Category: Social Media

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During the 2008 Presidential Election, I talked with a man who thought Barrack Obama was a Muslim. I tried to correct him. He didn’t believe me. Several friends joined the conversation but nothing anyone said would change the man’s mind. I don’t know why we we pursued the matter because I knew from the start it was hopeless. This didn’t stop me from trying. I thought it was important that he understood that Obama wasn’t a Muslim. This was a lie and, as long as he understood that was a lie, he was free to vote for anyone he wanted. Of course, I failed miserably. He still believed Obama was a Muslim when our conversation ended.

This experience was quite frustrating. I don’t mind someone disagreeing with me as long as we are working with the same facts. But instead of arguing about what a fact means, we were arguing on what a fact was. I took Obama at his word that he was a Christian. The other man believed what someone mistakenly told him on the internet. We both believed our facts even though both couldn’t be true. How can you have an honest argument when you can choose your facts?

This explosion of conflicting facts has people wanting to keep misinformation from reaching the public. Can we stop the spread of false information? More importantly, should we stop the spread of false information? The world be a better place if people heard only the truth but how can we do it in such a way that our civil liberties are protected?

It when I reach that last question where I begin to feel differently about removing lies from public debates.

In my attempt to persuade my acquaintance that Obama wasn’t a Muslim, I gave him new and accurate information. The truth, however, and unfortunately, didn’t change his mind. The shining light of truth is no match for the closed mind. The truth quite simply didn’t matter. The answer, however, isn’t keeping the lie from the close mind. The internet isn’t the only source of misinformation. Humans have been spreading lies for thousands of years without the help of modern technology. Keeping lies off the internet only stops the speed, not the spread.

What, then, is the advantage of keeping lies off the internet. The lie doesn’t go away peacefully. The lie is still there waiting for someone to pick it up and carry it to a new person. Wouldn’t it be better to know the lie and be able to battle the lie instead of keeping a lie from the closed mind?

Don’t Social Media companies have a responsibility to the public to have truthful information on their sites? I am torn here. Do they? Isn’t Social Media supposed to be the town square? Facebook is offering a place to talk and not a court room for evaluating truth. Social Media companies presently police their squares for bad behavior. It is primarily a passive monitoring and works best when people are misbehaving. People prone to offense will always find something to be offended about. The Social Media police are kept busy evaluating these infractions.

Even this minimal policing has troublesome aspects. Who is monitoring? What do they believe? Where do they draw the line as opposed to someone else who holds a different set of beliefs? How much harm can a lie do versus how much damage does it do to not hear the truth. Don’t get me wrong lies are harmful. I would prefer that everyone tell the truth. That just isn’t realistic. Lies are always going to happen as long as humans are involved. We can only respond with the truth whenever a lie arises. To tell the truth, I must know the truth.

I can live with closed minded people reading lies on the internet as long as I get the truth as well. In order to insure this happens, I’m afraid the lies must be heard as well as the truth.

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I was reconfirming some flight data yesterday on several different airlines and travel sites. After I completed my task, I went directly to Facebook and there were, in a matter of seconds, at least 7 different ads from airlines or travel sites on my Facebook home page. If I had received just one ad, I might have shrugged this off as a coincidence but 7, come on, somehow Facebook found out about my previous searches and pounced.

I am not the most tech savvy person so maybe one of you can determine what I did to connect Facebook with my previous data searches. I was on Facebook but on a completely different browser. My Facebook page was open in the Safari browser however all of my travel searches occurred on Google Chrome. To my naive eyes, there is no connection. The different browsers shouldn’t be sending information to each other. Then, on Google Chrome, I logged into Facebook — and the travel and airline ads poured in one after the other. I am speculating that somehow Google Chrome sent Facebook my searching information when I logged into Facebook.

Now, I am not a fool. I have given up on privacy when using the Internet. I know the different companies are selling my information to each other but this is the first time I witnessed the rapidity with which this occurred and the blatancy of their approach. Numerous companies know I am interested in travel and they are going to get their sales pitch out to me as quickly as possible so that they can nab my cash while it is still up for grabs.

