The Famous 25 Lost Candy Bars of the 1970s

People are googling for the recipes for the "lost" candy bars of our childhood, and not getting a nice printable article on the subject--only tedious videos. This web site will now fill an information need:

First...it's not true that there were 25 candy bars that were banned. About twenty candy bar wrappers were banned in 1976 because they were made with dyes that tended to seep into the food inside (it was not always or only candy). The companies could have repackaged the candy bars, and did try with a few brands, but decided these candy bars weren't big sellers anyway. In some cases they were clearly weaker competitors with brands that are still selling well. 

But a few of these candy bars might be brought back, with better branding and packaging.

1. Ayds 

These chocolates were marketed as weight loss "aids," not candy, although candy is what they were. They were made with artificial sweeteners and chemicals that were fairly toxic. They sold well to dieters, and were reformulated a few times, but then a new wave of attention to a disease called AIDS killed the brand forever. 

2. Candy Cigarettes 

Cinnamon candies with bright red tips, designed to attract children to the body language associated with smoking cigarettes? Well, that idea didn't fly for long. I don't remember a difference in the flavor between Cigarettes and ordinary Red Hots. Then again I didn't like either one...

3. Space Dust

Same sort of thing as Pop Rocks: lumps of sugar, artificially flavored and colored to suggest fruit, that fizzed on contact with saliva. They just weren't as strong a competitor because parents had heard scary stories about "angel dust" and thought Space Dust was a gateway, horrors. Loss to society? Nil. We still have Pop Rocks.

4. Big Time 

Thicker, peanut-enhanced version of the Milkshake bar, q.v. This one might be brought back.

5. Butternut 

Butternuts are a native American tree species, with edible nuts, in the walnut family but (I think) much nicer tasting than any other walnuts. Butternut candy bars did not contain butternuts, which would have been one valid reason to ban them (false advertising), but the candy was never banned. I never actually saw one; they weren't a nationally popular brand. They are described as like Snickers with more peanuts. Like the majority of candies that disappeared in the mid-1970s, they came in wrappers with red, yellow, or violet colors that were banned for adding toxicity to the candy, and the company decided not to try different packaging as the candies weren't doing as well anyway. Apparently people who had the choice preferred a higher ratio of sugar to peanuts, as in Snickers.

6. Caravelle

Caramel, lightened with crisped rice and/or pecans, wrapped in chocolate, sold fairly well but not so well that the company bothered designing new wrappers for them. 

7. Charleston Chew

Sticky chewy taffy that just might pull out the fillings from teeth that might have got cavities from chewing on too much sugar, already. Some people did like it. Charleston Chew was sold as a long strip of candy guaranteed to make a disgusting sticky mess. Then a different manufacturer bought the brand and repackaged it as bite-sized candies wrapped in chocolate, a little less messy, though when it got into the hands of children... Anyway, although some people liked this confection, more people hated it. It was banned, because the strawberry flavor was actually made with a toxic red dye, but was brought back with a red dye that seemed safer. It just didn't sell as well as other candies.

8. Cherry Humps

The idea might be revived, but they'd need a new name. The original idea was simply chocolate-covered cherries sold as candy bars at checkout counters. The cherries were preserved in "cordial" and wrapped in chocolate. Whole cherries formed little bumps in the chocolate bar. They were dyed red. The FDA objected to the dye. No dye, or a safer dye, didn't sell so well The company tried using chopped cherry bits in cherry-flavored pink nougat to fill chocolate bars. That didn't sell very well either. Apparently customers were emotionally attached to those dyed cherries. Today's customers have not formed such attachments...but real cherries aren't cheap. Fake cherries? Meh. I wouldn't buy them. It would have to be real cherries and, for me to buy candy bars, the price would need to drop back to 50 cents for the small bar, $1 for the large one.

9. Chicken Dinner 

The brand was patented about a hundred years ago, when many people thought of salt pork as their primary source of protein (which meant they were actually getting their protein from whole grains and beans, salt pork being mostly fat) and a chicken dinner as a special treat. So, this candy bar was the special dessert treat to be served with the chicken dinner. The chocolate bar was filled with peanuts and caramel, a recipe that worked better as Snickers.

10. Chocolite

Another candy marketed to dieters, this one consisted of real chocolate with air whipped into it so you ingested less chocolate, thus fewer calories and less fat and sugar, with the same size chocolate bar you were in the habit of buying. Europeans actually like this; they buy similar treats called Aero Bars. Chocolite was not a big seller in the US. Perhaps if it cost less than solid chocolate bars, in proportion to the amount of chocolate it contained, the brand might be revivied.

11. Coconut Grove

Wads of heavily sweetened coconut dipped in chocolate, not unlike Mounds. This idea might be revived by someone who doesn't mind that peanuts outsell coconuts in the US. Some people did like the coconut alternative, and still do.

12. Cristy

'Another peanut-nougat-chocolate bar that didn't sell as well as Snickers.

13. Denver Sandwich

I never heard of it, but apparently some people out West liked this version of peanuts, nougat, caramel, and sometimes crispy wafers in a chocolate shell. In the Eastern States we still have Snickers and Twix.

14. Hollywood

Another version of nougat, caramel, and peanuts covered in chocolate in a banned bright red package. I remember eating this one and thinking it wasn't as good as Snickers.

15. Marathon

Just caramel covered in chocolate made a cheap enough bar that the company could afford to make it much longer than competing chocolate bars. As a teenaged candy connoisseur I thought it was boring, but some people did like sticky caramel.

16. Milkshake

This one and the spin-off Big Time brand really were unique. They were made of malted-milk-flavored nougat. Nobody else ever replicated the recipe. It's thought to have involved special processing equipment that was destroyed by a fire. The malted nougat was covered in caramel, then in chocolate. The package was banned for being made with toxic dyes, but the company repackaged the candies and were able to sell them in the late 1970, before the fire.

17. No Jelly

Basically a peanut granola bar that just begged to be slathered with jelly or jam. The package was banned. The candy was fine; newer versions of it are on the market now.

18. PB Max

Peanut butter oatmeal cookies, with peanut butter filling, covered in chocolate...the brand survived into the 1980s but just didn't sell as well as similar cookies that were packaged as cookies.

19. Powerhouse

Caramel, peanuts, and chocolate fudge wrapped in chocolate. The wrapping was banned; the company was able to sell the candy in a different package until a corporate merger prompted the decision that it wasn't selling as well as Snickers.

20. Reggie

Caramel and peanuts coated with chocolate sold as round, baseball-shaped souvenirs of baseball star Reggie Jackson during Jackson's active career. He retired about the time the company had to repackage the candy, so they didn't bother.

21. Seven Up

There were several different versions, some cheaper than others, of the chocolate bar consisting of seven distinct bite-sized pieces of chocolate wrapped around different fillings, to be eaten one piece at a time or more than one at a time. The most common version had mint, nougat, butterscotch, fudge, coconut, buttercreme, and caramel fillings. Other fillings included peanuts, chopped brazilnuts, almond pralines, butterscotch, dark chocolate "truffle" candy, vanilla custard, Irish Cream, pistachio nougat, maple toffee, peanut butter, and pineapple. The FDA banned one wrapper and some of the sweeteners used with some of the fillings. Still, these chocolate bars were popular and survived repackaging easily--they'd been repackaged to advertise new flavor mixes several times before. What they did not survive was a lawsuit for copyright infringement. The company tried marketing chocolate bars with sections of different fillings in the 19808s and 1990s, but seven seemed to be the magic number for bites of different candy and apparently nobody wanted to try renaming the candy anything like "Sampler Seven." 

22. Snik Snak

Wafers layered with chocolate, like Twix. People who lived in places where this alternative brand was sold say it was different from Twix. I wouldn't know. 

23. Triple Decker

Layers of milk chocolate, white chocolate, and dark chocolate, on top of each other and all covered in dark chocolate, so that the different kinds of chocolate melted together in the mouth when people bit into one very thick bar of pure chocolate. Some people liked the candy (I don't think I ever saw it), but changing the wrapper was the least of the company's worries. The dark chocolate coating tended to stick to whatever wrapper they used. Some people thought the texture of the chocolate needed to be lightened with nuts. That wasn't easy to make work, either. The idea of just packaging three separate thin bars of chocolate in a stack, so that people could bite into them together or separately, doesn't seem to have been considered. 

24. Walnut Crush

This one was unique: chopped walnuts in white nougat with a thin outer shell of chocolate. Price may have been the reason why nobody tried repackaging this candy bar. Enough people like walnuts that it might sell, though not, of course, as fast as peanuts.

25. Whiz

Peanuts suspended in marshmallow, covered in chocolate, just might have worked if the company had worked at marketing them. Mallo Cups will never sell as well as Reese's Cups but they do sell. 

Disqualified for This List 

Mars Bars consisted of nougat, caramel, and almonds wrapped in chocolate. They don't qualify for this list because they were sold in the US into the early 1980s. In 1982 Sue Townsend had an American character who didn't recognize them and had to be told about them by other children when he visited England. This is anachronistic. Americans knew about the whole-almond bars, though perhaps American candy munchers didn't want to risk their teeth actually eating them. Or maybe it was the fatal commercial where that baritone who'd done the other commercials about Mars Bars being "out of this world," and so on, said "You get big crunchy nuts in a Mars Bar." The commercial aired around the time kids my age were discovering that "big crunchy nuts" had an alternative meaning. It always seemed to me that the candy bar died of embarrassment. Anyway it was officially discontinued in the 1980s due to declining sales, then brought back as Almond Snickers. 

