The War on Social Media
Facebook was the Deep State’s baby, why have they turned on it?
Kit Knightly
For a long time now, bubbling away on the mainstream media’s back-boiler, there’s been an on-going campaign to attack and undermine social media. It is multi-faceted, and unfocused, but constant. Seldom does a day go by, and never a week, that a story calling for limitation, regulation or outright banning of certain social media networks is called for.
In a perfect example of what I’m talking about, I just went to The Guardian to find a story they published criticising social media two days ago…and then found new story on the same topic published yesterday.
For months, years, we’ve been told how dangerous, immoral, out-of-control corrupt and just plain evil social media has become.
The anti-social media campaign first came into view in the UK, immediately after Jeremy Corbyn won his first Labour leadership election 2015. Just two months later Yvette Cooper MP, who lost to Corbyn (humiliatingly badly), launched her “Reclaim the Web” campaign to “stamp out” abuse of women on the internet.
This can be plainly seen as a direct response to Corbyn, who won the leadership in large part due to his followers swamping social media. Momentum, and others on the left, were vilified as misogynistic bullies, and social media were called on to “regulate” the alleged “bullying” of MPs.
The campaign tied in with The Guardian‘s “web we want” section, a long-running series of articles about how we need to shut down the internet to protect free speech. It fizzled completely (hopefully at least partly due to our response section, The Web THEY Want), but its slowburn successor is still going.
There are many recent examples.
In December last year The Guardian published an editorial calling social media “dangerous for out democracy”. Just a month later, Vice took up the same call.
Tellingly, they have different reasons. The Guardian, of course, blames “Russian trolls” [sic] for controlling the debate, whilst Vice says social media enables right-wing demagogues. But, whatever their (flawed) reasoning, they agree on the basics: social media = bad.
Social media is also blamed for the “rise of extremism”. ISIS, though very much out of vogue right now, were the threat du jour just a few years ago. They were ALWAYS being associated with social media, “ISIS use of social media” even has its own wikipedia page.
More recently “far right” extremists are consistently blamed on social media platforms. The social network Gab was attacked throughout the media after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, despite having no connection to the crime other than the alleged gunman has an account. The Christchurch attacks were live-streamed on Facebook, leading to much outrage directed at the platform. Social media was blamed, not for the gunman’s actions, but for the spread of his supposed ideas and broadcasting of his crimes.
They’re also pulling the “think of the children card”. Two days ago the UK police announced we should “boycott” social media to “protect children” from pornography.
Further, apparently, “social media is bad” because the internet companies are monopolies. Alexandroa Ocasio-Cortez, an SJW mouthpiece I increasingly have very little time for, has called social media a “public health risk”, and then echoed Facebook’s co-founder Chris Hughes in calling for big-tech companies to be broken up. This sentiment has been widely broadcast across the media. I don’t know when, exactly, the six media conglomerates that own 90% of the Western press developed a problem with monopolies, but it was fairly recently.
The hits just keep on coming. We’re told social media spreads conspiracy theories. And increases feelings of loneliness too. It’s also is bad for the disabled. And your mental health.
It’s “very addictive”.
And “dishonest”.
And “dangerous”.
Of course, the media’s reaction to these problems, is to suggest a solution.
Cue “calls for regulation”.
Of which there have been many, including – these – four – different – ones – in the last few months. There are many others. It’s unending. Almost literally. There are dozens of examples. Some of them actually call social media a weapon that should be controlled “like guns”.
The media is unanimous: Social media needs to be “regulated”.
What does “regulating” social media mean?
Well we already know. It means kicking people like Alex Jones off Twitter, or cutting off Gab’s hosting service. It means that corporations receive hit-lists from the state, and censor people they label “dangerous”.
What does “dangerous” mean?
That’s the beauty of the system, “dangerous” can mean whatever they want it to mean. Jeremy Corbyn has been called “dangerous”.
It will start with “fringe” or “controversial” figures like Alex Jones, because people won’t defend him for fear of being called “conspiracy theorists”. It won’t end there. Chris Wiliamson, and other Labour leftists, will be in the crosshairs – they’ll be banned for antisemitism or “hate speech” or some other fluffy, ill-defined newspeak.
The methods are obvious, the deeper motivations as old as the hills, the real question is, “why now?” Why is Facebook suddenly a target of the Deep State? It certainly wasn’t always that way.
