Social media poster that is true
TL; DR Summary
Facebook’s confusing censorship policy
Facebook temporarily shut down Gaines’ account at the request of the police. It came right before officers opened fire, killing her and striking her 5-year-old son. The decision put a spotlight on another Facebook activity: its routine censorship of users. Source: How Facebook censors your posts (FAQ)
Political polls
Political polls are often a form of propaganda messaging. However, the propaganda connection is not the purpose of this post. UPDATE Nov 10 2016: The campaign polls were severely wrong, so wrong that they might have been part of propaganda messaging – or their failure may result from the pollsters and media being off in their own worlds, out-of-touch with real people. In essence, the pollsters and media may have become the “elite” that view the rest of the country as the…
Social media and its negative impact on productivity
High tech ought to be driving our economy forward, but as the linked article highlights, our productivity improvements and job opportunities are not nearly as great as past industrial advances. Why is that? Much of today’s tech industry is “social media” and: One reason [for a productivity slowdown] may be the nature of “social media,” which is largely a replacement for technology that already exists, or in many cases, is simply a diversion, even a source of time-wasting addiction for…
Research finds that social media rots teen brains
Analyzing the test results showed that students who frequently used social networking sites like Facebook or apps like Snapchat ended up wasting their brain cells, scoring on average 20 points lower in math, reading and science compared to those who didn’t partake in the online “social scene.” Source: Research Suggests Gamers Get Better Grades, While Social Sites Rot Your Brain Hmmmmm …. If you, say, wanted to control a population, you would use social media propaganda … with the added…
Hillary Clinton can’t walk up stairs? Old photo, missing context
TL;DR Summary This photo is spreading today (August 7, 2016) on Twitter and Facebook and purportedly is a contemporary photo of Hillary Clinton requiring assistance to go up a flight of stairs. Reality: The photo is from February 2016 when she slipped on the stairs and was grabbed by aides to prevent a fall. Once posted on social media, this was shared, liked and re-tweeted, with no one asking the obvious questions about time frame, location or verification of the subject. This…
Bernie Sanders is not a millionaire?
TL; DR Summary A shared social media poster asserts that Bernie Sanders would have been the first president who wasn’t a millionaire, since 1945. On the surface, this statement sounds plausible. His Senate disclosure forms list less than $1 million in assets. But it leaves out the value of his retirement savings and his government provided pension. A private sector worker would need at least $1 million in assets to have a pension payout similar to what Sanders will receive…
Context matters – “Allah is the only god”
TL;DR Summary Conservative social media protested that school children were ordered to write “Allah is the only god” for a school assignment. The incident did happen, but context matters! This is just one tiny part of a multi-part course segment on issues in world history. And specifically, on the role that religion has played in major historical events. On 1 day of a 3 week period, students examined the Five Pillars of Islam to learn the role they played…
Republican Platform seeks to sell off all Western US Federal lands
TL; DR Summary The basic propaganda method used here is the strawman argument. In the strawman argument, you create a fictitious statement from your opponent (in this case by exaggerating what they said) and then argue against that fictitious statement, rather than what the opponent actually said or promoted.
“In the age of the Internet, the truth does not matter”
“In the age of the internet, the truth does not matter. The message you want to propagate can be told, and it will spread like wildfire. And spread it did.” Propaganda spreads faster than wildfire on social media, often torching everything in its path. The marriage of social media and propaganda is extraordinarily dangerous if you think about how Internet mobs convict people, groups, ideas – in a matter of hours – in the absence of a full set of…