As a bonus idea, one of the videos about these vanished candy bars self-advertises with a picture of a once popular dessert that was never marketed as a candy bar--white "seafoam" or "divinity" candy with chopped-up gumdrops suspended in it like stained glass. Seafoam candy was cheap, though hard to make. It was a popular party dish because it needs teamwork; someone has to pour hot syrup slowly over egg whites while someone else is beating them. In the 1970s fear that the hot syrup didn't cook the egg enough to kill possible salmonella pushed seafoam candy completely out of fashion. White nougat and white chocolate with bits of fruit jelly candy, possibly in the classic seven-bites arrangement, just might be a marketable idea.

Stores I Wish Still Existed

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asked about stores that we wish still existed.

https://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-July-8-2026/

Since I came in late, I can report on what everyone else named...

How could you not guess reviewers would put this first? Independent locally owned bookstores: Every middle-aged person probably knows at least one that closed because some dear older person or couple retired. Oh the days! Add mine to two other votes for bookstores as a general category.

Woolworth's: Sort of a smaller, older precursor to Wal-Mart, a discount department store where the young and underpaid used to look for most of the non-food items we bought. My Woolworth's memories include the ridiculous (the Tarr Shampoo Boy), the still vaguely embarrassing ("If they're not impressed by your resume yet, you'll just have to meet an employer the way they did in old movies. Wear your good school clothes, buy lunch and a newspaper at Woolworth's, and get to know the people who own all those offices!"), and the pure nostalgic delight: I still knit with my Woolworth's 9-pack plastic needles--some of them--and still wear, with pride, the first few sweaters I knitted with yarn from Woolworth's. Add mine to two votes for Woolworth's.

Record stores: To one vote for record stores as a general category, I'll add mine. Takoma Park's House of Musical Traditions sold records, sheet music, instruments, replacement parts, and accessories, and was a great place for anyone who liked music to spend as much time and money as possible. It still exists but it now specializes in instruments, not records. What students with only $5 to spend in any given week are missing!

Clothing stores: This is one type of store that should not be allowed to be eaten up by online stores. For some things, like T-shirts, mail-ordering a "small/medium/large" and finding out how it fits when it arrives may be good enough. For school, work, and party clothes, fit matters and people who buy off-the-rack clothes should insist on trying them on before they pay. Of course, store fitting rooms have always had bad lighting. People have assumed the colors would look better in natural light. That this assumption was often over-optimistic has traditionally fed the good charity stores where people sent their clothes for re-purchase by those whom they actually suited, heh-heh! Mail-order clothes ought in theory to feed even more clothes to charity stores but, hello, they're not feeding in good clothes, the kind one can be proud of saying one bought for two dollars in aid of the Prevention of Blindness Society. Too much of what people order online from Zara and Zulily and similar looks sleazy even before it's been washed and falls apart after. Add mine to one vote for clothing stores.

Malls: "One for all and all to the mall!" Children of two working parents used to be given some money and encouraged to hang out on shopping malls after school, before a parent came to meet them. It worked better for some kids than for others. Some teenagers were responsible enough to walk ten laps up and down the mall with friends, buy groceries for the family before Mom or Dad came to the mall, and save the money they had left for clothes, records, etc. Unfortunately several malls found that kids hanging out after school stole more than they bought. Meh. I never was a real fan of shopping malls, though I did meet the serious boyfriend while working a pushcart on an upscale mall; there was that. Two votes for malls.

Blockbuster: It seemed as if you could rent every movie in the known universe on videocassette at Blockbuster. I never actually rented a movie myself but I went to Blockbuster so many times with friends, friends' children, boyfriend, husband... Add mine to one vote for Blockbuster.

"Dollar theatre," a pre-TV concept where teenagers and/or local groups of people with special interests enjoyed semi-private chaperoned entertainment watching movies from bygone years for a dollar. (The Snarkout Boys, a two-volume series by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, was about teenagers who became friends through "sneaking out" to that sort of theatre.) We didn't really have one in any place where I ever lived; the closest thing was a church-subsidized Christian Cinema, free with offerings taken up at intermission, that operated in Kingsport for a few years. In Gate City, "Cotton" Roberts' "topless theatre" has been given a temporary roof and could easily be opened as a Dollar Theatre by any local movie buffs who want to revive, say, cowboy movies, or Disney Movies from the Walt & Roy Years, or silent movies, or, oh, any specialty that's popular enough to have its own Roku channel... Anyway, one vote for "dollar theatre." 

Waldenbooks: Never as big as Barnes & Noble or Books a Million, but it used to be a nice chain. One vote for Waldenbooks.

Child World: I don't remember this but it sounds like a toy store. One vote for Child World.

Pay Saver: Apparently that was another discount department store. One vote for Pay Saver.

Netto: George Thomas describes this as a Danish-based store that apparently spread to the UK and offered good prices on groceries. One vote for Netto.

The Harmony Club: Described as a "hangout" operated hippie style, more for fun than profit. Few of those survived even the 1970s but oh, they were fun. One vote for the Harmony Club.

Bookstar: Described as a large local chain bookstore. One vote for Bookstar.

Wet'n'Wild: Described as a water park. One vote for Wet'n'Wild.

Odyssey Records: Described as a specific, local record store in Las Vegas. One vote for Odyssey Records.

I should add something. Nobody else has mentioned a wool shop. So many needlecrafters saved up to open a wool shop to run for ten or twenty years between official "retirement" from a job working for someone else and real retirement. Often the shop reopened as a different store, in the same location with some of the same inventory, several times and customers hardly even noticed. Inez's Stitchery in Kensington (often classified as part of Silver Spring but it's a separate place), Maryland, was unique and probably couldn't have been run by anyone else. There was a real Inez; she was awful, but she stocked good yarns and pattern books and she could teach beginners how to knit, sew, and crochet. Even if you didn't like Inez, personally--did anyone?--you'd work there as Christmas help for the discounts. It was a huge store, the top half of a whole building. It had something for everyone who had discovered it. It was publicized and patronized by Goldie Hawn, whom I met while Christmas-helping there. (She was just a hometown girl shopping in her old favorite store. She was, at the time, much prettier in real life than her characters in movies; still, there are a lot of good-looking women in Silver Spring, so it was the voice that made me stop and stare, "Is that REALLY...?") I think I've sold everything I made with yarn from Inez's but I still have some of the pattern books.

How Much Is Advertising Hurting Products?

"It pays to advertise," we've all heard. If products and businesses aren't advertised, how will people know they exist? 

Then again, how many people do you know who actually look at advertisements, or watch TV commercials? Can it really pay to be noticed...as a nuisance? Do you really want an image that subconsciously triggers people to reach for the remote control to get your product off the TV screen?

Some smarty-pants researchers will tell you that you do. For some audiences, it seems, shopping is mindless. The more obnoxious the TV commercial is, the more likely some people are to forget the commercial, remember the brand, and think "Hmmm...wanna try that," when they're wandering through the mall in a hung-over, Homer-Simpson-like state of consciousness. You could bottle sewage and label it sewage and at some times of day Homer would probably look at the bottle, say "Hmmm...sewage," and drink it. So in theory, if you annoy people enough with an advertisement for a box of old broken rusty nails that starts with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, what some shoppers have in the way of a thought process will go "Hmmm...Rusty Nails! Just what the living room shelf needs!" 

Those people are not writers. They are not artists. They are not the people who spend a lot of time using the Internet for things other than games and movies. 

Writers, artists, and early adopters of computer technology generally, have more completely developed brains and nervous systems than Homer Simpson has. They're the ones who either walk out of the store that sells Rusty Nails, or say to the storekeeper, "You're trying to sell old broken rusty nails that are advertised with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, now? What's wrong?" 

A majority of us are introverts. Introverts' social behavior, when it does not consist of moving away from obnoxious extroverts, is based on showing respect. We don't run up and chatter at people because our more completely developed brains contain a set of neurons that might as well be called a conscience, which tells us that people have their own lives and running up and chattering at them is disrespectful. Other people would have no reason to like us if they perceived us as pushy pests. What does that tell you about advertisements? 

And yes, we do remember it when we decide, even in grade six, to stop buying a favorite snack because we found a TV commercial that advertised it annoying. 

I am not making this up. My brother and I stopped buying M&Ms, which had been our treat of choice almost every time we went to the store, during the year he was in grade six because we thought that year's TV commercial campaign was insulting to kids.

People who spend a lot of time using the Internet for things other than games and movies have other things in common besides being introverts. Most of us are, or feel that we are, underpaid, so we shop mindfully and frugally. Many of us go online from work or school rather than having Internet connections at home; at work or school making an impulse purchase online might have repercussions, so a lot of us are never going to make an impulse purchase online. Many of us read Consumer Reports and check the customer reviews before choosing to buy things that cost more than, say, a dollar. Some of us don't buy things that used to cost less and now cost more than a dollar. 

Most of us are security-conscious, so forget all about "targeted advertising." It's true that people in cold climates buy more snow tires than people in the tropics do, that men don't buy a lot of bras, and that very few people whose title is "Rabbi" are going to buy pork sausages...but what you need to know is that security-conscious Internet users don't like the idea that you know which country we're in, unless we told you. Don't try to find out more information about us. The more you seem to know, the more we want to avoid you. If anything, advertising products that are not actually sold in our country gives me a pleasing sense that you're minding your own business and not meddling with mine. 