Social Media as a Tool of the Deep State
Facebook has a LONG history of working with the Deep State. Some even argue the whole thing was a creation of the CIA.
Whatever the reality, it cannot be denied that Facebook is, in many ways, a totalitarian dream. All that information, willingly surrendered, gathered in one place for the whole world to see. It’s remarkable people fell for it, really.
An analogy I often use: Imagine Facebook had been invented by a government. Imagine it was a state-backed project. Imagine a government employee called you, out of the blue, and asked you for the following information:
- Your name, age, address and contact information.
- Your employment status, job and education history.
- The names and addresses of your friends and family.
- Your relationship status, plus the names and addresses of your former partners.
- All the places you’ve been on vacation. Plus copies of photos you took whilst you were there.
- What movies you like, what book you’re reading, what you had for dinner last night.
- Oh, and where you are, and what you’re doing, right now.
When you ask him why they need this information, he tells you they’re planning on putting it on an internet database which the whole world can access.
Would you answer those questions? No. Most people would be appalled. But that’s what Facebook is, what it was always supposed to be. A vast public database of information that, at some point, might be useful.
Big picture: Monitoring general trends, social experiments, sowing disinformation and nurturing narratives.
In the specific: blackmail material, compromising photos, embarassing secrets, easy background checks.
As a tool of the state, Facebook is unsurpassed in its usefulness. All social media platforms are.
BUT they also became something else.
Facebook enables the state, and mega corporate partners, to monitor and influence people on an unprecedented scale, but they also allowed us to talk to each other. To cooperate. To circumvent traditional media. To see behind the curtain. To experience news without a filter.
The symptoms of this are clear, every day.
Unforeseen Conseuquences
Social media may have been utilized by the Deep State, it may even have been created by the Deep State, but the unforeseen consequences of this creation is handing an incredible power to the people.
Look at Syria. The deep state plan for Syria was destroyed, and not just because of Russia and Iran, but because the narrative agenda was not allowed to go unchallenged.
Compare Syria to Iraq. The war in Iraq was sold to the public on a mass of lies, obvious and picked apart at the time by people in the know, but those voices had no platform. No way to organise. Yes, a million people marched in London, but the establishment narrative was the only one allowed to air. It was stated, over and over again, but never contradicted. It sunk in, even if people didn’t realise. That’s why they won, and we lost.
Syria was supposed to go the same way, but Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…they all allow people on the ground to report the truth directly to their peers, and then the public. Fifteen years ago if Vanessa Beeley or Eva Bartlett couldn’t get in the mainstream media, no one would ever have read their work. Now, they just livestream interviews. Post to their blogs. Share it on Twitter. Now they can make their own audience.
It works in the domestic sphere as well as foreign policy.
Jeremy Corbyn is soft, and misguided in some things. He’s not as tough as Tony Benn or as forthright as George Galloway. He’s hardly a dynamic threat to the status quo, he’s just a decent guy who tries his best. Fifteen years ago there’s no way he would ever have been a within a mile of Number 10, let alone – as he finds himself – a fingertip away. Corbyn is there because people have the power to communicate, to talk past absurd media narratives (*ahem* antisemitism), and tell each other the truth.
Bernie Sanders is nothing like as big a threat to the US power structure as Corbyn is here, in the UK, but he’s brashly and brazenly used the word “socialist”. For most of America’s history that would spell doom for a political career. But, if it weren’t for the DNC’s corruption, he would have been running for President. That was all on the back of the much-maligned “Bernie Bros” and their comrades on the internet.
But by far, by FAR, the biggest virtue of social media – all internet media – is the ability to step on lies instantly. To real-time fact-check propaganda.
The US post-war Empire is a power based on control of narrative. And narrative is a crop that has to be cultivated carefully. You need to be able to tell lies, regularly and without contradiction. Small lies, most of the time, but it’s always vital they go unchallenged at the time. Printing retractions later is fine, letters to the editor are fine, by then the damage is done.
Realtime social media takes that all away. You can’t control the story of Hillary Clinton’s health with well-placed op-eds, when a member of the public can just throw up a cellphone video proving you wrong. You can’t spin Nazis as sympethetic just because they have vaginas, when everyone in the comments is pointing out the fascist imagery in your photographs. You can’t just pretend protests in Paris or London aren’t happening, when every one of the protesters has a cellphone and a twitter account.
