found out about COVID from you - before anyone knew it was a virus, before anyone knew it was a coronavirus, and before it was called COVID. You were the first to report on both Ebola outbreaks and MERS-CoV as well!


---------------------------------------------


Pat
@Most765
Sep 22
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Just discovered you are back again. I’m so glad.

---------------------------------------------

And many more likes.....


Thank you everyone for supporting Independent Media with your likes!
 
Last edited:

Eurosurveillance
liked your Tweet
Hi Everyone! We missed you. We will see how this goes. :)

A few things:

1)We are still the same. We do not shift to "mantra of the day."
2)Do not donate to us.
3)We do not promote or sell anything.
4)If you have any medical questions, consult your medical practitioner.
 
It appears we are getting a lot of support on twit. A sample:

All
Mentions
See new Tweets Notifications











Cliff
and 36 others followed you









Pam
and 11 others liked a Tweet you were mentioned in
People to follow on flu @florian_krammer @MackayIM @Fla_Medic @FluTrackers @marynmck @Laurie_Garrett @InfectiousDz @ChuBailiang @Lingling_Wei
 
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