Less stalking, less of an attempt to get inside our heads and manipulate our thoughts, and more of a straightforward interest in making sure people know about your product, is generally good for your image. Don't try to tell us anything like "You want this" or "You should do this." That kind of message is disrespectful. Tell us what your product is. If you can tell us what it costs, with one price for everyone, that's a plus point.

In real life, promotions that offer discounts for people in certain categories--seniors, teachers, veterans, people who are willing to tell storekeepers if it's their birthday--can work well for stores. Online, that kind of promotion is very bad. It's disrespectful to try to find out whether Internet users actually are dogs. One price for all is the only rule that looks ethical to Americans.

We trust one another more than we trust you. We think the Internet is an ideal place for messages like "Don't buy Brand X cereal--I opened a new box and a live mouse jumped out of it." Don't try to oppose this. Use it. Let people see how seriously you take quality control. That mouse in the box of cereal doesn't have to destroy the brand if you recall the batch, close the plant for cleaning, and of course apologize profusely to the customer. If you don't do those things and your brand suffers, we figure you deserve it.

The appropriate response to the street phrase "Prozac Dementia" would have been to suspend sales of Prozac until it could be made to stop causing dementia. The appropriate response to Glyphosate Awareness would have been to pull all glyphosate products off the market. The appropriate response to the "vaccines cause autism" whine would have been to address the fact that vaccine reactions may include fever, which may cause brain damage, which may include autism, and level with parents about whether diseases like measles are more likely to cause autism than the vaccines are. Trying to censor the complaints, instead, has destroyed the credibility of the entire brands of Bayer, Lilly, and Merck. Their best move would be to pay all claims against them now and then either dissolve, or maintain a very low profile for the next thirty years.

Most of us are White but we are, or like to think we are, hip enough not to mind when disproportionate numbers of advertisements feature non-White models. However, most White people know that styles that look good on a Black person probably won't do much for us. Thousands of short, average-sized blondes may have deluded themselves in 1982 that what looked good on Diana Spencer might work for them, though most of them have learned something from that mistake, but they don't think that what looks good on Nicki Minaj will work for them. Quite a few Internet aficionados are Asian, and some are Black, so there's nothing wrong with designing and marketing styles for non-White people online. Just balance inclusiveness with practicality.

Some of us honestly don't notice or care about clothes as long as they cover as much skin as is required by local law. Some of us are fashion-conscious and may, if we're not thinking about something else, do detailed analyses of what is and isn't working for the celebrity or model on the screen. No, this does not mean that we're attracted to the model. Yes, in fact, any suggestion that we're thinking about the model as anything but part of a fashion image is likely to be offensive.

Even if the primary content is a football game you can never afford to assume that the Internet audience is all male. Even those of us who are male are likely to be in heterosexual relationships. Don't tolerate content, messages, or comments that offend women.

Be cautious even about things that are controversial among different social groups of women. I am a lady, and if you can't avoid calling me in public, the least obnoxious thing to call me is "Ma'am." (I don't particularly like "Ma'am," either, and if you are a store employee "My Lord and Master the Honorable Customer" might be more appropriate, but I ignore people who blat out my name in public and I think people who call strangers by what are generally perceived as terms of endearment need to be in prison.) I don't understand why some women who are not ladies wouldn't want to be included in the category of ladies, but some women don't. So how do you address the female customers in the audience? By showing a product that females buy, of course. Words like "dresses" or "lipstick" are personal enough.

A majority of Internet users, though only a minority of people in the real world, hold political views that could be described as left-of-center. Don't mistake "majority" for "everyone." Don't signal stupidity by participating in stereotypes about "conservatives" being racists or fascists. Don't show bigotry with stereotypes about "DEI hires" being incompetent tokens, either.

A personal site or social media page that shows no political leanings whatsoever loses credibility. There may be no need to endorse candidates or parties but readers will want to know what basis you have for whatever statements you make. Individuals have personal tastes and opinions. A majority of Internet users vote Democrat but those of us who are not in the Democratic Socialists clique, even among D voters, do look for evidence that the individual is observing, thinking, writing, singing, etc., about the real world rather than partisan rhetoric. Ability to work with Rs is a good quality for a D to have. Ability to like and be amused by D extremists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is a good quality even for Rs to have, but seriously backing their bids for presidential campaigns raises questions of credibility.

A business site doesn't need to mention anything that's not directly related to business. A business can have a blog with monthly posts on topics like "How different are this year's blenders from last year's blenders?" or "How to change the ink cartridges in the Model XYZ printer," without losing credibility. 

Some specific rules for Internet advertising can also be included in the category of showing respect. Here's a short list of fifteen:

1. Don't show the same ad in the same place twice. That means that, if people are logged into sites like Youtube or X, you should ask those sites to make sure they don't show the same ad to the same account twice.

2. Require political campaign ads to focus on who the candidate advertised is, what that person has done in the past, and/or what that person hopes to do if elected. Don't focus on the opposition. Advertising tends to arouse reactions on a spectrum from skeptical to hostile, at best, and if a political ad tries to show "the worst of" another candidate the effect on voters can easily be, "The worst of Candidate B looks better than the best of Candidate A." Images showing a candidate shaking someone's hand, debating with an opponent, or posing for a family picture are acceptable as long as they make it absolutely clear whom they're about. E.g., if more than one face can be seen in a photo, be sure the candidate's face is front and center.

3. Don't advertise patent remedies for anything. Don't show or discuss any part of the body in health or disease. (Yes, you can advertise shoes without mentioning feet.) Anyone stupid enough to pay for an advertisement in the genre of "This product may cause blindness, cancer, projectile vomiting even in people who have not heard this advertisement, abnormal growths in bizarre places, and sudden death in people under age . Ask your doctor today whether this product is right for YOUR seasonal allergies!" should not be talking to adults outside the family without supervision.

4. There's nothing wrong with "funny" ads where people show how clueless and confused they can be. There's nothing wrong with ads where people proclaim in authoritative tones that "This product out-performed twenty other competing products at removing stains from a white rug" or "This product contains lavender oil." There is, however, a tedious and offensive stereotype about ads where a woman plays the clueless character and a man speaks with the voice of authority. Don't use that combination. 

5. Actually, considering the sensitivities of some Internet users, it's a good idea to try to avoid using images of living people in advertisements at all. You can display pictures of shirts on hangers, food on tables, cars on roads, etc., without showing a single human face. Try it! It saves the cost of paying models!

6, If you really want to attract the eye to an ad, turn off all the sound. People who are in the habit of ignoring commercial natter will look at the screen to see what's wrong. That's when they'll see your product and associate it with a feeling of relief--"Oh, it's only a quiet advertisement." 

7. One advertisement among fifty social media posts is acceptable. The current formula at X, e.g., is not acceptable. For me to go back to using X regularly I'd need to see a solid majority of posts from the free accounts of private people and a minimum of posts from corporations or politicians. That includes news headlines. I used to use Twitter for the news headlines but that was before the Trusted News Initiative. I don't want to support censored news sites in any way; until the New York Times has fully repudiated TNI and run whole front-section features about why people should not use those profitable products whose manufacturers wanted censorship, I'd as soon be seen looking at porn as looking at a NYT headline.  

8.. Up to two minutes of advertisement per hour of video content is acceptable, provided that the ad does not interrupt a speech or a piece of music. If the choice is between 2:01 minutes and 1:35 minutes, always go with 1:35.

9. Understand that, if you want to sell anything to Internet users, your best bet would be to discard the advertisements and pay Internet users to produce content about your products' reviews and ratings. The experience of reading those reviews and ratings in order to write an article or present a photo essay about what people who did use it liked about your product is more likely than anything else to make Internet users think thoughts like "I might find a use for a blender some day, and if I did Brand X seems to be a good brand." Sometimes it might even get your product onto an Amazon Wish List.

10. People who read other people's personal blogs will probably skip the product reviews. If they do read the product reviews, they're looking for a flippant, snarky tone, not a gush of praise that nobody's going to believe. The overall tone of a good personal product review is favorable to the product, but phrasings that show that it's an individual's thoughts NOT a Madison Avenue advertisement are also important. 

Seriously. As a bookseller I've found that sparing use of certain phrases that living writers don't like to see in book reviews consistently moves books:

* "I don't like this kind of thing myself, but some people do."

* "This book has a strong enough sense of place to make me feel glad that, whatever else may be going wrong, I'm not in the place this book is written about."

* "This writer completely misunderstands (women, vegetarians, people who buy canned soup) and shouldn't have tried to write about them."

* "There is some good material in this book. All of that good material is better expressed in other books on the subject, such as __, __, and __. What is uniquely found in this book is a load of pants."

* "The funny stories in this book didn't make me laugh, but some of the serious exposition did."

Book readers will buy books, and other things, just to see which side of a difference they are on. If the product is salty garlic-flavored toothpaste, and some people say "That's a disgusting idea" and others say "That's a refreshing change from sweet mint- or cinnamon-flavored toothpaste," book readers will want to find out firsthand where they stand in this controversy. So don't be afraid to ask bloggers for honest product reviews, even if what they say about some products is "The product arrived with an important working part broken, and while it was on the porch the neighbor's dog expressed his opinion of the product in such a way that I've never actually used it as advertised, but it makes a nice $79 flowerpot." 

11. The key to using individual bloggers' research pieces about product ratings is to plan on a slow steady trickle of results. Many Internet users are poor; many are "retired"; many have disabilities. We aren't going to buy sports cars. We do, however, have young relatives who might be interested in such things. We can say to them, "Well, the Gran Gasto seems to run about twice as long on average as the Depense Extreme runs before breaking down. The Molto Costoso has a lot of transmission problems," and they pass this along to their friends, and the overall result may sell a few dozen Gran Gastos. If you are planning to downgrade the Gran Gasto once you've attracted interest to the name, you are not a nice person and we'll make sure everybody knows that too. Plan on at least a five-year sales cycle for the Gran Gasto.