The old saying goes that a lie can go around the world whilst the truth is putting its boots on, and that broadly speaking is true. But only because the system was designed that way. Social networks, and the internet in general, tears holes in that system. The truth has its boots on and is back in the race.
And the powers that be hate that.
This is not new in the human experience, it is very very old. Whenever a new forum, a new social avenue, or a new technology opens up channels of communication between citizens, the power structure immediately begins to attack, undermine or outlaw it.
According to this podcast, in 1872 telegrams were criticised because they:
Allowed instant publication of words and criticisms, often without their propert context and not unfrequently without mallicious additions
All the way back in 1675, Charles II banned Coffeehouses, his reasoning sounds pretty familiar:
…in such houses, and by occasion of the meetings of such persons therein, diverse False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majesties Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm
Power is always paranoid, and always at once looking to extend itself and fearful of its own destruction. Power is an ever-hungry monster. If one area of public life springs up which stands outside the control of the state, it will instinctively move against it.
That is an old lesson.
Editors Note: Many thanks to one of our followers for bringing these historical examples to our attention on twitter. A wonderful example of exactly what this article is about.
Conclusion
The sheer weight of articles attacking social media, from multiple angles on multiple topics, speaks to the fact it has become a thorn in the establishment side. As such, it falls to us in the alt news to defend it.
That’s not to say the Facebook is perfect, or even a good thing. I’m not arguing that corporate monopolies are great, or that you should let Mark Zuckerberg do whatever he wants with your private information. Clearly, Facebook and the other social media giants aren’t benign, they have already censored on demand and their huge corporate reach is truly frightening – But we’re not just talking about facebook. Or Twitter. Or Google.
“Regulating” social media does not mean “making Facebook nice”. Facebook will still harvest data, they will still monitor us and breach our privacy. “Regulating social media” means limiting freedom on the internet, and nothing more.
Not just users, but also publishers. Increased “regulation” will hit start-ups and newer platforms much harder than the established giants. Gab and Dtube and Bitchute and the like are much more likely to be shut down than facebook.
The freedom to communicate is far too important to let personal objections to a certain platform colour your attitude.
Likewise, it would be foolish to let partisan politics define your position on this issue. Just because the new breed of Democrat – AOC and her peers – are attacking social media, doesn’t mean we should join in. “Concern” about the “issues” of social media will come from both sides. The conservative right and the progressive left. As in all such things, both “opposing sides” will suggest the same solution to a made-up problem. Left and right meet in the middle and have the same core concerns.
All aspects of the establishment serve to protect the state at the cost of the individual – to increase their power at the expense of ours. If we cheer on the censorship and control of the social networks, we will be helping them do just that.
They will call it “regulating social media”, but they mean regulating us.
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Spot on man is all I can say!
Not calling for regulation cedes unrestricted (“private property”) power to the social media giants, which are proxies of intelligence agences. This power is certain to be abused both by profit motive imperatives and by surveillance and manipulation by intelligence agencies.
On the other hand, direct regulation or control by government or its proxies is likely to degenerate into censorship.
Perhaps a solution is to go the Baby Bell route and break up social media giants into smaller separate corporations once they reach a certain size in audience, revenue or other metrics.
Good piece. Clearly losing control of the narrative has major implications, as we have seen in the elections in the US and the UK. However, I wouldn’t rule out either the possibility that the sniping is merely a smokescreen and a deception. This fake sniping is the tactic that has long been used by governments and right-wing politicians ‘against’ the ‘left-wing’ BBC to hide its purpose as a government mouthpiece.
‘But by far, by FAR, the biggest virtue of social media – all internet media – is the ability to step on lies instantly. To real-time fact-check propaganda.’
I agree. I used to think that exposing regular media propaganda was difficult, but it is opposite: it is easy.
The reason why I thought it was difficult had more to do with me than with the difficulty of exposing a lie, that is I did not really care about the content of the news. Only when that changed, I became aware of the lies and how easily they could be exposed.
I think the biggest propaganda technique MM has, is to make the reader believe that the news is nothing more than spectacle, nothing of your concern, just fire gazing after a long day of hard work. I usually read the news after a long hard day of work… And what helps me staying critical after such a day, is reading news like this article showing how easy it is to expose media lies, combined with a joke or two.
