As IF Times

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.

link Soda Wars: Michelle Obama tells kids to drink water | WashingtonExaminer.com.

I suppose it’s a noble thing to use your position of influence to persuade others to do good things.  Issues  and conditions that affect many people but which require financial support to ameliorate are worthwhile causes.  Jerry Lewis has been associated with the Muscular Dystrophy cause for decades and of course Pamela Anderson has been linked to PETA.  World hunger, AIDS, etc etc etc all have their champions.  When Nancy Reagan was the First Lady, she took it upon herself to fight drug use via the famous “Just Say No” campaign.

It gets increasingly harder to find worthwhile causes that haven’t been associated with celebrities.  Michelle Obama finds herself in this pickle and so initially decided to wage a war on fat, especially among kids.  The first pass was to introduce, actually mandate the creation of legumes and veggies onto school lunch menus.  Yum!  Oddly, children weren’t particularly fond of arugula and carrot sticks…go figure.

As this campaign is as successful as the humus dip at a Denny’s, a logical idea then was to make success easier to achieve.  How about the idea of drinking…water!  It would be much easier to point to statistics that will eventually show that the program was working, kids are drinking water! We do have some reservations about getting  kids to buy into this though.  Smart Alecs will say “Water? that’s the stuff they flush toilets with!”.  No doubt there will be expensive public service campaigns expounding the virtues of drinking water with accompanying instructions on how to do it properly.  Let’s see, right hand on tap, turn clockwise…do not overfill!  Pamphlets will be distributed in schools and billboards created to ensure maximum exposure.  Facebook pages will be created on which you can “like” water.  As an accompaniment, there will also be supplementary instructions on other confusing things that children may need help with.

Breathing for example: techniques for proper air ingestion.  Let’s not forget walking instructions.  There will be discussions on the necessity of alternating feet.

I hereby wish to contribute my suggestion for how to tackle the devastating issues of child obesity and water consumption simultaneously.

Let’s remove all water faucets from homes.  Let’s direct water only to large cisterns that regionally serve communities.  To get water, children must walk some arbitrary distance, let’s say 2 miles, to carry buckets of water back to the home for consumption.   In many African countries, they are way ahead of us on this.  We combine exercise with utility, sheer genius.  Have you ever seen a fat African kid? Sometimes the old ways are the best.

Next: breathing in and out. And walking tips, is it necessary to alternate feet?