12. There are brands that do "sell themselves." They sell the stores that retail them. Stores in my neighborhood don't hang out signs saying "Try 'Carhartt' brand workwear"; they hang out signs saying "We have Carhartt." I suppose there might once have been ads for Carhartt but the way people my age found out about it was probably going to a job site in some cute little outfit we had worn to a few college classes, and having a senior co-worker say, while snapping the cuffs up or down on his insulated coveralls, "What you need is a Carhartt." Or they read a report from some place that had had a problem with bogus disaster relief volunteers whose real interest was access to the contents of damaged houses in a nicer neighborhood than their own, and the writer said, "If you come around here offering to help rebuild houses, and I don't see your tool kit and Carhartt..." That is the kind of "advertising" Internet users trust, ourselves, and the kind you want to let us help you build...if your product deserves it. Be honest with yourself. The only way to get the kind of free advertising Carhartt gets is to deliver the kind of product Carhartt delivers.

13. If yours is one of the brands that advertise its retailers more than vice versa, consider whether cutting advertising expenses might be more profitable than any kind of advertising. The world does not need another Coca-Cola ad jingle. Most people can sing two or three different ones already. Coca-Cola might benefit from more sales, and at this point the way it could get them would be to stop advertising and cut the price of a 2L bottle back to 89 cents. What we all learned from the "make soda pop controversial and raise the price" campaign is that a lot of former Coca-Cola drinkers find that generic cola drinks aren't bad.

14. Unless your product is exclusively for some sort of minority lifestyle choice, avoid associating it with any specific lifestyle choice. People avoid buying things they associate with people they don't want to be like. They may give you credit for niceness if your ad for children's play clothes features a child in a wheelchair or even a child wearing glasses, but they'll buy the clothes modelled by a child in perfect health. Most men don't want anything worn or used by a male model shown touching another man, either--they don't want to invite that kind of attention. Relatively thin women don't buy things they've seen modelled by fatter women. Some people in their thirties even avoid things they've seen modelled by people in their sixties. And you do not want to put a spokesman for anything as controversial as, say, choosing not to homeschool when the choice was available, at the front of an ad campaign.

15. Music or words. Not both. Never, never, never keep a drum beating in the background while someone brays about your product. It sounds so much like an old-school used car advertisement that it would turn me off even an old-school used car dealership. Music playing while the words you want to associate with the product appear on the screen makes the important statement that you're a polite, respectful company. People talking--normally, never loudly, never using the imperative mood--can help clear up any confusion shoppers may have expressed about whether the garlic paste in the tube is meant to go on toothbrushes, on sandwiches, or both. But choose between words or music.

Should Web Sites Remove Misleading Health Information?

The breakthrough occurred during the coronavirus panic, while so many adults who had been using the Internet from work or school were offline. The multitudes of polls and surveys on this subject finally told some people what they wanted to hear: a Yahoo News survey found a sample of Web users who wanted web sites to protect them from “misleading information” about health matters.

Interesting. Wonder why I didn’t get that survey? Maybe because the subjects were set up to respond as they did by watching a movie, which my computer wouldn’t have played, that pretended to “document” blatantly false, upsetting “information” about COVID-19 having been deliberately bioengineered.

No points for guessing that the survey was sponsored by some corporation whose executives hoped the survey could be used to suppress accurate information by association with the misleading kind. It is in fact misleading to state that “Vaccines cause autism,” so Merck and other pharmaceutical companies’ official are no doubt drooling with the hope of persuading web sites to suppress more accurate information like “Individual reactions to vaccines can include fevers high enough to do permanent brain damage, which may produce or aggravate autism.”

It’s hairsplitting, but surely everyone sees the difference? Masses of people who are not autistic have had vaccines, so obviously vaccines don’t always cause autism. On the other hand hundreds of children who seemed normal before having certain vaccines have seemed autistic afterward, so, equally obviously, vaccines had something to do with their autism. The simple physical process by which some vaccine reactions produce or aggravate autism has been accepted by responsible pediatricians for more then sixty years. It’s not news. In fact, denying that a measles vaccination may make all the difference in whether a given child will become or seem autistic would be misleading information.

How do people recognize "fake news"? Well, on a five-minute timed test, they don't--and this came as a shock to some people. 

During the Trump Administration a hurricane left many people without electricity or drinking water in Puerto Rico. This web site was one of several that posted nags like our little ditty, "Our territories we'll protect, we said, come flood, come fire. If we don't stand by Puerto Rico, then we are a liar. A liar, a liar, we'll be a big fat LIIIIar..." Naomi Parker, whose blog is about knitting patterns, posted more political comments on Twitter and was also vocal about our obligations to Puerto Rico. So some Tweep of hers teased her and her other Tweeps with a bit of fake news. Trump had invited Puerto Rican hurricane victims to stay in Florida, but he was going to seize their passports and make them pay to get them back. 

Instantly NP and I posted comments like "How tacky can you get?" 

Then, because this was a qiestion of human rights and not merely budgeting, I asked first: "They have passports? People on that income level usually don't have passports. Why would they need passports anyway--they are U.S. citizens. They can visit any State for as long as they want and go back to their own Territory when they want."

And then we recognized that the news item was fake news. "Gotcha!" the joker scored off, by now, a couple dozen of NP's Tweeps who'd posted things like "How tacky can you get?" There has always been some fake news out there. Much of it slips past people because they don't really care. When people care whether a news story is true or not, they may not recognize fake news on sight but they can and do recognize it by following up on it. 

I say large multi-user web sites should continue to assume no responsibility for whatever facts, opinions, or outright lies people choose to post. I say people who read the words, if not people who believe whatever they see in a movie, are capable of remembering that anybody can post anything on Twitter, including typographical errors like omitting negative particles. That is, it’s possible for people to intend to tweet “It’s not raining outside” and actually post “It’s raining outside.” So if you see outright lies, e.g. “Glyphosate is safe” or “Measles is a deadly disease from which measles vaccines, which are harmless, keep us safe” or “The temperature in Virginia was 69 degrees Celsius at the time of writing,” on Twitter you check the facts elsewhere. You know that few people would survive if the temperature were 69 degrees Celsius so you automatically think “The person meant 69 degrees Fahrenheit.” About other things people say out loud or post on forum sites as if they were facts, you might need more work to reach a less positive conclusion.

Measles is a mostly trivial disease that can cause complications, including high fevers, brain or nerve damage most often associated with blindness, and death, in a minority of vulnerable individuals. Measles vaccines are a mostly non-fatal cure that can cause complications, including high fevers, brain or nerve damage most often associated with conditions that resemble autism, and death, in a minority of vulnerable individuals. Measles is a virus, which means vaccines contain live virus and are extremely susceptible to contamination. It also means the virus can mutate, so measles vaccines do not necessarily guarantee lifelong immunity to measles; people who’ve had either measles or the vaccine don’t “come down” with the disease but they can have unmistakable symptoms of it, twenty or thirty years later. The facts about measles and vaccines generally may not be as prejudicial to Merck as the facts about certain specific batches of Merck vaccines have been, but the facts are not “product-supportive.” After exposure to accurate facts on this topic many, if not most, people will not want the vaccine. And accurately reported facts will dramatically reduce sales of flu vaccine and other vaccines against minor diseases, too.

About health matters, the corporations will frantically admit when confronted with the product-unfriendly facts, there are, um, er, a lot more opinions than facts. This is true. For example, “[Cows’] milk is the perfect food [for humans]” definitely qualifies as misleading information, but what about “Cows’ milk has some place in a healthy diet for humans”? The majority of humans, worldwide, lose lactose tolerance at least by the age of fifteen! “Cheese is more digestible than milk, so restaurants should decorate everything with cheese”? Demonstrably false for some people, like me, who can still drink a glass of milk and keep it down, but cannot eat a slice of cheese and keep it down. (That cheese smells like vomit is an officially confirmed fact. That the vomit-like odor of cheese is disgusting and should be confined to a separate, fully enclosed room in restaurants that do continue to serve cheese is my opinion.) “Some humans do absorb some nutrition from milk, even as adults, so milk should still be sold as a food product” is less misleading, but it’s still an opinion. I happen to like ice cream but, if web sites are held responsible for any harm done to anyone by potentially misleading information about other people’s opinions, Twitter would have had to censor my encouragement to Ben & Jerry’s to keep their considerable weight behind the cause of making ice cream glyphosate-free again...because some people really do not need the suggestion that ice cream is food. For me ice cream is food; for many people it's toxic waste.