I am told I can fight this annoyance by fiddling with my settings. I used to try this but it seems the ad sellers can figure away around these restrictions, once they do, they share with other companies and changing my settings becomes a moot point. They simply don’t work for long and I don’t have enough energy to devote to learning new setting restrictions every time they figure out how to circumvent these setting. Send me the damn ads to me.

Now, the volume of ads is overwhelming on every platform I use. For instance, I used email a lot when it first came out. Now, I’ve pretty much given up on using email because almost every one I receive is an unsolicited ad for something I don’t want. When I open email, I spend a great deal of time just deleting emails. Why fight it? Marketing departments will figure out how to contact you, they will contact you — be it US mail, texts, email, Facebook. They will figure it out and you will get their pitch. And, since they are working together to get your cash, you can be sure that there is no way to effectively stop it. So get those credit cards ready.

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I accidentally got involved in Facebook argument the other day.  I know better than to argue with people who disagree vehemently with my position as I can never change that person’s mind. NEVER. If a person is passionate about an issue they are committed. They do, however, think that they can change yours. The argument will begin with the pretense of reasoned argument and end with taunts and name-calling.  I avoid these types of arguments as much as I can.

I stepped into this particular pile of shit because I thought I was replying to someone I knew, and probably agreed with. The post had the following statement: Why do you hate the rich? I answered the question with another question: Why do the rich hate us? There are billionaires out there that make more money than they know how to spend, why don’t they give this money to the poor and middle class so that everyone can enjoy a better life.  Today’s rich live in the greatest luxury known to humanity so even if they were taxed more, they would continue to enjoy the good life with little, if any, discernible change in how they live.

As I thought I was talking to my largely liberal friends, who would disagree? Yet, the disagreeing comments came.  When I checked the names of my opponents, I realized these were not people I knew and I should move on without comment.  I need to make a small confession here. I like to argue politics.  It is fun.  Or it used to be. I remember in college that I would go to a bar with people of varying political beliefs. We would drink and argue, but even though drink was involved we were mostly respectful of other people’s opinion, we listened and occasionally minds were changed.

Facebook arguments, if you haven’t been in one, aren’t friendly bar room arguments.  And that alone is saying a lot. I would rather argue with blind drunk political partisan in a bar than a completely sober person on Facebook.  Facebook arguments are savage hand-to-hand combat followed by the full nuclear arsenal raining down on the wounded bodies strewn across a bloody battlefield. It is bloody to participate in, impossible to win and thus pointless to respond.

But if I were to respond this is what I would say.

The crux of their argument wasn’t even an argument, it was a question: why did I care about how the rich spent their money.  It was their money and they earned it. This is where I disagree. What happens is that a company receives profit and the leaders of the company decide to divide the money between the people who are employed at the company.  The people who divide the pot are also the big wage earners. Low income earners are not invited to this particular table.   

It should be no surprise to anyone that the people dividing up the pie are the same people taking the biggest slice of the pie. The perverse side effect of this type of distribution is that high earners demand more and more money because their wages keep increasing and in order for companies to stay competitive they must pay their top earners more while the lower income earners wages are stagnant and there is little pressure to give this group more money. In fact, the top wage earners have abandoned their low wage-earning peers by putting more and more pressure on the lower income earners through automation and out-sourcing. So, while everyone at a company contributed to creating the profit, the top wage earners decided to take the lion’s share of the money claiming that the market made them do it. They personally had nothing to do with this skewed distribution, we are only following the dictates of the market.  If it was up to us, we would happily pay more money to low wage earners but, the market, you know must have its way.

Which brings me back to my question: Why do the rich hate us.  They take an unequal portion of the profits. They drive down global wages. They allow low income earners, people who by the way work a full-time job, to live in precarious economic situation while they live in luxury. They work to limit access to good public services for low income people. They are contemptuous of everyone who makes less money than them. Why do they hate us so?