All of the Big Tech social media platforms are actively engaged in coordinated censorship of user content when such content contradicts establishment narratives. Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and others have all been caught punishing their users through shadow-banning, de-listing, deletion and de-platforming, even when such content clearly does not violate their convoluted and arbitrary terms of service agreements.
Such censorship has reached a whole new level since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the coronavirus hoax where even highly respected career professionals in fields such as healthcare are not permitted to have a voice when that voice challenges the government mouthpieces in the mainstream media.
As i see it, the primary issue here is not that the fat corporate clowns are cutting their own throats by censoring users, but rather that people with important and often vital information which is clearly in the public interest, continue to rely on platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to disseminate their views and then complain when they're censored or banned. True, alternatives such as BitChute, Gab, Mastodon and others don't offer the amount of exposure that Big Tech does, assuming they allow you any exposure at all, however that will only change when more people start using alternative platforms. I mean really, have they left us with any other choice? And that's not an entirely bad thing either, especially when many of the alternative platforms have a far greater respect for freedom of speech and our privacy.
I'm sure there are many other alternatives than those listed here, so if you know of one, let me know.
If you have something to say, i would suggest that relying on social media is not the only place you should be saying it since, ultimately, you have no control over your content. All mainstream social media platforms, and many alternative platforms, will happily shadow-ban, de-list, de-monetize, de-platform, demote or delete you or anything you post which they are critical of, regardless of whether it breaks the wall of text agreement they call their terms of service. Or they may simply dry up and disappear overnight, taking all of your content with them. Furthermore there are limitations as to how you can format your content.
I've also noticed a somewhat disturbing trend as social media and smart devices gained traction in that many people have either stopped using email, or do not provide a method to contact them outside of whatever privacy-hating social media platform(s) they use. This is particularly annoying for those of us who want nothing to do with the likes of criminal, data-mining mega-corporations like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc..
Having your own website can be very inexpensive and fun, plus you'll have far greater control over your content and will be much freer to say what you wish. You also have control over how you publish and format your content and there are plenty of software choices for handling that regardless of your skill level.
If you'd like to explore setting up a website of your own and this is all new to you, and you want to go the least expensive route, then shared hosting may be the answer. With a shared hosting provider you can easily keep the cost down to a few bucks a month and still have a great website with good support. Another alternative is to host your website yourself using your internat connection. This can even be done using a Raspberry Pi but some technical knowledge will be required, especially regarding your network security.
Pitfalls
While there are several potential pitfalls with shared web hosting, if you decide to pursue that path, there is one in particular you'll really want to avoid when choosing a host and that is utilizing any company owned by Endurance International Group (EIG) a.k.a Clearlake Capital Group a.k.a Newfold Digital. As of 2022 these ultra-shitty corporations own approximately 60-70 web hosting companies, including some web hosting "review" websites, and the complaints about their rotten service and support can be found everywhere. To make matters worse, many of the companies they gobble up do not advertise that they are owned by EIG/Clearlake/Newfold and so avoiding them can be a bit difficult.
Click here to reveal a (probably incomplete) list of companies owned by EIG/Clearlake/Newfold as of 2022...
2slick.com
A Small Orange
AccountSupport
Anchor
Apex Infosys India
ApolloHosting
AppMachine
AptHost
Arvixe
Berry Information Systems
BigRock
BizLand
BlueBoxInternet
BlueDomino
BlueFur
Bluehost
BuyDomains
CirtexHosting
Cloud by IX
Constant Contact
Crucial Web Hosting
Digital Pacific
Directi
Dollar2Host
Domain.com
DomainHost
DonWeb.com
Dot5Hosting
Dotster
Dreamscape Networks
Ecomdash
EmailBrain
EntryHost
Escalate Internet
FastDomain
FatCow
FreeYellow
Garin IT Solutions
Garin Technologies
Glob@t
Homestead
HostCentric
HostClear
HostExcellence
HostGallo
HostGator
HostMonster
HostNine
HostV VPS
HostYourSite.com
Hostopia Australia
HyperMart
IMOutdoors
IPOWER/iPowerWeb
IX Web Hosting
IdeaHost
Intuit Websites
JustCloud
JustHost
LogicBoxes
MojoMarketplace
MyDomain
MyResellerHome
MySocialSuite
NameJet
NetFirms
Network Solutions
Networks Web Hosting
Nexx
Panthur
PowWeb
PublicDomainRegistry.com
PDR Ltd.