What about gluten? I saw this prompt on a survivalist site. What is gluten and should you be concerned about it when stocking your emergency supply of food? Several plant proteins are described as glutens, and in fact a few people may be unable to digest the others too, but wheat gluten intolerance is the kind that’s a problem for a large number of people. As many as one out of four or five people of Celtic descent may have some difficulty digesting wheat gluten but, during periods of history when wheat had not been treated with certain chemicals, serious health problems caused by this genetic trait were found in about one of every ten thousand people in Ireland, one in a hundred thousand in other parts of Western Europe, with no known incidence in non-Celtic populations. (The word “celiac,” the name for these people and their gene, is not related to the word “Celtic.”) As recently as 2008 it was possible to say that, although the gluten-free plates offered in some institutions tended to contain better and fresher food than the stale bread-based alternatives, for most people wheat gluten was a valuable source of protein and nutrients. Vegetarians actually throve on high-gluten bread! Then in 2009 glyphosate, which had previously been used only as a pesticide, went generic and manufacturers encouraged farmers to spray it directly onto grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables as a ripening agent to allow them to harvest more crops at one time. Masses of people became ill, didn’t get accurate information or helpful treatment, and found that adopting a gluten-free diet helped—somewhat—for a while—because avoiding gluten reduced the amount of glyphosate in their food. People have died from the unacknowledged effects of the glyphosate reactions they were having, some of which resembled celiacs’ gluten reactions, some of which did not. When stocking your emergency supply of food, if you’re not a celiac you should not have to worry about wheat gluten, which ought by rights to be a safe healthy food to store. Unfortunately the glyphosate that’s been added to the existing supply of wheat in the United States has killed many non-celiacs already and will probably kill more. Survivalists, very unfortunately, currently need to avoid stockpiling wheat. In fact almost any commercial plant-based food grown in the United States, including overpriced "organic" food, contains enough glyphosate to make you sick. And the corporate weasels have worked to prevent farmers from telling you if any of their crops do happen to be safe to eat. Many "gluten-free" foods trigger celiac reactions because they're not glyphosate-free...and the industry has attacked, and sabotaged, food processors who've tried to offer products that were glyphosate/GMO-free. 

Should web sites remove the misleading suggestion that wheat, other grains, nuts, vegetables, fruit, or meat commercially grown in the United States are safe for humans to eat? Or touch? In many cases, due to the extreme level of glyphosate contamination the industry is fighting so hard to maintain, that’s not true. If web sites are held to account for allowing people to post “misleading health information,” anyone who tries a yummy vegan recipe somebody posted on Tumblr and develops massive bleeding ulcers from ingesting glyphosate-poisoned tomatoes and glyphosate-poisoned spinach will be able to sue Tumblr. Is this really the way we want American society to be?

We need to put coronairus behind us and get back to work on the glyphosate contamination issue. We need to accept the fact that, during the coronavirus panic, even the most authoritative sources spouted “misleading information” about the dreaded virus, and because they were really reporting hasty opinions based on incomplete information about something new, “misleading” was the only kind of information about coronavirus that existed.

The value of the Internet is that it allows rapid transfer of information. Whenever news is breaking, some of that information is certain to be incomplete and, therefore, misleading. That is the nature of early information.

In order for the Internet—or daily newspapers—to be useful, people need to be reminded that some of the information they convey is going to be misleading. There will always be items like “Four people died in the fire” reports that have to be followed by next week’s “No, actually seven, counting the three who were taken to hospitals but not revived,” or “Candidate A won a close race in the Eastern States” followed by “But then Candidate B’s party rallied the vote and swept the polls in the West, so B won the popular vote.” On interactive sites there will also be items like “John Doe has an apartment for rent—oh no he doesn’t, his grandfather just moved into it,” and “Jack and Jill’s wedding will take placenext Sunday—or no, wait, it won’t take place at all, now that Jill got a good long look at Jack’s porn collection,” or “Suzy Q’s boutique has X on sale...erm, make that ‘had’.” And there will also be “Celebrity X just collapsed...was it a heart attack, an overdose? No, doctors now say it looked more like diabetes. No, wait, it’s not diabetes, it’s...” and similar “misleading health information” whenever any piece of health news, private or public, trivial or substantial, is either new, or bitterly resisted by unethical profit-oriented corporations.

The best way to reduce the harm done by misleading information is to allow prompt correction. Therefore web sites need to avoid clogging the flow of information by any kind of censorship. Instead they should rely on disclaimers, like “Individual users are responsible for the information they post here.”

--At least, that is what reason has been telling web site owners from the beginning of the Internet. However, web site owners are fallible mortals, and as a Twitter Insider I had opportunities to see firsthand how the marketing department wheedled, “Oh please, can’t we offer big corporate sponsors the brand-friendly benefits of corporate censorship, just like all those TV news channels that Real Twits dislike, distrust, and avoid for that reason? Yes, of course Twitter will lose all redeeming social value if it becomes the voice of the big corporations, another form of television, and Real Twits will detest and abandon Twitter if it does...but can’t we destroy Twitter, grab the money and run? Please please pleeeeasse?” 

I don’t really expect web site owners to grow enough of a spine to tell the marketing departments that, if that’s what it takes to make their web sites profitable, they might as well just shut down the web sites while their individual names still have some credibility, or while the basically unsustainable Internet retains enough users to make it usable for any purpose. I expect the Internet to self-destruct, actually; the way things are going now, I give it three years.

But, if any web sites are going to be around five years from now, I think they’ll be the ones that rely on disclaimers rather than censorship to avoid the horror of being held responsible for misleading information. 

As for the sites, like Elon Musk's X.com, that agree to censor content that hurts sales of sponsors' products--i.e. whistleblowing on vaccines that are more likely to kill previously healthy people than COVID was, or glyphosate, or cigarettes...I think we all know what decent people do about them.

Proven Strategies to Enhance Web Site Users' Experience

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a network that compiles lists of writers' questions and e-mails them to other writers. It's like Quora or Answers.com, except that the answers are private and may be published in a glossy magazine.

Anybody can join HARO but obviously the service is more useful to some writers than others. Obviously the writers asking questions know what search engines are for. Obviously they already know people who can answer questions like '"The great majority of their questions are for specialists. They look for business owners and managers as well as doctors, lawyers, and dietitians. Some writers are also looking for answers from ordinary people who've had a certain experience--anything from "making the most of just one day at a major amusement park" to "surviving brain surgery." Others are looking for answers from a brain surgeon. 

The writers aren't required to pay for answers. Many of them don't. Well...if they've not paid for the answer I gave them, that answer is likely to turn up as a blog post. It's something a publisher was paying them to research so it is probably something a lot of readers want to know about. I'm thinking of making it a weekly feature: Content I Offered or Gave Away for Free to Someone Who's Not Paid Yet. (Actually, the most common reason why my HARO content has not been rewritten as "interviews" in magazines is that the magazines demanded face pictures.)

So, why should readers look for answers here instead of at glossy magazine site? Here's why. Glossy magazines are funded by advertisers. The funding and the advertising can shape the content of the answers the magazines provide. That means that they might recommend some $500 product for use in a situation where soap and water would work better. That is not a problem for this web site.

Also, this web site may offer them a better visit experience. 

Here's what I know about enhancing web site users' experience: 

Keep it simple, safe, and respectful.

1. From time to time, visit your own web site using the oldest, slowest, klunkiest device you can find. Try to find one that's "not receiving updates" and is therefore, in some people's minds, "effectively unusable." People use those things. You want to be accessible to those people. So, avoid any bells-and-whistles add-ons that can be avoided. If your web site exists to sell clothes you probably need a lot of color photos showing what is meant to be worn, where, when, by whom, with what else. If it exists to sell music you can economize on the visual element and focus on the sound. If it exists to sell car parts, washing machines, or books, you don't really need either pictures or sound---all people need to know about your merchandise can be said with the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks on the keyboard.

You can add doodads like a map showing your store's address or a video showing how someone uses your product, if they work for your customers. People who can't watch movie clips or listen to music clips aren't going to hang out at a site that sells movies or music, so you can do what works. However, the more doodads you add, the more memory they'll use and the less well they're likely to work. If you have difficulties using Windows 95, remove some of the clutter.

Generally avoid

* anything that pops up, jumps across the screen, flashes, blinks, or moves in any way unless the customer clicks on a button to play a video

* recognizable images of people. Distant figures in a crowd are less problematic. Images of hands holding or operating a product are generally inoffensive. Images of parts of the body that might be considered sensitive or rpeeulsive are best avoided. Avoid photos or even drawings of any part of a human body in between the shoulders and the knees. Images of damaged body parts, even hands or feet, are also best avoided if you want to sell anything. The word "sunburn" is always preferable to a picture of a sunburnt arm.

* pale-colored text on a pale-colored background. In finding a balance between what does least damage to the eyes and what communicates information, black text on a white background and serif fonts are helpful. Sans serif fonts ar most effective as arty print fabric motifs, though they can work in one-word headings like "Item--Small--Medium--Large." Avoid displaying more than two or three words together in a sans serif font. 

* showing large amounts of text as an "image" or "table." Large amounts of text are going to be printed so that people can actually read them, and they need to be easily formatted to fit the paper used. 

2. If you use a hosting service like Google, Wordpress, Squarespace, etc., your site  will have cookies. If you don't have the technical skills to create, build, and secure your own web site out of thin air, it's better to use a reliable hosting service. But don't add any cookies. If you do build your own site without any corporation's help, make it cookie-free. 

3. You don't want to know any more about your customers than they've told you. There are ways to get people to answer marketing-type questions like "Where do you live?" and "Do you ever buy things for children?" but it's generally a good idea not to ask. The less information is customized "For You," the more trustworthy it appears to be.

* Never even mention ph*n* n*mb*rs.

* Not everyone has a blog feed but, for those who do, a "blog" or "news" page where any changes to your site show up in the blog feed is much nicer than automated e-mail. Some hosting sites, like Wordpress, offer the options of displaying new blog posts in my blog feed or in my e-mail...the blog feed is better. 

* Some people live in places that have a doorman on duty to receive parcels from a delivery service all day. Most people don't. If you are really saving a lot of money using a service that delivers to the door and can't deliver to post office boxes, you can have separate shipping charges for those who put only a mailing address on the Internet. Never ask for anyone's home address. You look like a burglar just by asking.

