As IF Times

Source: Police look for victim in body-shaming photo taken by Playboy model at L.A. gym – LA Times

It’s as if an entire bloc of people are living in a protected bubble with nary a link to the outside world.  These are people for whom life is lived virtually, where the things that are truly meaningful are linked to what is portrayed of them on the six inch screen.

The proliferation of smart phones, apps and social media platforms has transmogrified western culture into a self indulgent, narcissistic generation of Peter Pans.  If we could only get the ISIS tribe on board this faux world of false praise and paper thin sensibilities, we wouldn’t have to go after them with bullets.  A few well placed insults or provocative selfies and they’d all come undone just like the snowflakes and sensitive flowers that now populate the west.

It may be welcome respite for the police to chase down the sinister crimes of name calling rather than worry about hate groups threatening their lives on a daily basis, but there are some who think this may be a waste of resources.  It parallels worrying about how to get the caramel in a caramilk bar while engaged in a gun battle with thugs. And yet, a segment of the populace thinks that this is a good use of police resources.

It may be worthwhile for the US military to consider using a new tack when dealing with terrorists of all stripes.  Give them cell phones complete with twitter  and facebook accounts.  Then start calling them names and bodyshaming them and display it all as publicly as possible.   In very short order, they’ll abandon the notion of real violence for the more important world of virtual violence.  Mass killings are so impersonal; far better to inflict biting insults and micro-aggressions on your enemies.

Source: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

It’s incredibly ironic that at a time when communication to the larger world has never been more accessible, peoples’ exposure to it can actually be shrinking.  This doesn’t mean that people are unaware of things happening across the county or even across the globe.  Thanks to social media platforms such as the ubiquitous Facebook, people are able to snoop into the lives of people whom they would normally never hear from…and that includes relatives, from all over the world.

Now, you can be Facebook pals with any ‘celebrity’ who willingly leaves the door open for the public to ogle their lives.   This satisfies both the voyeur and exhibitionist elements of society.  Facebook has evolved from being a bulletin board of peoples’ actual activities, (essentially a year round Christmas letter), to one where people post cute cat and dog videos.  From this banal stage, Facebook is now moving to a more ambitious, possibly sinister stage, that of news dissemination.

Those of you who post or frequent Facebook regularly may have noticed the proliferation of ads and infomercials interspersed among the cat videos.  That is to be expected, since monetization of eyeballs is the raison d’etre of the company.  What is more subtle are the “trending” news stories that appear throughout the site which are then ‘liked’ and forwarded by your social network.  Since you are more likely to click on the referrals of your pals than to randomly read a story, the newsworthiness of the article gains exposure and by implication, veracity.

This is nothing different from the way that humans have long communicated: the tried and proven technique of gossip.  It’s the modern day equivalent of  “I heard from a reliable source that…”  This gets passed on throughout the community and the story becomes fact without regard to the validity of the story. Next thing you know, the neighbor is part of the JFK cover-up.

The problem is, as the linked story illustrates, the original sources of the story may have questionable facts and indeed may be promulgating a particular worldview.   If a story emerges about the plight of missing penguins caused by evil global warming (and especially if accompanied by doe eyed pictures of the little critters) is “liked” by Pamela Anderson, then every girl on that social net will ‘like’ and pass on that story on their sites and voila, global warming kills cute animals.  For some reason, they never use spiders or snakes.

It’s always good to be skeptical of the news stories foisted upon the public by the major commercial news outlets, but Facebook’s tack is much more powerful, because it creates a mechanism for people to get information from trusted sources, namely their friends, which may carry more weight than if they had read it from oh, let’s say, the unimpeachable Huffington Post.  People may appear to be more informed about things; until you find out that they are really just Facebook bots.  Deluding people with make believe friends is harmless: deluding them with make believe realities is not to like.