PureHost
ReadyHosting
Register.com
ResellerClub
SEO Gears
SEO Hosting
SEO Web Hosting
Saba-Pro
Scoot.com
Site5
Sitelio
SnapNames
Solid Cactus
Southeast Web
SpeedHost
Spertly
Spry
StartLogic
SuperGreen Hosting
Typepad
USANetHosting
Unified Layer
VPSLink
Verio
VirtualAvenue
Web.com
Web24
WebHost4Life
WebHosting.info
Webstrike Solutions
Webzai
Xeran
Yoast.com
YourWebHosting
eHost
easyCGI
hostwithmenow.com
iPage
vDeck
webhosting.info
One nearly universal lesson i've learned over the years is to avoid large companies that plaster their ads all over the place. Often their service, support and security practices suck and data breaches are common. This is especially true of VPN providers for example, but that's another story.
Personally i gave up shared hosting long ago since my needs are greater. In the interest of full disclosure, i wrote the article, Why shared web hosting sucks, but understand that the article is geared more toward those wanting to up their game and extend beyond the limitations of shared hosting, however dong so requires a greater degree of technical knowledge than what is required here. For those just starting out, or who just want a small, personal website for private or business use, shared hosting can be fine and it is one of the least expensive and easiest routes to building a website.
Content management
The choices as to what software you want to use for managing your website is practically limitless. On the more popular side are feature rich content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many others. While such CMSs make it rather easy to get going, they are also bloated with features you may never use and require more server-side infrastructure than a simple static website, which we'll get into in a bit. Of these WordPress is probably the most popular, however i might recommend ClassicPress instead if you want to go that route.
At the core, none of the above is even necessary. All you really need to create a website is a text/code editor, a basic knowledge of HTML and, optionally, a basic knowledge of CSS if you want to make your content look pretty. Beyond that you'll need a way to upload the files you create to your web server. While the big content management systems make publishing content easy, they don't teach you the fundamentals of HTML and they add a lot of bloat to your web pages in the form of unused CSS styles, 3rd party resources and JavaScript, the latter two of which not all your visitors may appreciate. They also consume valuable server space and resources and increase the attack surface for malicious hackers.
Having used WordPress for quite a long time, and now ClassicPress after WordPress got "woke", one of the more serious issues i've found with these platforms is the plug-in market. One can easily extend the functionality of most any CMS using 3rd party plug-ins but the problem, at least with WordPress and ClassicPress, and probably most others as well, is a lack of regulations regarding what a plug-in developer may and may not do with their code, as well as a lack of security oversight. This can, and very often does, lead to all kinds of trouble from data mining to unwanted advertising to critical security vulnerabilities. I once suggested in the WordPress forum that this problem be adequately addressed and my post was quickly locked and buried by a senior moderator before anyone had a chance to reply. What does that tell you about the ethics regarding security at WordPress?
If you're really wanting to keep things dirt simple i'd suggest avoiding all of the popular server-side CMS solutions such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., and have a look at Publii instead. Unlike the aforementioned products, Publii is a Static Site Generator (SSG) that you download and install locally on your computer and this has several important benefits. First of all, you can edit and preview your website off-line if you don't have an internet connection at the time. Secondly, as mentioned, Publii generates static websites. This means there is no need for all of the infrastructure that a typical server-side CMS requires; no database, no database server and no PHP. The result is a much more secure, worry-free website which is far less prone to hacking. Also content generated with Publii, or any other SSG, does not require exposing you or your visitors to any potentially malicious, insecure, or privacy invading JavaScript. You need not worry about server-side hardware failures or making backups of your website either since you'll always have a local copy of the very latest version. Publii is something i am seriously considering myself.
In light of the ad-riddled, CDN powered, JavaScript infectedshit-hole that is in fact what the modern web has become, static site generators are making a significant comeback and though there are a plethora of them to choose from, Publii is currently the only one i'm aware of that is oriented toward newcomers and does not require knowledge of any programming/scripting languages. Anyone who is comfortable with a CMS like WordPress will feel right at home with Publii and anyone who isn't can easily learn it.
Recommendations
STAY AWAY FROM ANY COMPANY OWNED BY ENDURANCE INTERNATIONAL GROUP (EIG) a.k.a Clearlake Capital Group a.k.a Newfold Digital !
Make sure the company has been in business for at least 10 years or more. It seems many start-ups are looking to be bought and you want to avoid those.