Thanks for this article, Kit.
it puts nonsense like the “10-year challenge” into a bit more perspective..I think the “joke” about that being used to fuel “AI-enhanced facial recog software” is probably only half joking
great article. thanks.
“social media” will soon also mean “websites that propose any views contrary to the Groupthink dynamic” ..watch out Off-G!!
““ISIS use of social media” even has its own wikipedia page.” – Created and edited by a Mr. Philip Cross, one suspects
There is a distinct irony in the fact that the people clamouring for social media to be better controlled (and censored) to prevent the spread of their perceived idea of ‘fake’ news are the very same people who have been deafeningly vocal in their condemnation of President Assad, based entirely on fake news circulated on social media by the ‘White Helmets’ Propaganda Corporation’.
In 2014 FB ran a covert psychological experiment and changed the mood of 700K users. It came out in a scientific paper: which was highlighted by the Graun among others. ABC made a documentary about it.
The Mercers supposedly used Cambridge Analytica to get Trump elected, by micro-targeting voters. I say supposedly, not because I think that this is not true: I’m just not sure how influential it was – applied late in his campaign. The potential to manipulate elections is real, however, if applied from the start. No one said anything about Crooked Hillary being in bed with Eric Schmidt and Google – and employing SEME (search engine manipulation effect). Or the dodgy Diebolds George owns.
Similarly, Arron Banks employed CA in the Brexit campaign. Both of these campaigns were outed by Carole Cadwalladr …in bed with Damian Collins and his Fake News committee psyop (which also featured Bill Browder’s input).
Out of the committee’s recommendations came the Fusion Doctrine; the Rapid Response Unit: II; etc…
https://www.ukcolumn.org/censored
There is a whole lot more detail about this campaign listed chronologically in the link.
There are two broad conclusions inferred here. That the PTB are not a monolithic bloc, and their is an old establishment versus new establishment ‘Clash of the Tecno-Titans’ going on behind the scenes. The old guard are scared witless by the potential of social media to ‘nudge’ and socially engineer their own power bloc. Or, the whole thing a coordinated dance toward full spectrum dominance of the mind-space of social media. Which, although several astute commenters have said they are immune to this – FB proved the majoritarian massif are not. Micro-targetted ads and ‘likes’ do manipulate the herd. Or, there could be a combination of the new and old integrating into a agglomerated tech power-bloc …which very much seems to be happening with ‘fullfact’ psyop manipulation of reality. Journalists like Vanessa Beeley will be controlled, their passports revoked …and possibly be imprisoned under the recent ‘Online Harms’ white paper.
Julian was the first …he will not be the last
We are all Julian now.
Ever since the MM raised the issue of “fake news”. their own fake news manufacturing has skyrocketed. So much so that I can’t believe the shit they are spreading and – even more to the point – I can’t believe that even THEY can think they’re convincing anybody. But having said that I am sometimes astonished at how effective repeated messages can be. An old friend referred to Corbyn as “racist”. I had to answer that. But it shows how even the most absurd crud can percolate dow.
The advantage that the MM has is that even now it stands for many as THE news. It’s at the centre. It has the appearance of being accepted wisdom. Indeed – the most powerful thing about it is that folk hear it and don’t even think of questioning it.
Generally speaking, two personality types are attracted to the upper hierarchies of our society:
Ambitious, ruthless, control freaks and psychopaths.
When the sand shifts under them they go into overdrive or kill mode.
So . . . what’s the second personality type?
Fb seriously limits a person’s ability to diseminate information. Only cat videos can go viral. I attempted to post a YouTube video into the comments section of political ads here in Oz and after a few times I was warned I was violating community standards and was subsequently blocked from posting any further videos from that particular channel. My freedom of speach and ability to spread an idea was curtailed. https://youtu.be/OJrXI3rBbSA
Executive summary
Freedom of association: problems, problems, problems…
I think they have turned on “their baby” simply because they have noticed that their baby is no longer the genius they hoped it would be.
They have also noticed that WE have noticed, which makes it more convenient for them just to ditch the baby and look for another one.
