Clicking “Like” on a social media post that contains controversial commentary may get you fired from your job. This has happened in the past and may happen to some police officers who liked a controversial post from a former police officer that participated in the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Back in 2016, fake social media posts from fake social media accounts were used to incite fear and hysteria, with attempts to start riots. I documented this in detail back in 2016.
Today we again have fake social media posts being used to incite violence, looting, arson and anarchy – none of which leads to productive solutions to bona fide injustices and societal problems. Social media is playing a central role in this non-productive destruction of our society – and is not providing a platform for problem resolution.
In 2017, without warning or recourse, Google shut down all services associated with Salil Mehta, a professor of statistics, editor of a statistics journal, author of a best selling book on statistics, a former Obama administration official and later, a polling statistics adviser to the Trump campaign. His offense? He ran a blog about mathematics! Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the totalitarian governments of the 21st century, stifling speech their algorithms choose to flag. Unlike us peons, Mehta is well connected and a huge outcry caused Google to reinstate his account.
Numerous common terms, even commonly used numbers, are now considered symbols of hate, per the newly updated official list of hate symbols from the ADL.
There are many news reports about a growing “epidemic” of transgender murders in the United States. However, the data show a nearly constant trend line from 2015 to 2019. Further, the transgender murder rate, based on the data, is 1/4th to 1/2 that of the overall U.S. population. (It is possible that the underlying data is poor, which the Human Rights Campaign hypothesizes – but news reports calling out an epidemic in the absence of data to support that are not even pseudo news reporting – they are creative fiction writing.)
All murders are wrong, period. Violence and hate are wrong, period.
This post is about news reporting, not the transgender community.
Software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services. Disclosures are often buried in user agreements. Source: Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail – WSJ They also let employees of those companies personally read your email: this is “common practice”. As already suggested on this blog, they data mine the hell of our emails, logging your purchases, financial records, travel records and more. For companies that want data for…
The senator [Sanders] from Vermont says 40 percent of guns are sold without a background check. The Washington Post notes the figure came from a small survey in 1993/1994 before major changes in gun laws. The latest data indicate it is 13%, not 40%. But remember, the first propaganda message someone hears is the one that sticks – undoubtedly this figure has stuck with Sanders for a quarter century. Source: Bernie Sanders resurrects a ‘zombie’ claim on gun sales without…
A UCLA student journalist reported a story using a photo of a sign in front of a student housing home that said “No Blacks Allowed”. Russian trolls picked up the photo, extensively edited, and then posted it on a Russia run propaganda group called Blacktivist, to emotionally target members of the group. The FB group had 360,000 “Likes”, which was more than the Black Lives Matter group itself. But Blacktivist was a fake group designed by Russian trolls to racially…
Welcome to our Western social media future! China’s popular, social-media platform Sina Weibo reintroduced key elements of its service a week ago after they were suspended in January by the country’s Internet regulator for failing to halt the spread of “harmful content.”In January, the Beijing office of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) declared that, “obscenity, low taste, and ethnic discrimination continued to spread on Sina Weibo,” along with content containing “wrong public opinion orientation.” Source: China boosts censorship of…
Not only is a “strong social media presence” now a prerequisite for many, if not most, jobs, but companies have begun to look at your number of followers as both a measure of monetary value and a career determiner. And according to TIME.com, employers actually consider people without Facebook suspicious. “If you boycott Instagram, you’re cutting yourself off from a lot of opportunities,” said Emily. “I started posting more selfies, despite being self conscious about it, because honestly—you get so…