Facing Facebook as It Wrecks America from the Inside
It seems both media and government are terrified of the Big Bad Wolf and I for one am tired of watching America destroyed.
Big, bad wolfie in this case is a punk kid named Zuckerberg
The punk claims with a straight face and 12-year-old’s demeanor that he’s only enabling freedom of expression and none of the racist and fake news shitstorm going on in America is his doing. That’s a crock of shit that only a six-year-old would spring on his parents after he demolished the furniture—grinning and telling them he’s exercising his freedom of expression. He needs his ass tanned, his toys taken away and sent to bed without dinner.
Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. In a recent article, Facebook is a Doomsday Machine, she makes several great points:
“But viewing Facebook merely as a vehicle for individual consumption ignores the fact of what it is—a network. Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?
“But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change.”
Well said. You’re less angry than me, Adrienne and I acknowledge that, but there’s a time for raw anger.
And now I gotta admit I sometimes get angry and that makes me hang my head
I get angry, raw angry, when child-Zuckerberg invents algorithms that outwit 15,000 Facebook gatekeepers, sits on a cushion before Congress to make himself taller, enables Nazis and child-killers, then says he feels no remorse.
I get angry, raw angry, when the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma knowingly murders 400,000 Americans with OxyContin and the Sacklers negotiate a money-agreement that avoids jail and admits to nothing.
I get angry, more than raw angry, when the President of the United States encourages armed mobs into American streets, pouts through a pandemic and calls a national election stolen without a shred of evidence.
It’s worth knowing, that Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany
Hitler built a following by screaming repeated lies, blaming others, destroying the rules of law and race-baiting the German Republic. Newspapers in Germany and America treated him like an interesting news event. He took over all the available media of those times and played them like a symphony orchestra. He was everywhere at rallies. Master of the pointed-finger, his club-wielding Brownshirts spilled into the streets, a mob on the loose.
I was ten years old, attending a Cary Grant movie with my parents at the Teatro del Lago theatre in Wilmette, Illinois when Warner-Pathe News came on between features. Dachau Concentration Camp had just been liberated by American troops. Stacks of bodies were being removed by soldiers with bandanas over their faces because of the stench. Theater-goers streamed into the parking lot in shocked, hushed and stricken silence, the three of us among them.
There are those today—on Facebook and elsewhere—who claim the holocaust never happened
But it did happen, largely brought to an end (along with his own demise) by a führer who had captured an entire nation with radical and outrageous behavior. We’re healing from that man’s evil, but it’s taken seventy-five years and even now the nay-sayers are beginning to emerge from the murky shadows of the past.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “having to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”
He is silent on Facebook and the newspapers of today, but his words are food for thought.
Photo: NPR.org