Most (choose to) believe that if we – imperfect human beings – don’t fix the broken world, then it won’t get fixed. Most believe that we are our own savior. That then justifies doing things, not necessarily principled things (which actually kills ‘winning’), because, supposedly, EVERYTHING good is at sake. Count me outside of that crowd. I take Kit’s point and mostly agree with his article, but I can’t follow his advice because I have faith. I am not God. I ditched Facebook years ago because I found it strange and cold and had better things to do. Then I came to appreciate how evil it is and can’t support it, on principle. That may make me seem extremist, but I’m not an extremist. I just don’t willingly compromise my principles. Nor do I believe that I have to. (Nor do I vote for the least evil of a bunch of evil political candidates. Nor do I vote so as to effectively legitimize a crooked, undemocratic electoral system. However, If there were, despite measures taken by the 1% to prevent it, good candidates in elections which I am entitled to vote it, then I’d consider it, but not without also voicing my concerns about the captured electoral systems we all have to contend with.) Those who don’t like my political and/or religious views will just call me extremist and scary and move on. So be it. It’s a free universe.
“An analogy I often use: Imagine Facebook had been invented by a government. Imagine it was a state-backed project. Imagine a government employee called you, out of the blue, and asked you for the following information…”
You mean like Tor, which Wikileaks promotes for gosh sake?
What is the relevance of this remark?
I think what Arby was suggesting is that tor was also an Intel agency run software and not as secure as it was first touted to those wishing to stay anon on the dark web. And the irony of it being pushed by Wikileaks as a safe way of navigating anonymously for whistleblowers is not quite as safe as it thought?
https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/
I spoke with an ex cyber counter intel bloke recently who is now an ethical hacker in corporate security. I have not fact checked his point he made to me, as his credentials seemed to speak for themselves.
He told me the www we mostly surf is 8% in size, the dark web represents an incredible 92% in size by comparison. I said to him, well, I guess it needs to be that large for all the spooks and intel agencies to peddle their ware unhindered. He just smiled and said its a strange old place, where anything goes, but would not counter to my comments about it being a hangout for all things spooky..
I may have that wrong though re: relevance! I’m sure Arby will let you know what was the relevance is when they are next on Off-G
Indeed. It’s all covered in Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley.” The book is awesome but not perfect. Yasha is ignorant about JFK, even though his only reference to that admin has to do with the economy (and he gets it wrong). The more serious error Yasha makes has to do with the reason why Julian Assange went into the Ecuadorian Embassy. Yasha said that Assange was avoiding having to answer questions about the rape allegations. What a big fail that statement represents! It really looks like people don’t read. And it really looks like even writers don’t read!
Tor was created by the US gov and is still funded by the US gov and progressives think that it protects them from big brother. How is that not appropriate?
The US govnt also invented the internet, LCD screens and Lithium batteries, how can you typing on your computer not be a US govnt official spying on us all for gosh sake?
Very good article from Kit.
Social Media supposedly needs to be controlled, censored, or simply suppressed, to control a now bewildering variety of evils. It’s worth briefly summarising these again to consider their validity.
1. To protect children from pornography (a favourite old chestnut to justify censorship historically.) As of a couple of month’s time, supposedly you will have to buy some kind of a permit to view porn. But do the powers that be really expect us to believe this will make any difference? Porn has been around for thousands of years, from cave paintings onwards. And how concerned are they about children, really? When primary school children are now being exposed to extreme gay/ tranny material as official policy?
But it has some utility in generating a climate in favour of censorship.
2. To protect children from suicide sites, bullying on line etc. Again, this has some merit, maybe, but it’s basically just part of a wish list for people to be nice to one another. That isn’t going to happen. Unless you impose a monastic vow of silence on people, there will always be malicious gossip, and children/ women/ men will always be bitchy. It’s just part of life. Sometimes it gets out of hand and that’s where teachers/ police/ courts come in.
3. To protect particularly female politicians like Yvette Cooper/ Jess Phillips/ Luciana Berger and similar from “misogynistic” or “anti semitic” comments on line. These aren’t particularly likeable individuals who seem to want to suppress and close down critics of themselves. Somebody from UKIP made a comment on line that he could never bring himself to rape her no matter how drunk he got. Maybe a crass and unnecessary thing to say, but there was noIt is enough to deal with genuine offences. realistic threat of violence involved. And it followed sneering from her about male suicides. She seemed to think it was hilarious that so many men were committing suicide. The lesson is, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it out. For the past 30-40 years we’ve had something called the Malicious Communications Act, to deal with genuine abuse of the telephone or electronic communications to cause harassment, alarm or distress. This is sufficient.