* On the Internet no one knows if you're a dog...but it's good to assume that anyone who's willing to type bank information into a computer is a dog. Online payment services will be viable again if we get a federal law requiring them to pay all funds collected to the customer, on demand, using the customer's preferred method of payment which may include delivering cash. Until that happens, it's best to accept checks and postal money orders by mail, rather than taking responsibility for handling bank information online.

* Always remember that Internet transactions are never really private. People transact legitimate business far more often than the illegitimate kind, so yes, just as there are lots of people who have left their cars parked with the doors unlocked and the windows down, and still found their cars in the same place when they came back for them, there are also several people who have typed their real names, home addresses, and credit card access codes into a computer and never been robbed or even harassd. Nobody can afford to assume that that will happen again. Your responsibility is to avoid collecting data that someone else might be able to steal from you and use to harm people. So just don't touch credit cards. Period.

* So, discourage any use of real names. You can't stop the clueless from using part or all of their real names as screen names, but you can set up interactive forms that prompt people to type in a screen name, not just "name," which prompts some people to type in their real names without thinking. 

"Safe" should be understood, not to mean "sheltered from having to read opinions that differ from your own," but to mean "not exposing any personal information to anyone who might use that information 'against' you in any way."

4. Paying attention to what people do choose to tell you, during a conversation = good. Trying to find things out about people outside of that conversation = bad. So, if you have a large enough and diverse enough inventory (as it might be of books or music) that you can suggest something for each individual customer, be sure to take your suggestions from their correspondence or published content for that day, NOT yesterday. Don't be like that idiotic program Amazon used to have that kept trying to sell me the book I'd reviewed the day before. Hello? Sometimes people's other recent Internet activity consists of trying to unload things they already have and don't want to keep. Durrrr!

5. Even if your product is regulated differently in different States, it is better to publish that information than it is to ask inappropriate questions. If your site spells out something like "Alaska residents add __ shipping fee" or "Regular model $500, Special California Earthquake-Insurable Model $750," people may agree that an extra charge is reasonable, or may be motivated to change it. If you ask questions before stating a price, you create an assumption that your pricing system is discriminatory, and even if you offer the best deal in town people may feel proud of paying more, somewhere else, rather than taking any benefit from preferential discrimination. 

6. It's a good idea to avoid using "sales personnel" (real or virtual) or anything that looks like a "sales funnel." Paying people to do research about a product can be a good way to create a predisposition in favor of that product, assuming that its customer reviews are good. You need to understand, though, that the nature of the Internet guarantees a lot of "Looky Lou's" who are never going to buy your product. The Internet is where teenyboppers can gawk and giggle at products designed for people with different kinds of bodies than theirs, without embarrassment. It's where people on strict diets can look at pictures of steak or ice cream while taking meal replacer drinks or tube feedings. It's where wheelchair dwellers play fantasy football. It's even where hack writers are being paid to read about your product so they can write about how someone else's product is better. And it is also where you can conceal, and then forget all about, your resentment of those people while building an informative site that will predispose some of the gawkers to consider your product if, say, they ever get a job requiring them to use something they're not interested in using at home. Informing, rather than trying to push for a sale, is the key to those potential future sales. 

7. Customers are adults. They can deal with an occasional mention of a sensitive topic, as long as the sensitive topic is not being exploited to manipulate them. 

If you do feel tempted to post something about abortion, homosexuality, or transgender-ism, try this: Replace the content with an equal amount of content on the topic of either "castration" or "colostomy." If your immediate reaction is "THAT's not going to boost sales!", chances are that the topics people feel more comfortable pontificating about aren't going to boost sales, either. If your reaction is "Yes, my market niche is 'All Offensive Content All the Time,'" go ahead and use the big hot-potato topics, and why not use coprophagy, too, while you're there.(I will not visit your site. I prefer to limit my gross-outs to images of fungi or caterpillars.)

If you're not trying to exploit the sensitive topic but to respond to questions you've been asked, as a doctor, a philosopher, a religious teacher, etc., to explain your views on the topic to readers, it's probably best to do that in a private letter. Save a copy in case you want to answer another letter. If you become a successful author in an appropriate market niche, you can publish it as a pamphlet--"Dr. Whatever Answers Readers' Questions About Coprophagy." 

(What's coprophagy? It's destined to be the next fad after fashion victims have the opportunity to discover that the human body does not digest insect bodies. As a food fad it will burn out even faster.)

8. Diversity costs nothing as long as it's not producing a strained, and counterproductive, overall effect. As a bookseller, for example, you want to stock books by and about members of ethnic minority groups. For most large groups there are several good ones to choose from and you're not even limited to books whose titles might as well be "Me, Me, Me, Boring Little Me, a Member of Group X with No Talent for Writing." But if you succumb to pressure to "represent" some newly selfconscious tiny group, you may get stuck trying to sell copies of "Me, Me, Me..." at the expense of space from, and the benefits of, selling Shakespeare and Thoreau and Tolkien and Amy Tan and Ngaio Marsh. 

Far too many books by White male writers were published, and some of them were not only boring but vile, in years gone by when books by women and non-White writers were viewed with prejudice. Now publishers are scrambling to try to make the list of books in print reflect the demographics of the real world. Since White male writers had about a thousand-year start on everyone else writing in English, that now results in 

(a) discriminatory publishing policies, many of which are still boiling down to "We want to see manuscripts by women and members of ethnic minority groups. If you're a White man you must send us ten dollars just to get a rejection slip." I'm a woman, at this time of year I have enough "color" that strangers aren't sure which language to speak to me, and I find these policies disgusting. Winning a contest for some specific type of writers and writing--"Biracial Writers on Their Biracial Experience" or "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Memoirs by Members of the Michigan Group," is one thing. (Though even then, please, can we admit that the differences among the Michigan Group, the Canada Group, and the New York Group were produced by variations in word usage and we all had basically the same disease?)  But "Everybody But White Men Will Be Considered, Black Women Preferred, Black Lesbians Guaranteed Preference, White Men Pay for Rejection Slips" is tacky. Some of The Nephews are, by now, White men, and they deserve equal treatment with the rest of humankind.

(b) low standards for the coveted handful of Black lesbian writers, who were tiresome enough to read, often enough, when they were Audre Lorde and I'm not sure why anybody should bother reading the new ones who are less talented than Audre Lorde. These days anyone who happens to be a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller can use a computer program to spin a whole book out of "I is a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller. I never reads nuffin cos nobody else look like me dig. Never goes nowhere nor talks to nobody needer. So all I gots to say is I is a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller and I also gots bowel trouble. And I iz tryna sell my body for drugz but that aint workin less I finds me a rich White dude who beez into coprophagy." Right. I admit it. I made that up, but if you think it's impossibly bad, you should read some of the "poems" that win those prizes White men have to pay $10 to be snubbed by. Due to contractual obligations my parody is actually cleaner than some of the winning drivel I've read, but not worse.

Don't do these things. It's not a sin to be born White and male. It is a sin to be so prejudiced, and make others so prejudiced, against Laotian-American wheelchair dwellers that you mistake the worst writers in that group for the best. 

9. Strictly limit non-text content on your site. Fifteen years ago, as the early "content farms" (where so many of us hack writers were so contented) broke up, we all thought we wanted Google Ads, which at that time were modest little ads for weird Internet-based stuff nobody wanted. Now an ing number of my e-friends have Google Ads on their blogs, and...Google Ads now advertise more interesting products. Which is a pity and a shame, because the way they advertise those products is so counterproductive. The ads are irrelevant, distractig, browser-crashing. A person who had not been following these writers for many years wouldn't even try to read their posts. 

The site that used to be Twitter, now known as X--the crossed-out cancelled site, the site that used to be so much fun for so many people--recently revised its terms of service, in a weaselly way that ought to be illegal, to admit that they;ll censor honest content that adversely affects their advertising. They want to make X all commercial all the time, like television. So they're selling lots and lots of ads! And they're getting lots of views...from advertisers! And, hello, where have all the real people gone? Back to reading each other's blogs the way we did before we joined Twitter, of course. X is no longer useful to us. And, hello, we're the people who don't already work for the advertisers, who might some day have bought some of their junk. Elon Musk is a genius but he's also very young. Because he's a genius there is still hope that he will learn, some day, what a mistake this was. Possibly someone else could, meanwhile, launch a site like the original version of Twitter--calling it something like "Tweetsy"--block access from countries where anyone is still squalling for censorship, which are cordially invited to sink in their own wretched pit, and earn a comfortable profit selling small friendly ads to Americans who remember that Original Twitter really worked for everyone who used it. 

Don't let outside advertisements eat your web site. I'm in favor of advertising as long as it's not allowed to damage the primary content. Do consider dropping into your content a keyword that supports an advertiser's content, but, unless the advertiser is paying all the expenses of maintaining your site, don't make your site about the advertiser or their products. Do insist that, if you allow lipstick ads at all, you're going to display images of women looking much nicer because they're not making their mouths the focal point, because a woman is not a lamprey eel and is likely to look her best when she's not trying to look like one. Do reject ads for toxic products that ought to be banned--and do consider joining boycotts of sites that accept that kind of ads. No matter how much they're paying, advertisements for cigarettes, for alcohol as something to drink, for "pesticide" poison sprays, for "medications" that are known to make significant minorities of patients sicker, for politicians whose parties fail to denounce censorship, or any other evil thing, can only harm your site.

