Health Impact News Quits All Social Media – Sorry Trolls!

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Health Impact News received notice this week that our Twitter account has been reinstated:

From: “Twitter Support” <support@twitter.com>
To: “Health Impact News”
Sent: 12/16/2022 10:30:12 AM
Subject: A Message from Twitter

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that we’ve unsuspended your account as part of our reinstatement program. Should you run into any trouble logging back in, try requesting a password reset email.

Please note, it may take 24-48 hours for your follower and following numbers to return to normal.

If you need to get in touch with us again, please file a report through your Twitter app or our forms page, as this account isn’t monitored for replies.

Thanks,

Twitter

However, we will not be logging into this account and using it, and in addition, we have now deleted our other social media accounts and will no longer post any articles on Social Media.

We will maintain our video accounts and Telegram channel, where we can turn off comments.

This ends over 2 decades of social media use for myself and my companies, as I started utilizing the Internet and Internet discussion groups back in 2000 and 2001, after we saw that the Internet survived Y2K.

In the early days, the Internet and social media groups were a tremendous asset to truth seekers, allowing us to bypass corporate media censorship and take our message directly to the people.

We were utilizing social media before Facebook and Twitter were even around, and even before Google was selling search result advertising through “pay-per-click” (PPC). We used to use Overture, before they were bought out by Yahoo for over a billion dollars, and before Google came in and started dominating Internet searches and PPC advertising.

When Facebook became popular, we established our brand and spent a lot of money promoting our Facebook Page for my online business, and then also started a Facebook Page for Health Impact News when we started back in 2011.

Before Facebook banned us, we had 2 million followers we had collected over almost a decade. Facebook became the best place to advertise our products also, as we could tailor our ads to very specific people who met the profile of our consumers. They quickly became the best platform on the Internet for advertising, because people so willingly published information about themselves and their interests.

But what became a great tool for businesses advertising their products, also became a great tool for intelligence agencies like the CIA, FBI, and others. These social media giants became not only resources to surveil and track people, but also to influence what they think and believe by using fake users, which we called “trolls.” At one point, it was estimated that over half the user accounts on Facebook were fake users, and Twitter also had a large percentage of these fake users which Elon Musk complained about before he bought it.

In 2014 I published an article commenting on an article written by Glenn Greenwald based on Edward Snowden’s leaked documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) which showed that British and American intelligence agencies were paying “trolls” to influence opinion online and destroy people’s reputations. See:

Internet Trolls May be Trained Government Agents According to Leaked Document

Health Impact News was a frequent target of trolls in social media that tried to discredit our reporting on the dangers of vaccines, among other things. I learned early on how to spot these trolls and how to squash them, and I always had a staff monitoring our social media accounts, especially Facebook.

Today here in 2022, even the secondary social media platforms, which are predominately among the Right Wing political groups that were banned from places like Facebook and Twitter (Pinterest was actually the first one to ban us because of our articles on vaccines), also seem to be dominated by trolls, and it is impossible to tell who is behind some of these platforms, and who all they are selling their data to.

In addition, we have developed a culture of entitled crybaby users who believe somehow that it is their “right” to post comments and criticize our content, or use other people’s social media accounts to promote their own agendas and websites.

If you delete their comments, you end up getting emailed with attacks like this:

I see you censored my comment like the left does. May the Lord repay you for hiding the truth.

After seeing a few different accounts try to post comments on a recent article where we mentioned Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on one of these alternative social media platforms, where these users were saying things that were almost identical, I looked at their accounts and saw right away they were fake accounts, and probably paid trolls. In fact it is entirely possible that all the accounts belonged to one paid troll, making it look like several people agreed with them, a very common tactic.

So I made the decision that it was time to stop using social media sites. Not just because of the trolls, but because all of these platforms are now used for surveillance and tracking, and the benefits of social media no longer justify allowing our enemies to track our readers when they use these platforms.

We are leaving up our social media buttons on articles for people to share for now, because people are going to share them there anyway, but those will probably disappear soon also.

All commenting on our articles will now only be done here on our own websites, where people can use anonymous usernames and emails when they post a comment, and not be tracked by Big Tech and the government.

We stopped using Google Analytics last year, and now use a software program called “Matomo“, which exists only on our servers and is never shared with anyone else. So when you see the top articles for the week and number of views for that article, that all comes from our own internal stats, and NOT Google.

I know these newer generations of young people feel they have some kind of right to come here and voice their opinions and criticize or attack the articles we post here, but that just simply isn’t true.

This is a free platform. We don’t even accept donations. No product is being sold here, so there is no vendor-client relationship where we have to supply customer service.

If you see something you don’t like or agree with, you just simply stop reading and move on, and even unsubscribe if you want to. That is your right. But criticizing and attacking me is not your right, and generally is not tolerated here, which is why you see so few comments on our articles.

Comments that are genuine and contribute to the subject of the article are welcome, and we get most of those positive comments on our articles on the Created4Health.org website, and those comments end up being a blessing not only to me, but to others who read them.

Courtesy and respect are all but gone in today’s culture, and often I have to delete a comment rather than publishing it, when otherwise I might publish it because it has some useful information, but the person either starts out the comment with something like: “You are severely ignorant on this topic….” – or, after masterfully writing a great comment, they end it with something like: “Let’s see if you actually publish this comment because you have suppressed the truth in the past…” or some other such rude statements that have no place here.

I am very old school, and grew up with the Internet. I remember the days when only print media existed outside of television, and if someone wanted to voice an opinion or challenge an article in a print publication, they had to write a “letter to the editor,” and the publication would have a special section of their publication where they would publish some, but certainly not all, of these letters, and then give their response.

But it was 100% up to the editor, and nobody was screaming “CENSORSHIP” back then for not publishing dissenting views, and of course they would never publish attacks and threats. People would actually feel honored if their comment was published.

Social media was a great way in the past to connect with friends, family, and others, but today it has become a very dangerous place, where unfriendly eyes are watching everything you say, like, dislike, etc., and will eventually be tied into our social credit score by the tyrants.

So for us, it is time to say: no thanks. We pass.

In Canada, the The Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams now pay visits to your home for speaking out against Trudeau online.pic.twitter.com/WSQjGERhhN

— Tammy AbiKhalil (@abikhalil_t) December 15, 2022