4, To control the dreaded Russian bots which supposedly stole the US election, Brexit Referendum, and a bewildering variety of other elections across Europe. These allegations are transparently ludicrous and no credible evidence to support them has ever been forthcoming. But social media has disseminated evidence of deceit, hypocrisy, mendacity and outright criminality by the political elite, and evidence of war crimes and worse by the organs of the state which they find highly embarrassing to say the least. It’s not surprising they want this closed down. Or any criticism of Israel, which is “anti Semitism.” So we see all the blacklisting, Newsguard, Propornot, Integrity Initiative, funded and staffed by all the usual suspects, deplatforming and algorithms. And now we have Facebook and the like begging for state censorship.
5. To control the spread of “conspiracy theories.” People like Aaronovitch have been especially active in calling for censorship of basically anyone he disagrees with. People like David Icke and Alex Jones have been around for years, but suddenly need to be silenced. They are mildly entertaining, and occasionally have some good material among all the intergalactic space lizards. Enjoyable nonsense by and large. But now anyone who questions the official narrative about 9/11, Syria, Russia, or a host of other subjects, has to be silenced.
This is a sign of weakness and panic, not strength. After all the lies that have been told, trust in the MSM in the US has fallen to 6%. The MSM is dying on its feet and has to be bailed out and subsidised by the state. It is transparently mendacious, and nobody believes the presstitute media hacks any more. They are losing control, and it terrifies them. That is why they are doing this, why they are doing it now, and why we are being presented with all this array of excuses and justifications for it.
Just a small point.
But the analogy with Charles 11 not a great one.
Charles 11 was a progressive in his time. And the prevention of a new civil war and religious conflict was key at the time.
None of us can sleep well in our beds until we have the kind of internet Susanne Moore and Jess Phillips approve of – after all, sometimes nearly 5 minutes goes by before they are again reminding everybody (from a prominent media platform) how fed-up they are with being ‘silenced’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/07/twitter-misogynists-women-public-life-social-media-abuse
For them, challenging female authority figures is a bit of a no, no, although hi-fiving over human rights abuses is perfectly OK, so long as it only affects men they don’t approve of, such as Julian Assange – go figure.
I found this article pretty stupid. The author needs to read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff for starters.
Then, the author needs to remember the world before “social media”. Social media HAS morphed into the highly disingenuous, destructive blabber that has polluted every single narrative out there.
Getting rid of con-men, liars, rip-off artists like Jones (and the author didn’t even touch on the REAL reasons Jones has been banned off of all social media) isn’t a bad thing. You don’t get to go into a crowded room and scream “FIRE” again and again. Jones not only did this – but he’s repeatedly called for civil war against his “enemies”, which means that the author of this article doesn’t seem to think that might be a problem.
Social media isn’t “your” platform. It’s THEIRS. And you have to abide by their rules to use their platform. It’s that fkn’ simple you nitwit. I ran a blog for decades. It was MY platform, and I had rules. Violent, racist, hateful commentary WAS removed (infrequently, my regular commentators knew the rules). Repeat offenders were banned. Pretty damned simple. If you want to use it (I do not) – follow the rules.
Frankly, I think social media is curse on our civilization. It has disconnected people in the SAME ROOM from having real conversations. Nobody talks to anybody anymore. Brief character limits and unseen bodily language and a whole host of other reasons make social media ‘interactions’ a joke. They’re not real life and they do not convey real life. Embracing this or even pathetically attempting to defend this reveals a gross misunderstanding to what social media actually “is”.
It’s not the real thing and it will, never, ever be. It’s a private platform that has rules and restrictions. It alienates people through screens and asinine “trends”. It turns introverts into extroverts screaming for attention by engaging in utterly asinine antics and activities. It permits the most ugly personalities of our species to create phony platforms for support. It absolutely DOES need to be regulated – and if this clown cannot actually see that – then he’s spent FAR too much time online.
Here’s another reason how I know that this clown is utterly clueless – “But by far, by FAR, the biggest virtue of social media – all internet media – is the ability to step on lies instantly. To real-time fact-check propaganda.”
Definitely NOT true. The exact OPPOSITE is true. Numerous studies have demonstrated that false claims, memes, trends very rapidly (near instantaneously) take on their own life once they’ve been posted and then reposted, up to millions of times in just a few hours. Fact-checking however, does NOT gain the widespread adoption or acceptance as he claims – just the opposite is true. The false memes continue to permeate the digital platforms on a far greater percentage then what is “fact”.
