How To Deprive Mainstream Media Of Revenue And Get Around Their Paywalls

in media •  7 years ago  (edited)

Some people use private browsing to watch porn. I use it to read the Washington Post. And I probably feel a lot dirtier afterward.

I’ve been meaning to write this article as a public service so that my readers can understand how to navigate through today’s online media environment in a way that is least beneficial to the establishment propaganda machine. The following tricks aren’t new and I didn’t come up with them, but I keep getting people telling me they’re unfamiliar with them and they’re probably more important for this specific sector of online community than any other, so here’s me doing my part to spread awareness in a way that hopefully even the most internet-illiterate can understand.

First I want to talk about how to read articles by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. I know, I know, we all know those are corporatist warmongering propaganda rags, but it’s important to be able to find out what they’re saying so that those of us working to spread truth can fight their pernicious narratives with information. WaPo alone has ties to both the CIA and to a dangerous plutocrat who is trying to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy, so discovering what such an outlet wants us to believe is an important part of figuring out what’s going on in our world.

Trouble is, they’ve got a paywall. After a few free article reads in a month, when you try to read one of their articles you get a message like this instead:

From the feedback I’ve been getting from my audience, this is where a lot of people give up; the mind virus that this oligarchic mouthpiece is trying to implant in the public remains a mystery to them. There’s no need for that. What you do is open a private/incognito browser and paste the URL of the article you’re trying to read.

In Chrome, that means selecting “File” and then “New Incognito Window”:

In Safari same thing, but it’s “New Private Window”:

Then you paste the URL address of the article you’re trying to read in the new window you’ve just opened, and presto! Now you know that both WaPo and the Associated Press are circulating the story that Bashar al-Assad is using chemical weapons on civilians in Syria based once again on reports from the western-backed terrorist propaganda firm the White Helmets, also known as the “Syrian Civil Defense”.

So that’s a good tool for you personally to get around paywalls, but what about if you want to share that article online so that other people can see what fanciful stories the empire is trying to spread about Syria, Russia, Iran, North Korea, important grassroots political movements, etc? If you are as opposed to these establishment propaganda outlets as I am you probably want to avoid bringing them clicks if possible, because who wants to help financially subsidize the world’s brainwashing? One thing you can do to avoid this is use an archived link instead.

First go to archive.is and do a search in the bottom blue bar to see if someone has already made an archive of the article you want to share:

If you get no results, enter the URL into the top red bar and it will create an archive for you. You might have to clip off a few of the extra characters at the end of the URL until it ends in .com or .html or makes a normal address in order for it to work; I had to snip off the “?utm_term=.c04e9687cd0e” from the above URL, for example. It will only take a few seconds, during which you’ll get a screen that looks like this:

Then hey hey! You’ve got a link to an archive of the Washington Post article that you can share with your friends and followers without drawing revenue-generating traffic to a deep state psyop factory! I’m lazy about this myself sometimes, but we should all try to use archived links to MSM articles. Friends don’t let friends support propaganda.

Another added bonus of archiving links is that if there’s a sleazy edit made to one of the MSM’s infamous discredited Russiagate stories, for example, the information is publicly available to call them out on it.

Other MSM sites like the Wall Street Journal have gotten hip to the private browser trick and will often be inaccessible that way, but you can still go to archive.is and check if any good Samaritan has signed up with that outlet and archived the article you’re looking for. Very often they have, as in the screenshot above. Just go to the bottom blue bar at archive.is and do a search for the URL you’re trying to read.

Another trick you can try is a simple search of the exact headline or a snippet of text from the article you’re looking for. Often the text of the story will have been nabbed and republished by some smaller outlet or blog, and you can read it and share it from there. This trick works via mobile as well, which is nice.

And that’s really all you need. There are other methods you can use to get around paywalls, but I’ve never had to use them and I’m not sure about the legal gray areas involved in them, so I won’t endorse them here. I’ve been able to build a career on attacking mainstream media narratives using only the techniques described above, so they should work fine for you, too.

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Thanks Caitlin! I was hating that I felt like I had to subscribe to that warmonger rag the Washington Post in order to get the news out for the work I do. Now I'll be saving muh cash for real news. Cheers! ❤️

Ahh good! Yeah, Bezos doesn't need the cash.

But Caity, Jeff B really needs the $!

Informative article! Hadn't thought about it. What kind of masochist would pay to read WaPo?

Resteemed probably too soon. Oops

Caitlin: Thanks for that. I did recently find a WaPo article that amused me to no end, suggesting we MUST support NAFTA if we want to continue to enjoy McDonalds hamburgers. I must find that article now that I know I can share responsibly.

Politically speaking, if you monetarily support corporations which subjugate the people, then you're a party to your own subjugation. That's fine if you don't mind enabling them in exchange for a greasy cheeseburger and some fries, but everyone should be aware that giving your money to that kind of multinational corporation is to give them your political power. I personally think we should all be a LOT more selective about who we give our political power to than that.

We're down with disrupting the media cos, but there's a more constructive and more inspiring way than ripping off their content. They do, after all, pay writers to create it, so pirating it only undermines your arguments. Just don't read it. Get your news solely from publishers on writers on decentralized and p2p platforms like Steemit. Honestly it'll make you a lot happier, and everything you need to read you can read on here or Medium.

I agree except one point....people need to stop thinking Steemit is decentralized when in fact it is not. In a decentralized company or platform the power is distributed throughout on a EQUAL basis. The upper tier does not hold the vast majority of power or influence. It does not matter that they have "witnesses" it's no excuse to call yourself a decentralized platform.

That won't be true when Proof of Stake takes off.

Not really, the power will still be at the top, there will still be middlemen only called delegates this time and there will till be little lowly you and I.

For the writers trying to stay on top of establishment talking points, a sense of awareness is necessary for them to proactively refute deceptive claims. Casual readers have the luxury of sticking to indie platforms, but the authors who create their articles often have to observe how the narrative is trying to trick the public.

Some people use private browsing to watch porn. I use it to read the Washington Post. And I probably feel a lot dirtier afterward.

Great opening lines. Thanks for suggesting this way around as I've noticed that many publishers, not just the CIA-WaPo-Amazon group, are requiring people to turn off their ad-blockers in order to see their articles.

Yeah, I discovered the private browsing trick by accident myself a few months ago. You all are doing very important work bringing us the truth of the news rather than the corrupted worldview the MSM drags over our eyes 24/7/366

I'll stick to the por n.

Some things are just too disgusting...wapo being one of them.😂

2nd comment ❤❤

Had not given it any thought to archive and bypass their ad revenue, brilliant, thank you!

Great tips. You link to a Mintpress News article. Is this outlet on Steemit by any chance?

Way to stick it to the man, Caitlin.

Thanks Caitlin, you're the best! your articles are a tonic

It does my heart good to see old fashioned information warfare being undertaken - and taught.

I wish you'd shared this post under the #informationwar tag, so more folks with that mindset might not have missed it. I reckon it'd be a better tag than wapo.

Thanks very much!

Great post and great information. As I was reading I was thinking why would any one pay for that propaganda but you did a great job explaining that. However I personally think that reading their garbage news knowing it’s propaganda can still have a negative affect on us that we don’t always see consciously and that extreme caution must be used. And that not everyone reading their news knows how or what to decern should probably stay away from it all together. May I add, I think it’s also part of their brainwashing that paying for their media some how legitimizes them above the others. Anyway I get what your saying and agree completely it really enjoy this post. As Sun Tzu author of Art of War said”Know they Enemy”.