Let’s talk about freedom for a second.

Freedom. It’s something most of us have. It’s something many of us take for granted. And it’s many of us, without which we would be utterly lost.

Freedom. Fancy that.

“You can never take my freedom!”

That’s true. No one can take your freedom. But they can prevent you from expressing your freedom.

Listen. There’s a vast, vast difference between organizations preventing us from making violent threats to harm someone and/or their property, and organizations preventing us from transmitting organization simply because “they said so.”

Let’s call upon our good friend SOPA.

The basis of SOPA was “censor any part of the Internet that may infringe copyrights.” Which is good in intentions.

However, the implementations that many companies such as the RIAA and MPAA would have used SOPA for were frightening, really.

Why?

Take it from Wikipedia.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court orders to baradvertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison. A similar bill in the U.S. Senate is titled the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

That’s SOPA in a nutshell. Essentially, an entire website can be censored if one dude decided to post a copyright infringing comment on a blog post.

That’s right. This very blog, Blog2Success, could be censored if one such person wanted to do that.

Taking it further, the entire domain of wordpress.com can be censored, if there was a guy whose blog (hosted on wordpress.com) was dedicated to infringing copyright.

The entire YouTube domain can be censored if one person uploads some infringing videos.

Essentially, it would take only one person to ruin it for everyone.

Thankfully, SOPA is resting for now, but there is one more thing that needs to be brought to attention.

Say hello, and hopefully goodbye, to MyWOT.

Once people start infringing on our freedoms of speech, there is no limit to what other freedoms they can take.

MyWOT is a website dedicated to securing your online privacy. They have four ratings– “Trustworthiness,” “Vendor reliability,” “Privacy,” and “Child safety.” Four things by which a website is rated.

Sounds like nothing can go wrong, right?

Except it seems like everything has gone wrong with it.

Take a moment to go to check the MyWOT rating for www.betternetworker.com. Here’s a comment from a dude named ‘SpamCop.’

“Appeared on an automatically composed list of spamvertised websites. (Low reliability)”

So… they use an “automatically composed list” of spamvertised websites to rate sites. Let’s look further.

“Get rich quick scam. see- http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/9009-get-rich-quick”

BetterNetworker.com, a get rich quick scam?

Furthermore, just go to that forum post about get-rich-quick scams. It includes any and all MLM, network marketing, affiliate marketing–basically, any sort of method to make money online.

Seriously, MyWOT? Way to discriminate.

So a few ignorant people get on this thing called MyWOT and they decide on what sorts of sites should be considered unsafe for children and basically unsafe for humanity.

What’s worse is that Facebook has partnered with MyWOT to decide what sorts of links you should be allowed to share and go to on Facebook.

Which means what? It means that the needs of the few are satisfied while the needs of the masses are ignored. It means that any sort of MLM is barred from Facebook simply because the MyWOT community deemed it unsafe.

It means that our freedom is being infringed upon because a small group of people don’t agree with us.

Yes, MyWOT has its uses. It has blocked my computer from malware (which my anti-virus program does for me) and it does warn against some scam-sites. However, when they group every single MLM company, affiliate marketing company (if you check the link above, the clickbank domain is noted as a get-rich-quick scam), and essentially every way of making money online, as a dangerous website… well, then it merely promotes bigotry and ignorance.

Do you want this small community censoring Facebook? We just beat SOPA, though it’s coming back. Let’s beat this MyWOT thing down. Let’s make it change its policies. Let’s lock arms and fight against any censorship of the Internet.

Let’s promote and exercise our freedom of expression and stop this right now.

Onto you: Let’s protect our freedom. Let’s take action now.

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=block_appeal <—- Here’s where you can object to a page that was blocked, with a direct appeal. Do this every time you see an industry post have the ‘MyWOT DANGER’ sign. (it is not dangerous – this site is dictatorial, see the video)

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=ui_links <——- Here’s how you can make a suggestion to how Facebook deals with external links – I also suggest complaining every single time you ever run into a MyWOT block. Censorship in any form, especially dictatorial in nature like this from a small group of bigots, can’t be tolerated from people who love freedom.

This is not just Empower Network - this is ALL industry websites that are having Facebook traffic negatively affected by this.

Here’s the message to send to Facebook:

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Facebook,

I wanted to report the inappropriate blocking of the following link: **put link here**

I am strongly requesting that Facebook stops it’s partnership with MyWOT. MyWOT is a totalitarian organization, and the way they rate websites is not only inaccurate and based on the ‘popular opinion’ rather than real data, it is harmful to small business.

If I, as a small business owner decided to shut down the Facebook traffic of a competitor, all I would need to do for almost all small businesses, is organize a coo of 5 people, and if we all voted negatively, we could immediately shut down any competitors website.

This strongly goes against my belief in Free Speech, and contributes to the forming of centralized power and inhibition in social communication, and I believe harms the Facebook community. Please consider immediately discontinuing all MyWOT relationships and ratings, it is interfering with my Facebook experience.

See the following articles for more information and complaints from the small business community that have been fraudulently deprived of social traffic, on the whims of a few bigots:

http://complaintwire.org/complaint/d6wBAAAAAAA/wot-web-of-trust

http://mywotscam.com/wotscam/

http://www.affhelper.com/mywot-reviews-exposed/

http://scamfraudalert.net/2011/05/25/mywot-com-is-a-fraud-system-that-fails-to-protect-people-from-real-security-threats/

http://dukeo.com/mywot-web-of-trust-review-modern-web-totalitarism/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-horton/facebook-mywot-and-crowds_b_862123.html

Here is a very good post directly on Facebook that explains the complete small business abuse that WOT inflicts on internet users:

http://www.facebook.com/antiwot/posts/198736643542362

I believe that Facebook’s reputation is harmed by it’s association with such a totalitarian organization, and I do not want ANY MyWOT blocks on my profile, for any reason. Thank you.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME HERE.

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SHARE this post with anyone you know who wants to KEEP our freedom of expression on Facebook.

In prosperity,

Rasheed

SHARE this post with anyone who respects freedom.