10. Don't invest too much in the Internet. Until the right to freedom of online "speech" is solidly guaranteed by law, you have to think of your web site as something that's likely to be destroyed just because a competitor, or the opposition party, or somebody you never even considered as opposition before, has paid somebody to pull it down. A censored site is a dead site, and a censored Internet will be a dead Internet, but some people don't care about that. Save your own copies of your own material and always be prepared to go back to publicizing your work in the post-Internet world. And never pay a penny to any corporation that offers you a contract that they reserve the right to change to suit themselves. If they want to make hosting profitable, let them come out to where you are and take a blood oath to defend freedom of speech with their lives.

Can Linda Yaccarino Save Twitter?

I'm not optimistic. If our Republican Congress don't grow the backbones so many of them have lacked for so long and crack down hard on the Party of Censorship, it's hard to see grounds for optimism about anything in cyberspace. A censored web site is a dead web site; a censored Internet will be a dead Internet. While fretting about the lack of moderators to pull down content thought to contain "animal cruelty," Twitter's new CEO continued to allow an algorithm to delay a "Please help this shelter dog" message until after the dog was scheduled to be killed. 

I do think it's possible for a good thing to come out of the World Economic Forum--screaming, tearing its hair, running frantically for the place as far as that convention of cartoon villains as it's possible to get.

Does this look like a good thing to you?

 

Not as much, perhaps, as little Greta Thunberg in that video where she was surrounded on the street and badgered by a gaggle of much bigger, older reporters, but Yaccarino has had more practice. She does look frazzled. 

I have a dream in which that hair makes her feel desperate enough to listen to an older woman who can tell her: "When I was eighteen my hair looked like that. When I was thirty I discovered a way that even my hair could look good, for the first time in my life. Together, you and I can guide the world back to a condition in which even your and my hair can look good again." 

I had a dream in which my husband's ex was not lying through her teeth about being in contact with their adoptive son, and we could become a blended family before my husband died, too, eighteen years ago.

But there is a way Yaccarino can save Twitter, in the short term, and actually make it pay...not as much as the stockholders may want, but it can pay...if she's serious about taking it back to first principles.

The relevant first principle would be: Twitter reached the size it reached because it provided instant communication for private individuals, before the corporate advertisers got there. The world did not need another commercial medium, would not have supported one, and won't support one. The world did need a social medium that would flash messages like "Please help! This dog is scheduled to be killed tomorrow morning," around the world, from anybody to any number of other bodies wherever people were interested in dogs.

People will expect Yaccarino to make Twitter work just like NBC. It won't. There is neither a need nor a desire nor a space in this world for any more of NBC. Yaccarino needs to sell her friends at NBC the first principle that TWITTER IS RADICALLY DIFFERENT FROM NBC.

That does not mean that Twitter can't serve them. It merely means that Twitter will fail to serve them if Yaccarino indulges them with another moment of thinking that Twitter can be made into more of NBC. She must help them understand that, in order to be profitable, Twitter needs to remain very, very different from NBC...while serving (some of) the same sponsors.

The key difference, and I say this as a disenchanted former Twitter Insider who's been watching the site and helping it grow for many years--the key difference is the difference between television and social media. 

Television is a medium where corporate sponsors, and the bloat in government that functions as a de facto corporate sponsor, incessantly blare their message to passive viewers who are seldom paying full attention to the broadcasted message. 

People don't interact with the TV set, unless they're pathetic dead-end kids like the TV cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead. Actually, my favorite people don't even turn on the TV set very often, if they even have one. When people I know do turn on the TV set, there are a few shows they actually sit down to watch--weather forecasts, "Jeopardy," and an occasional live broadcast of some special event. Even then, they talk, move around, and step out of the room during the ever-increasing commercial breaks. Most TV programs function as background noise in front of which people can avoid actual conversation while eating, snogging, or falling asleep. The sponsors can say anything they want in the part of the TV broadcast that matters to them, because nobody engages with it, nobody even consciously listens to it or looks at it, and so all they have to do is pound the name of their brand into people's ears. 

Does it work? Maybe. Maybe not. The companies that invest heavily in advertising products on television also invest heavily in getting those products well placed in the right stores. Awareness that brands exist may influence people to be a little more willing to buy those brands, but it does not actually hypnotize people into buying anything. As mentioned before at this web site, as a child I memorized the commercial jingles that were broadcast during the child-friendly shows I watched on family road trips, but although I can still sing some of those jingles today I've never bought the products they advertised.

What TV broadcasts do undeniably do is add stress to people's lives, mild or even benign stress for some people, toxic stress for others. For those who want to watch the ball game or talent show, the effect of the stress is limited to keeping them from sleeping, meditating, or exercising; only when this becomes a long-term pattern does it do any harm. For the family member who hates those ball games or talent shows and hears each one as a fresh display of ingratitude and ill will, every minute the TV blares is another brick in the wall. When couples want to be reconciled, or parents want children to focus and calm down and do well in school, their chances of success are better if they unplug the TV.

For those who want TV broadcasts, there are already plenty of TV broadcasts out there. Nobody is going to pay for an Internet connection that delivers the same experience as a TV broadcast. 

In order for a web site to interest anyone but the advertisers, the web site needs to deliver an experience that's very different from a TV broadcast. So Yaccarino might start by writing down a complete list of everything the sponsors want a TV program to be, then writing a list of what would be the opposite of that, throwing away the first list, and putting the second list on every wall.

Or I could just tell her what attracted so many people who don't watch TV, if we can avoid it, to Twitter as Jack Dorsey built it--something new, something useful, something that has only two things in common with television: (1) it appears on a screen, and (2) it can be used to display images and advertisements for products.

Here are the most obvious salient features Twitter absolutely must keep in order to stay different from television, to attract Real Twits, and to exist. These descriptions aren't necessarily true of Twitter today, but they are true of the original, viable Twitter. They must be true of "Twitter 2.0" if Twitter 2.0 isn't going to go the way of My Space, Google +, or Niume.

1. Twitter is silent unless a site visitor clicks on a button to play an audio clip. 

2. Twitter contains more words than pictures. This is no longer always obvious, but it used to be. Just accept it: People who choose the Internet over television prefer words to pictures. You never, never want to allow a picture to fill up the screen, as the pictures do on some social media sites like Gettr, unless someone deliberately clicks on a button to enlarge it. You want each picture to take up less of the screen than the words that introduce it. You don't ever want a picture to "move," or "pop," or "flash," unless someone deliberately clicks on a button to allow that.

3. Twitter is rich in the content site visitors are actually looking for. Original Twitter ran about fifty tweets from accounts the individual visitors had chosen to follow in between every one "promoted tweet" from an advertiser. That was, of course, because Twitter had to achieve viability on its own before it had a lot of advertisers. However, it's also a feature that made it possible for Twitter to achieve viability, while other social media sites crashed and burned. I personally feel that it wouldn't hurt the Twitter experience to allow a steady stream of advertising messages to occupy the right side of the screen--provided that the ads are clearly subordinated to the tweets. The center column should remain wider than the sidebars. Paid ads should contain text and thumbnail pictures only until Twits click on a button to expand them. Twits know that Twitter needs sponsors, but sponsors need to have it firmly in mind, at all times, that the different benefits people get from Twitter come from keeping the individual tweets dominant over the paid ads, at all times, in all ways.

(Yes, this can be of benefit directly to the sponsors, but they're going to have to think outside the box to accept the potential benefit. They might need to take a break or do some deep breathing to cope with the cognitive dissonance.)

4. Twitter's safety is maintained by site visitors' control of their own experience. Nobody wants to watch a video that starts with someone saying "Today we're going to beat up a younger kid" or "Today I'm going to slash my wrists," right? Yes, people did things like that on Facebook, and while other people sat there horrified, unable to believe what they were watching, these deranged Facebookers actually committed suicide and real crimes, in real time, live on social media. What have we learned from this? No, NOT to try to filter out bad content so that people don't see it. That's what will NOT help, so don't ever even think about it again. What helps is to watch for the bad content and take it seriously. Somebody posts, "Today we're going to beat up a younger kid." Leave that message where it is! Police should have someone watching. In case they don't, the social media site should have a prominently displayed "hot button" that notifies a site monitor to call the police. Police can trace the signal, find the source of the bad content, and probably stop the crime before it happens, while the malicious user is still bragging about what he's going to do. 

You need to trust individual users, now that people realize that these things are possible, to call the police and then click on to something more pleasant to watch. Which they will do. People love letting other people take care of problems. One of Junior's little friends just threatened suicide, notify the authorities, now back to the chat with the person whose screen image is a woman in a low-cut blouse.

5. Twitter's content is spontaneous and uncensored. People exchange PERFECTLY FRANK opinions of the sponsors' products. You know how that works. People do not actually say, like the character in the Totally Amateurish Radio Drama put together by the characters in an old radio serial that was re-broadcast when I was a kid, "I can find it because I have my new Brand X flashlight. It runs on two 'D' batteries and cost 79 cents at Store Y." Fifty-one weeks in a year they go to Wal-Mart, buy a few dozen staples they use every day, come home, and never think about posting anything as basic and boring as that they have this weekly ritual of buying things they enjoy using at this store. Then the week something goes wrong, they get on social media and flame that Wal-Mart where they expect they should be able to enjoy, in a bland boring way, buying the things they use every day. They never type a word about why they like that Wal-Mart better than the Target, or vice versa. Nor do they type about all the groceries and toiletries they like to use every day. Only when something goes wrong do they flame the everlovin' daylights out of the store and/or the product that disappointed them.

