Last night I tried to share a link via text to a friend. One-to-one communication. In the message was only a url to my latest blog post about election meddling. The last part of a url address is called a “slug”. Usually those are your keywords that help with search engine indexing. The example: https://hollyataltitude.com/ this is a slug . In my slug, I had the words steal and election. I copied the url and when I tried to paste it into my text, it wouldn’t paste. I tried several times, completely confused. So, I tried sending the link to my sister. Same thing. The link would. not. paste. I had heard some rumors online that T-Mobile was censoring texts, but since I didn’t use T-Mobile, I didn’t pay much attention to the news. But then it hit me: I bet Verizon was doing the same thing! To test it out, I manually changed my article’s url slug. I took out the words steal and election. Guess what… The pasting problem magically disappeared! I was able to share the article without changing any of the contents of the post.

This morning, I contacted one of my very tech savvy friends on the East Coast and explained the situation. After he conducted a bunch of tests with me, we were able to confirm: The problem is real. It was not a fluke. And, the problem is with Verizon, not Apple (my phone manufacturer).

This proves yet another conspiracy theory that Big Brother is real. No tinfoil hats here. It’s creepy. It’s scary. And it feels illegal, but I don’t know for sure.

The question is what to do about it? Hopefully the press will expose this along with the the other deluge of censorship information related to big tech, but that’s a big if.

In the meantime here is what you can do, switch to an end-to-end encrypted messaging service.

Here are my end-to-end encrypted messaging app picks – as of now:

WhatsApp: Owned by Facebook. Yeah, I was concerned too, BUT I’ve been assured by a few experts that because of the end-to-end encryption, as much as FB would want to get into the censorship game on this platform, it can’t. I’ve used Whatsapp personally and think it works well. The plus with WhatsApp is Facebook integration, which means your contacts are are part of this package. Android & Iphone compatible.

Signal: This is an open-source app which I really like because the code can be inspected by everyone. That means no backdoors. It integrates with all sorts of devices. My favorite feature is the group chats. Easy to set up, and when your contacts join Signal, you get… a signal. I’ve used this one for about a year. Snowden uses it, and so does Jack Dorsey – ironically enough. Android & Apple plus a number of other platforms e.g. linux etc.

Telegram: This is the last encrypted message app I’ve used, (I promise). This one works like the other two, with a few more sexy features. First you can send messages that self destruct. Second there’s a private chat feature that works like a secret between you and another person. If you want to erase a message you’ve sent to them, they have to delete it too. Telegram boasts over 200 million users. Android and Apple.

Take it for a spin! See if you get blocked from sharing the article. Here’s the original link: https://hollyataltitude.com/2020/11/16/political-election-steal-2020/

Here’s the sanitized link to the blocked article. Share this one while you still can!

If you want to share your thoughts on censorship with Verizon

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