Tag: Social Media

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Sometimes when people on social media reach the end of their patience with people they disagree with and they want to cease seeing their disagreeable posts, they will announce that any person who holds such horrible beliefs should unfriend them as they can no longer tolerate such nonsense. This is hardly an effective way to accomplish this and it makes you fair game for further noxious posts.

The best way to handle this, at least in my mind, is to unfriend them and be done with it. They will probably never realize you’ve unfriended them and you no longer have to be bothered with their noxious posts. It is an easy way to achieve social peace without having a showdown.

Unfortunately some people feel there must be a showdown. I am telling you I am no longer putting up with you and your asshole beliefs so do me a favor and unfriend me. Just speaking as someone who, from time to time, will send out annoying posts, don’t ask me to do your dirty work. Annoying your political opponents is part of the fun. If I know I am annoying you, I am certainly going to keep you as a friend in order to annoy you some more. Posting your displeasure with me, just announces I am being effective with my posting.

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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.