Beware of companies advertising unlimited resources, such as unlimited disk space and bandwidth. I assure you that attempting to start something like a video hosting platform on a shared server with "unlimited" resources is going to get you kicked out right quick. Storage space and bandwidth are expensive.
Make sure they provide free SSL certificates. All websites nowadays should be served over an encrypted connection (https) and Let's Encrypt provides free certificates.
Contact the company and ask them any questions you may have. Ask them where they are based and whether they employ their own support staff or outsource support, in which case you'll want to avoid them.
Look for unbiased reviews for the host you're considering and be aware that many web hosting "review" sites are run by hosting companies themselves. If the primary focus of the website is to review web hosting providers it usually best to disregard it, though are exceptions.
You generally get what you pay for, but even a good shared hosting provider will often cost less than $10 dollars a month.
Given that i currently do not use a shared host, i'm not up to date with the brands and their services, however SiteGround kept making an appearance in my research. While they are a bit more expensive ($6.99/mo. as of this writing for their smallest package), they seem to get good reviews by what appears to be honest people and they are apparently not owned by EIG/Clearlake/Newfold. A2 Hosting also seems to be very popular. Another potentially interesting company i found is VeeroTech Systems which claims to be 100% independently owned. If you want my personal recommendation for a company i have experience with, i might suggest KnownHost. Their support staff, reliability and speed have all been absolutely excellent since i signed on with them in late 2019. One really nice aspect of KnownHost is that they do not have a tiered support structure; all of their support people are professionals and they are very fast to respond regardless of what day or time of day i open a ticket but, like i said, you get what you pay for and KnownHost is on the expensive side.
There are many good, ethical hosting providers, it's just a matter of doing some research and LowEndTalk is a good starting point if cost is an important factor. Their forum is only lightly moderated and if a hosting company is crap, believe me, you'll discover this very quickly. LowEndTalk is affiliated with LowEndBox which offers lots of resources for cheap hosting services. Both websites are geared primarily toward resellers, however they are still great resources for learning about hosting provider.s
There are a variety of ways to find what you're looking for when you come across a broken link on the interwebs. Here's a few methods i like to use.
Search operators
The first thing you should know is how to use a search engine. Various search engines will attach a special meaning to certain characters and these 'search operators' as they're called can be really helpful. Here's some handy examples that work for Google as well as some other search engines (and no, you shouldn't be using Google directly):
OR: 'OR', or the pipe ( | ) character, tells the search engine you want to search for this OR that. For example cat|dog will return results containing 'cat' or 'dog', as will cat OR dog.
( ) : Putting words in a group separated by OR or | produces the same result as just described, however you can then add words outside of the group that you always want to see in the results. For example, (red|pink|orange) car will return results that have red, pink or orange cars.
" ": If you wrap a "word" in double quotes, you are telling the search engine that the word is really important. If you wrap multiple words in double quotes, you are telling the search engine to look for pages containing "that exact phrase."
site:: If you want to search only a particular domain, such as 12bytes.org, append site:12bytes.org to your query, or don't include any search terms if you want it to return a list of pages for the domain. You can do the same when preforming an image search if you want to see all the images on a domain. You can also search a TLD (Top-Level Domain) using this operator. For example, to search the entire .gov TLD, just append site:.gov to your query.
-: If you prefix a word with a -hyphen, you are telling the search engine to omit results containing this word. You can do the same -"with a phrase" also.
cache:: Prefixing a domain with cache:, such as cache:12bytes.org, will return the most recent cached version of a page.
intitle: : If you prefix a word or phase with intitle:, you are telling the search engine that the word or phrase must be contained in the titles of the results.
allintitle: : Words prefixed with allintitle: tells the search engine that all words following this operator must be contained in the titles of the search results.
One of the simplest methods of finding the original target of a busted link is to copy the link location (right click the link and select 'Copy Link Location') and plug that into one of the web archive services. The two most popular, general archives that i'm aware of are the Internet Archive and Archive.is. The Internet Archive provides options to filter your search results for particular types of content, such as web pages, videos, etc.. In either case, just paste the copied link in the input field they provide and press your Enter key. If the link is 'dirty', cleaning it up may provide better results. For example, let's say the link is something like:
The archive may not return any results for the URL, but it might if you clean it up by removing everything after 'hunt'.