Yes, we all understand the TV sponsors hate this. Yes, we all understand it's the one thing TV sponsors want to censor out of existence in TV Land. But that's what makes live, uncensored, unfiltered social media fun...and what can make them useful to sponsors. They just have to accept this: The Twits who made Twitter great do not live in TV Land, nor do many of them even visit TV Land. Sposnors have to venture into our neighborhood. To do that safely, as when they visit the neighborhoods of the Black friends they all claim to have or at least want, they need to show respect.

What do sponsors do when somebody...like me, because in this respect I am, if anything, a harder sell than the typical Twit, yet it is possible to sell me things...somebody who never thinks of tweeting "We just went to Wal-Mart and bought our favorite brands of groceries and toiletries: Brand X, Y, Z... What fun!" as person might easily do fifty times in a year, does, unfortunately, think of tweeting "Wal-Mart was out of the Brand X soap, the Brand Y printer paper, AND the Brand Z rice I always buy there, AND THE CLERK WAS RUDE!!!"? 

First, it's OK to pound a fist on the table or mutter the rude words that come to the sponsors' minds. Everyone can understand that. 

Now, having acknowledged and released those emotions, the sponsors should be ready to think creatively about how to spin these moments in the direction of profits.

Some people are Difficult Customers and proud of it. We are both made and born this way. Some people voted for Jimmy Carter because they've always gone through life thinking "Why not the best?", but they've been made to feel ashamed of it. Others have embraced it. I was brought up by a well-known Difficult Customer. I preferred spending time with milder-mannered adults rather than my Drill Sergeant Dad, and didn't think I wanted to grow up like him, so I didn't always complain about things as a young woman. I even went to one of those churches where the False Gospel of Nicely-Nice Verbal Abuse had crept in and some people may actually have been able to believe that it was nice not to tell people what they needed to improve...for a short time. Then I got out into the grown-up world of work and realized that well-known Difficult Customers were my best customers. They didn't have to sound like total old-school drill sergeants. Dad was one and sounded like one, but more successful Difficult Customers were fractionally more tactful than that. Fractionally. And I even had the pleasure of voting for one of them for President. I really like a Difficult Customer who is tough, but fair, and I decided before it was too late that I did want to grow up and be one. So now I am.

What makes people choose to be Difficult Customers is that we know that indulging people in undesirable behavior, such as imagining that the seller is ever "on equal terms" with a Customer, is not doing those people any favors. That's it, and that's all. We can be pleased--and we actually enjoy rewarding people when we are pleased. But you do have to earn the rating you want. You have to please us. 

That's where social media come in as the way to market your products to us. We can be pleased. We want to be pleased. And, because you are not wired to be able to understand how to please us, on social media we'll tell you exactly what you need to know.

You just have to think outside the TV advertising box. You cannot go on social media to pound your words into our minds; that's killed other social media sites already, and it can kill both Facebook and Twitter, too. You can go on social media and regain our good will by doing what it takes to please us. 

Not by looking for any rewards before you've earned them. I've been known to give zero stars if the "rate the service you received" screen pops up before I say it's time for it to pop up. 

Not by just trying to smooth over the "feelings" while ignoring the facts. Emotional feelings come and go. They last approximately ninety seconds, then fade quickly if they're not aggravated by feeding them more attention than they deserve. So if, let us say, you represent a shoe store where somebody tried on a pair of shoes, told the clerk they'd take that pair, accepted a wrapped box, took it home, opened the box, and discovered a completely different pair of shoes that didn't even match inside the box, you do not need to waste time with "I can tell you're upset." 

(Number one: if you believe you're a psychotherapist, what are you doing in customer service? Number two: you don't know which people use "upset" to mean a milder form of "angry" and which use it to mean a milder form of "nauseated," but you don't want the conversation to be about either of those things. Number three: the customer may be a woman, in which case, if you've CUTESIPATED her by ignoring a statement of FACT and babbling about her supposed "feelings," you have just outed yourself as a hater and made it her goal to get you fired. From your next ten jobs after this one, likely.) 

You need to own your feelings, approximately as frankly as the customer has just expressed per own feelings, as in "I'm very sorry that happened! It makes me feel like an idiot! Please let me send you the pair of shoes you intended to buy. If you could be so kind as to bring back the box, just in case we have another pair that look just like them somewhere and can donate both pairs to a secondhand store, I'd be grateful." 

Now you're making your store look good. Window dressing is all very well, but you're displaying honesty and a commitment to good service. Now the customer is motivated to reward you. Don't push; let it come naturally. You may have to grovel to a customer who you think is making unreasonable, unrealistic demands, repeatedly, depending on how deeply the customer is set in that dissatisfaction groove, but eventually you'll get free advertising from this customer. And if other people agree with you that this customer is unusually hard to please,per recommendations rate. People automatically discredit everything you say about your products or your honesty or your commitment to customer service, but if you get full marks from that customer, you are obviously doing something right--they'll try a box of whatever you're selling, too.

Before social media, it might have taken months or years for the Difficult Customer to feel confident enough to give you a positive recommendation. Maybe in real life he's never had a conversation about shoes with anyone outside the store. Maybe in real life she has no friends and her grandchildren avoid talking to her long enough to hear her opinions. But on social media, all of the Difficult Customer's followers can see your conversation. Maybe they agree that the customer expects too much; maybe they agree that you're doing a good job. Either way, you've just demonstrated to them, without either paying for an advertisement or automatically self-discrediting by advertising, that your store is a place to look for honest, courteous service. They have not only noticed your brand; they've laid down a foundation of agreement with your message. That kind of advertisement is like motherly love: there's no price tag on it, because it's beyond price.

Of course, some complaints are harder to turn into super-value publicity than others are. Everyone understands that Wal-Mart is so big that some complaints are inevitable. The person who posted the complaint about not finding X, Y, and Z at Wal-Mart will probably be back in the store next week, as will the people who read the complaint. What about "I used your product, as directed, and the doctor reckons that's why I now have cancer"? What about "Taking the guns away from patients only makes Prozac Dementia homicide-suicides deadlier--we have to monitor use of the DRUGS!"? 

This is where Yaccarino has the opportunity to be of real, lasting service to humankind. She needs to stand firm on those first principles.No censorship, ever. 

In fact she should consider making it part of Twitter's Terms of Service: "If a sponsor tries in any way to suppress complaints about a product, that will be taken as an admission that the product is harmful and the sponsor is not trying to repair the damage, so the sponsor will be permanently banned." And stick to that, however big and rich the corporaiton is and however much they offer. Make that an advertising point for Twitter. "Bayer tried to suppress the Glyphosate Awareness movement? Bayer's gone. Lilly failed to encourage the newspapers to print the results of an analysis of a homicide-suicide's blood tests? Lilly will never be seen on Twitter. Merck had the gall to say rude things to and about people whose children were harmed by vaccines? Die, Merck, die." 

If people have, inadvertently and in good faith, made a product that turned out to be more harmful than they thought it would be, then the way for them to demonstrate that good faith is to take everything the indignant customers throw at them. Humbly. Gratefully. With sincere penitence. "Yes, Sir, it's possible that our product hastened the progress of your cancer. Please accept our deepest apologies and know that your widow and orphans will never be poor," s all Bayer should have had to say--over and over, with different specifics and pronouns--since the total global ban onglyphosate that should have gone into effect in 2018. 

It's been said that, if you look out the window and see a little old lady being beaten until blood drips on the pavement, and you don't feel a reaction, you are what they call a psychopath. Well, I happen to be a little old lady, and I've been battered by repeated glyphosate poisoning--of the air, of food, of water--many times. So far I've not gushed blood onto pavement--only a bathroom floor, once, and you may be sure I scrubbed that floor. But there've been enough days in the past two years when I've stayed home, because I was likely to gush blood onto pavement, that I now classify myself as disabled. I do not want a pension. I want to go back to work. I want that glyphosate ban. And if you don't feel a reaction, you might want to talk to a psychiatrist about that. 

Feel that reaction, Yaccarino, and reconnect the global Glyphosate Awareness network Twitter helped me build, before the coward-boy Agrawal let Bayer interfere with our telling the truth. We've all heard and heard and heard about the coronavirus panic and the fear that people might not be saved by the vaccines that turned out to make them more vulnerable to the way the virus had mutated by the time the vaccine was available...oh well, anyway, it seemed to be so terribly necessary to censor anti-vaccine tweets so that...BOSH, I say. Everyone in Glyphosate Awareness knows the corporate censorship started with us, after political censorship had found a way to exploit the system during the 2016 elections. (Lilly had been leaning on newspapers not to print the most important fact in every homicide-suicide story since 2001, and Merck may have been gaslighting and insulting people with vaccine injury claims before that.) 

Twitter needs to take a firm stand on its first principles. Sponsors with genuine good intentions need to support that firm stand. Nothing must be offered to those who want to censor the unpleasant truth about their products except endless, boundless contempt.

If a corporation has any right to continue to exist, its executives and stockholders need to accept that market forces are what nature intended to impose morality on the corporation. Censorship must not be allowed to protect the corporation's profits. Rather,, any attempt to suppress the facts about a product must cut so deeply into the corporation's profits that nobody would dare to suggest such an immoral, unethical, stupid idea.

And if that means the Democratic Party has a lot of apologizing to do for having hidden behind the filthy coattails of the corporate censors, during even one election--and if that little venture into censorship costs all Democrats any chance at State or federal office for another decade!--even that would serve the Ds right. They didn't start apologizing and purging their ranks soon enough. They need to be doing that, nonstop, from now until November.