Russian officials denounce the West while simultaneously sending their kids to universities and jet set lifestyles in Europe and the U.S. They pretend to believe their own propaganda that the West is evil.
A Russian athlete appears at a sports competition wearing the “Z” symbol and flaunts it in front of a Ukrainian athlete. While many of us want to believe Russia’s cruel invasion of Ukraine is due to Putin alone, this behavior implies the Russian people themselves are awful. Behaviors like this have long term repercussions. It will be years – decades – if ever – for Russia to restore the rest of the world’s perspective to where it had been just weeks ago.
I feel as if I may have been duped and fell for Russia’s social media propaganda campaign that waged its propaganda campaign using ordinary Russians producing innocent content on social media. I have abandoned most Russians on social media for now, and hopefully in the future I can again resume watching their content – once this war is resolved. Everyone is suffering.
Starting today, Youtube will begin removing the “dislike” count from videos, saying that too many people had participated in “dislike” mobs to downvote videos (often political videos). The dislike button will remain, and content creators can see the count, but the count will no longer be visible to others.
Is it time to cut back on this blog? Today everyone seems aware of the issues with social media, and to a large extent, the issues with media manipulating our thinking. Is this blog still needed?
The researchers find we evaluate unknown sourced information based on whether it agrees with our existing thoughts. We judge information we agree with (even if factually wrong) as more credible merely because it aligns with our pre-existing thoughts.
Facebook completely controls public discourse in a totalitarian fashion. The WSJ reveals internal FB documents showing that FB “white lists” up to 6 million accounts world wide to get exemptions or special treatment from content moderation. The FB system applies to both FB and Instagram, and tends to include politicians (even down to the local city council level), actors, news media, sports personalities, academics – even those with very large followings on social media.
Because the FB content moderation system makes frequent errors, FB wanted to avoid the publicity that happens when a prominent person was censored by FB – thus, they excluded elite people from the system.
Through this system, Facebook controls public discourse – everyone can speak equally except some can speak “more equally than others” (to paraphrase Animal Farm).
The company has lied to the public about this system in the past, claiming that everyone was treated equally. But they are not. When public speech is censored by Facebook, Facebook becomes the arbiter of all information. In this case, FB has decided that elite members of society are more important than you or I and are given special speech privileges. Imagine the impact this has when some can promote (propagandize) their views but others are denied that option.
Facebook is a true menace to society.
Science communications is performed precisely as a propaganda function: “The first is what science communicators call “the deficit model,” which assumes the public is deficient in their understanding of science and need scientists as the learned elites to help the benighted masses.” and “The second limitation is that the goal of health communication is not to inform others, but to change their behavior.”
WASHINGTON — USA TODAY is fighting a subpoena from the FBI demanding records that would identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shooting that killed two agents and wounded three others. Source: USA TODAY fights FBI subpoena demanding records that would identify readers of Florida shooting story
Facebook, Twitter and Google outrageously censored scientists and doctors for asking questions about challenging issues in the pandemic. Today, we are recognizing that these discussions were important – but silenced by the unethical billionaires of social media.