There are also web browser extensions you can install to make accessing the archive services easier. For Firefox i like the View Page Archive & Cache add-on by 'Armin Sebastian'. When you find a dead link, just right-click it and from the 'View Page Archive' context menu you can select to search all of the enabled archives or just a specific one. Even if the page isn't dead you can right-click in the page and retrieve a cached copy or archive the page yourself. Another cool feature of this add-on is that it will place an icon in the address bar if you land on a dead page and you can just search for an archived version from the icon context menu.
Of these two services, the Internet Archive has a far more extensive library, but there's a very annoying caveat with it that defeats the purpose of an archive which is why i much prefer Archive.is. The Internet Archive follows robot.txt directives. I won't go into why i think this is stupid, suffice to say that content that is stored on the Internet Archive can be removed even if it does not break any of their rules.
Dead links and no clues
If all you have is a dead link with no title or description and you can't find a cached copy in one of the archives, you may still be able to find copy of the document somewhere. For example let's say the link is https://example.com/pages/my-monkey-stole-my-car.html. The likely title of the document you're looking for is right in the URL -- my-monkey-stole-my-car -- and you can plug that into a search engine just as it is, or remove the hyphens and wrap the title in double quotes to perform a phrase search. Also see some of the other examples here.
Dead links with some clues
If you come across a dead link that has a title or description, but isn't cached in an archive, you can use that to perform a search. Just select the title, or a short but unique phrase from the description (which preferably doesn't contain any punctuation), then wrap it in double quotes and perform a phrase search.
Dead internal website links
If you encounter a website that contains a broken link to another page on the same site and you have some information about the document, like a title or excerpt, you can do a domain search to see if a search engine may link to a working copy. For example, let's assume the title of the page we're looking for is 'Why does my kitten hate me?' on the domain 'example.com'. Copy the title, wrap it in double quotes and plug it into a search engine that supports phrase searches, add a space, then append site:example.com. This will tell the search engine to look for results only on example.com. Also see some of the other examples here.
YouTube videos you know exist but can't find
Because there is a remarkable amount of censorship taking place at YouTube, they will sometimes hide sensitive videos from their search results when you use the search engine provided by YouTube. To get around this, use another search engine to perform a domain search as described in the 'Dead internal website links' section.
Deleted videos
In some cases, such as with a link that points to a removed YouTube video, you may not have any information other than the URL itself, not even a page title. Using the YouTube link as an example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123xyz, copy youtube.com/watch?v=abc123xyz, wrap it in double quotes and plug that into your preferred search engine. You will often find a forum or blog post somewhere that will provide helpful clues, such as the video title or description which you can use to search for a working copy of the video. And the first place to look for deleted YouTube videos is YouTube! You can also search the Internet Archive as well as other video platforms that are more censorship resistant than YouTube, including Dailymotion, BitChute, DTube, LEEKWire and many others.
Broken links on your own website
I don't know about you, but i have nearly 4,000 links on 12bytes.org as of this writing and many of them point to resources which TPTB (The Powers That [shouldn't] Be) would rather you knew nothing about. As such, many of the resources i link to are taken down and so i have to deal with broken links constantly, many of them deleted YouTube videos. If you run WordPress (self-hosted - i don't know about a wordpress.com site) you will find Broken Link Checker by 'ManageWP' in the WordPress plugin repository and it's job is to constantly scan your site to look for broken links. While it is not a bug-free plugin (the developer is not at all responsive and doesn't seem to fix anything in a timely manner), it is by far the most comprehensive tool of its type that i'm aware of. There are also many external services you could use whether you run WordPress or not.
Following are some of the resources that i've found helpful for a wide variety of research projects. If you have any to share, please contact me or leave a comment.
Internet Archive: "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
Internet Sacred Text Archive: "This site is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics."
List of online newspaper archives (Wikipedia): "a list of online newspaper archives and some magazines and journals, including both free and pay wall blocked digital archives"
Michael Collins Piper Report: An archive of podcasts and articles by one of America's leading iconoclastic journalists.
PDF Archive: "E-books in PDF format, rare, censored, banned and unknown"
Spotlight News Archive: "a listing of many of the hundreds of articles that have appeared in The SPOTLIGHT since we first went on-line in 1997"
Unz Review Books Archive: "A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media"
Government
Center for Responsive Politics: "the Center for Responsive Politics is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy."
Cryptome: "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those."
Defrauding America: "40 Years of Recorded Corruption in Government Positions,
Endemic Cover-Ups, and Great Tragedies"
Governmentattic.org: "governmentattic.org provides electronic copies of thousands of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."
