Mato's Blog

I’ve given up on Facebook after reports emerged, that posts are censored and accounts closed. Now it seems I have to give up on Google+ too. I’m aware that social connections are important and that I need like anybody else a network of close friends, yet most social networking portals channel the connections into a rigid organizational frame whose main purpose is to gather personal information, to keep the users entertained, increase traffic, and (most important) make money with advertising.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, hi5, Friendster, Tagged, Myspace definitely work this way.

Social networking via one of the popular Internet portals is by design time consuming and rather unproductive. Facebook and Google+ are time wasters and everything is geared to distract and draw ones attention to recent memes, trends, fashions. The network sites create the virtual ambience, the atmosphere of a shopping mall, they never resemble the ambience of a forest, a savannah, a wetland.

People who want to deepen social bonds, exchange ideas, and cooperatively find solutions to pending problems will have to look somewhere else and build their very own private social networks. 

I have given up on Facebook since a long time but occasionally visit Google+ to publish links of my blog posts. When I visited my Google+ account yesterday I discovered that nine of the links had been blocked. I clicked the review request button and Google+ told me:

This post is under review

We received your request to review whether this post violates the Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy. Reviews usually take a few days. During review, this post is visible only to you.

If this post does not violate our policies, we’ll make it visible to others again. Otherwise, it will stay visible only to you, and we will delete it in a few weeks.

The blocked post were:
Links January 13, 2013
Death in Paris
Conflicting views about Syria
Doha fairytales (1001 nights) Part 2
Cuba after the Hurricane
Disorderly and discordant thoughts
Facebook censores and closes accounts
From a birds view
Breaking Point – Part 2

I read Googles User Content and Conduct Policy, which says:

Our policies play an important role in maintaining a positive experience for our users. Please follow these policies when using our products and services (“Services”). When we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review and take action, including limiting or terminating a user’s access to our Services.

We may modify these policies so please check back here. Also, when applying our policies, we may make exceptions based on artistic, educational, or documentary considerations, or when there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action.

1. Illegal Activities
   Do not use our products to engage in illegal activities or promote dangerous and illegal acts.
2. Malicious Products
   Do not transmit viruses, malware, or any other malicious or destructive code. Do not distribute content that harms or interferes with the operation of the networks, servers, or other infrastructure of Google or others.
3. Hate Speech
   Do not distribute content that promotes hatred or violence towards groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity.
4. Personal and Confidential Information
   Do not distribute other people’s personal and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, confidential national ID numbers, or account passwords, without their permission.
5. Account Hijacking
   Do not access another user’s account without their permission. Do not use our products for phishing scams.
6. Child Safety
   Do not distribute content that exploits children, such as child pornography (including cartoon child porn) or content that presents children in a sexual manner.
7. Spam
   Do not spam, including sending unwanted promotional or commercial content, or unwanted or mass solicitation.
   Do not aggressively add people to your circles.
8. Ranking Manipulation
   Do not manipulate ranking or relevancy using techniques like repetitive or misleading keywords or metadata.
9. Sexually Explicit Material
   Do not distribute content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Do not drive traffic to commercial pornography sites.
   Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content. For example, do not use a photo that is a close-up of a person’s buttocks or cleavage.
10. Harassment and Bullying
    Do not harass or bully others. Anyone using Google+ to harass or bully may have the offending content removed or be permanently banned from the site. Online harassment is also illegal in many places and can have serious offline consequences.
11. Violence
    Do not distribute depictions of graphic or gratuitous violence.
12. Impersonation or Deceptive Behavior
    Do not use our products to impersonate.
13. User Profile Name
    To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.
14. Regulated Goods and Services
    While Google+ is a place to discuss many topics, our service is not ready to support the marketing of any regulated products at this time. Do not facilitate the promotion or sale of pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco, fireworks, weapons, or health/medical devices. We may also remove content that offers or promotes the sale of substances that mimic the effects of illegal or regulated drugs.
    Discussion of gambling and gaming strategy is permitted, but do not distribute content that facilitates actual gambling, including online casinos, sports betting, or lotteries.
    Further, we may not allow verification of local Google+ pages for certain products and services such as escort services or other regulated goods.
15. Contests and Promotions
    Do not run contests, sweepstakes, daily deals, coupons or other such promotions directly on Google+. For additional details about this policy, visit the Contests and Promotions Policy page.

What did I wrong?

Was I promoting dangerous and illegal acts?

The suggestion to stop shopping, to drop out of the rat race, to grow ones own food, to stop looking TV, to question mass media reporting is for sure dangerous. Dangerous to corporate profits and to the existing social and economic system in general.

I should have restricted myself to the usual calls for mass protests and a worldwide revolution.

Was I promoting hatred?

I despise political leaders who sign assassination lists, send troops into foreign countries, and approve weapons shipments to religious psychopaths. No, I don’t hate them, as a determinist I accept that they are a product of their upbringing and their genes. They shouldn’t be sent to the guillotine, they should be transferred to a big island together with their tools, the religious psychopath. Without weapons, but with all the necessary equipment to build up a new life.

The Brits used Australia for that purpose.

As an atheist I regard religious teachings as nonsense. Is that a promotion of religious hatred?

Did I harass or bully?

I oppose weapons, NRA-members and other gun-nuts could feel bullied by my stance. I plea for a modest and natural life style. SUV-drivers, jet-setters, yuppies, and everybody else who cherishes an urban, tech-oriented life style could feel bullied by that.

I will have to be more careful in the future and write ambiguous, equivocal, cryptic. Maybe I will change from writing commentaries and analyses to writing fiction. Short dystopian stories like Do you like nightmares?

WordPress is also a commercial US-based enterprise. I better look for other communication channels in time. My email address again: The personal domain (which is mato48) plus the sign at plus the word speed separated by a dot from the top-level domain at. I’ll be glad for any (non-commercial) emails.