As IF Times

Source: Facebook has a climate-denial problem

Oh oh; my days may be numbered.  But wait! I don’t depend on Facebook to broadcast my views anyways, so we’ll just carry on until they get enough influence to block everyone on the internet.  The way things are going, I figure I have another 4 months at least.

The battle for real information and news keeps getting more intense as the conduits for information join with the information purveyors themselves in steering and shaping the public discourse.  No one will deny the hard slants offered by the majority of the popular news outlets, both print and video media.  But you don’t expect the vehicles you use to access news to be also gatekeepers for content. This is the equivalent of your forks and knives blocking you from eating a rib steak because they feel you should be a vegetarian.  Both Twitter and Facebook have publicly censored conservative speech in favor of egregiously offensive leftist postings.  Apple and Spotify have now joined the fray by censoring those that don’t conform to their corporate worldview.   It is allowing a very small cabal of people to dictate what the masses are allowed to consume.  Free thinkers and libertarians should all have their hair on fire over this.  Unlike what Colonel Nathan Jessup thinks, we can handle the truth.

While this may be cause for celebration by the increasingly irrational left, we can easily see such actions engendering serious deleterious consequences for society as a whole.  It’s not even a matter of right or wrong, it’s a matter of putting a halt to the progress of civilization.  Imagine if Copernicus’ findings were not allowed to be publicly aired because the idea of the Earth orbiting the Sun instead of the then accepted belief of the  opposite, was deemed to be heretical.   Copernicus prevailed because he could demonstrate proof of his theory.   In today’s world, you don’t even need proof of a theory to confer legitimacy.  Just a bunch of Facebook likes and voila, it’s truth! If Twitter had been around in the day, I’m sure Copernicus’ inbox would have been flooded by angry and derisive tweeters calling for a good stoning.

The American Economist and Social Theorist Thomas Sowell wrote that, “Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society.  Just as you don’t find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don’t find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.”

Thus, when opposing views are not aired and debated on “public” social networks, it paves the way to groupthink, a condition that would put an end to innovation of every kind.  Interestingly, this mindset is a bizarre take on Copernicus’ theory.  It portends that truth revolves around the individual, rather than the actual reality that the individual orbits the truth.

Source: Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: A Critical Test for Facebook – The New York Times

Watching the current testimony of Mark Zuckerberg in front of a Congressional panel on Facebook’s activities is a bit like watching a bunch of seniors asking a PhD student about string theory.   It’s obvious that the Facebook CEO is giving condescending and patronizing answers to people who are asking political questions rather than probing for real fact discovery.  The greatest laugh he has on them is that during his testimony, the stock rose enough to enrich him by $3 billion dollars!  Boy they sure showed him.

That there is any outrage over the leaks of individuals’ private data exists only because there is a tenuous link to the possibility of a chance of maybe helping to bring about Donald Trump’s election.  As we all know, employment of such data mining techniques by parties partisan to the previous President were hailed as genius.  The root of the outrage is not so much about the abuse of mined data, it’s more about who got to benefit from it.

As usual, the threat of government regulation of companies such as Facebook have been raised as a means of curtailing ‘abuses’.  Sure, that’s what’s needed here, more laws.  Somehow, the encompassing sense of entitlement that has taken root in Western culture extends even to Facebook,  an entirely free platform for which nobody is forcefully compelled to participate.  However, in participating, people voluntarily offer their most personal information and proclivities for the world to see and presumably expecting the same from others.  Facebook is a brilliant invention which captures that large segment of the population whom are exhibitionists, voyeurs or both.   To their credit, Facebook made a business out of it and a very big one at that.  But now, there are all kinds of expectations on what this free service should provide or be responsible for.  It’s like going to a free public toilet and demanding that it be supplied with toilet paper.

Zuckerberg for his part, has been disingenuous with the description of his company.  His comments regarding Facebook content makes liberal use of the word ‘community’ to describe Facebook users.  In fact, they have armies of people who are charged with filtering out those that don’t fit their views of what’s acceptable in their community.  So it’s an inclusive community, as long as you fit their definition of community.

As long as Facebook is not deemed to be a public utility, they can do whatever they want and to treat customers as they see fit.  The hysteria surrounding their business practices will subside.  Satisfied users will stay; unhappy ones will leave.  The recent publicity that Facebook has garnered has served an important function however.  It exposes the reality behind their business model and perhaps into the models of many other internet and social media companies. People get something for free, meanwhile, the business owners become billionaires.  Why is there surprise?