GovTrack.us: "GovTrack.us tracks the United States Congress and helps Americans participate in their national legislature. We publish the status of federal legislation, information about your representative and senators in Congress including voting records, and original research on bills and votes."
Ted Gunderson: A former FBI Special Agent, Gunderson published many investigative articles and participated in many interviews about his research work post-FBI. He is well known for his work on the 'FINDERS', a world-wide network of people and organizations involved in child trafficking and exploitation
The Black Vault: "Exposing government secrets... one page at a time."
The National Archives Catalog: "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper."
We The People Foundation: "The We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education has been established to fulfill the need for popular education including education, awareness, and knowledge about the Declaration of Independence and every provision of the federal and state constitutions, about the sovereignty of the people whose will the constitutions are designed to express, and about the government they are meant to control through their constitutions."
Health
Educate-Yourself: "Educate-Yourself.org is a free educational forum dedicated to the dissemination of accurate information in the use of natural, non-pharmaceutical medicines and alternative healing therapies in the treatment of disease conditions."
Open Payments Data: "The Open Payments Search Tool is used to search payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals."
History
British Movietone: "British Movietone is arguably the world's greatest newsreel archive, spanning the period 1895 to 1986."
History Commons: "The website is a tool for open-content participatory journalism. It allows people to investigate important issues by providing a space where people can collaborate on the documentation of past and current events, as well as the entities associated with those events."
Find Law: "Learn About the Law features informational articles about a wide variety of legal topics, as well as specific information about subjects such as how to hire an attorney and understanding your state's unique laws."
Law Notes: "Through the courts, encouraging the Government to obey the law."
Natural-Person: "A non-profit site educating Canadians and Americans
about the differences between human-beings,
natural-persons and artificial-persons"
United Nations - Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages."
Military
Air Force History Index: "The United States Air Force Historical Research Agency maintains hundreds of thousands of historically significant U.S. Air Force documents representing some 70 million pages of interest to historians, researchers, and Air Force buffs."
Stephen S. Clark Library: "The Clark Library combines our map collection, government information center, and spatial and numeric data services. It is a rich and unique resource, where students and scholars from every discipline--as well as those working across disciplines--can find the materials, tools, and expertise to meet their research needs."
People
Notable Names Database: "NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead."
Wikiquote: "Wikiquote is a free online compendium of sourced quotations from notable people"
Science
Sci-Hub: "the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers"
Crystalinks: "Crystalinks is perhaps the largest, most comprehensive and ambitious metaphysical and science website on the Internet today, a journey taken by millions of visitors each month that is spiritually, mentally and emotionally in tune with its readers' lifestyles, needs, zeitgeist and the transcendental quest of humanity."
Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment: "Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) was founded more than 80 years ago to help people to transform their lives. Our goal is to be your resource for body-mind-spirit materials that will help you in your everyday experience to be all that you can be."
Family Guardian: "Nonprofit Christian religious ministry dedicated to protecting people and families from extortion, persecution, exploitation,socialism, divorce, crime, and sin. Advocate personal liberty, personal responsibility, constitutional and SMALL and accountable government, sovereignty, and religious faith."
From The Wilderness: "Information on Peak Oil, Sustainability, and the events surrounding 9/11"
Lines of Credit: Ropes of Bondage: "LINES OF CREDIT: ROPES OF BONDAGE is about the financiers, their fellow conspirators and the plot to destroy Western Christian civilization."
Metapedia: "An electronic encyclopedia about culture, art, science, philosophy and politics."
The Corbett Report: "The Corbett Report is an independent, listener-supported alternative news source. It operates on the principle of open source intelligence and provides podcasts, interviews, articles and videos about breaking news and important issues from 9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more."
THE PAGE: "This is yer brain - BAD PEOPLE WANNA SINK THEIR HOOKS IN IT"
WantToKnow.info: "This website provides a concise, reliable introduction to vital information of which few are aware. We specialize in providing fact-filled news articles and concise summaries of major cover-ups and corruption which impact our lives and world."
WHALE: "Mapping & Killing the Matrix with Orgonite & Knowledge"
WikiLeaks: "WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption."
Wikispooks: "Wikispooks is an open licensed, open source encyclopedia of deep politics."
Specialized tools
FotoForensics: "FotoForensics provides budding researchers and professional investigators access to cutting-edge tools for digital photo forensics."