What he claims is a “virtue” is just made-up falsehood. It is the FAILURE of the social media users to fact check everything before reposting or sharing that is the fault here. Its done far less often then reposting a “lie” – this has been widely documented.
I’ve been online probably longer then this guy has been alive (since 1983) and have seen the rise of everything since the personal computer was invented. I warned my own audience years and years ago that the Internet was going to become highly polluted with distortions, advertisements and media control. This has all come true. By I have NEVER advocated that social media was “good” because it really isn’t. It’s manipulative, time-wasting, destructive and dangerous – BECAUSE it is unregulated and permits ANY voice to gain an audience and perceived “credibility”. Many of these voices are deadly, wrong, ill-conceived and seek to divide people over various issues. We are now reaping the whirlwind of this activity.
I avoid ALL forms of “social media” now because it’s utterly USELESS. It’s full of stupidity, hate, xenophobia, fear, paranoia, connedspiracy, ignorance, stupidity and useless FLUFF. As a “news source” it’s worse then useless and NOTHING posted on social media can be trusted. Just look at how our idiotic President “uses” social media to counter-act the real life negative consequences of his actions, history and words – it’s become his weapon of choice to fool his brain-dead followers into continuing support.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all other social media outlets are what we use to call “rag publications” full of gossip, innuendo, dishonesty and misrepresentation. You can use it if you want to – but it’s just stupid to “defend it” as if it represents anything more then the rabble, babble of the crowd of morons that inhabit this bit of cyberspace.
And finally – it’s downright laughable that you think that by regulating social media they’re “regulating us”. If you REALLY believe this, then you’re pretty damned stupid. First off, you’re assuming a whole host of wrong things here, the first being that social media is “regulating you” by imposing any kind of restrictions. If you’re really THAT pathetic, you should get offline and shut the fuck up, because you’ve got nothing worth saying anyway. Secondly, you have your OWN platform to voice your opinions. And I’m quite certain you regulate THAT.
I could give a fuck what social media “regulates” because social media does not and never has defined me, it has never silenced my voice or opinions, it had nothing to do with my online activity, and I was never hurt nor helped by it – because I never used it. If you want to be mad at social media platforms – then be mad at the idiots that use it. They flocked to this massive deception like the brain dead morons that they are. And then they, like you – objected when it became necessary to regulate it. Well, you only have yourselves to blame. A few of us realized early on that it was a trap and was undoubtedly going to screw with people (read the book, you will not regret it). Shoshanna (and I have, for many years) warned that social media would control people and screw with not only their privacy – but their very thoughts and belief systems. That is now happened. They are now churning out programmed people who have lost all sense of self-identity.
You are only affected by social media if you let social media affect you – which is apparently what you’ve done. That’s too bad, but there is still hope. Walk away and never go back. Otherwise, stop bitching about what “they’re doing”. You don’t even understand half of the problem.
To sum up your point – “social media belongs to THEM not us, but we still need to applaud when THEY censor people on it, because they’re doing it for our own good.”
Thanks your concern-trolling is duly noted.
These channels of popular communication are Commons. And Commons should never be in private hands. History is replete with examples of the disastrous things that happen when they are. They need to be nationalised – or more exactly internationalised – public property, protected as strongly as possible by publics everywhere defending them, as with our widely-loved NHS, against the incorrigibly-crooked gangsters-in-charge – the gics – both state and commercial, who want to quarry them to a state of nearly-hamstrung tight limits, for nothing more than goddamned profit and control; certainly not for the unhampered intercommunication of we plebs.
This has been the perennial story of the Earth’s Commons, since at least eight thousand years ago, with the spread of tillage-cultivated grain-agriculture, and the class-divided society that it brings into being inevitably.
“In December last year The Guardian published an editorial calling social media “dangerous for our democracy”.
Talk about doublespeak! Social media is being targeted precisely because it is a democratising force. “Our democracy” in Guardianspeak refers to the elites and their political/social/economic order. While an informed citizenry is fundamental to democracy, an uninformed citizenry is fundamental to plutocracy. This campaign perfectly illustrates the mutual exclusivity of these two social systems and, we must remember, is in tandem with Google/Facebook’s recent drive to censor the internet.
“Fascism is capitalism in crisis”. Lenin