Social Panic

I did some scanning of social media for “test positive” and found numerous cases of people testing positive for stupidity.

Quite a few were sharing a meme that a doctor or group of nurses had sent in a batch of unused Covid-19 tests to a lab and all came back as having tested positive. Obviously, that is a social media meme – there is never any provenance to the story, no details to check it out. Clearly, a fake meme suited for social mania sharing.

Bias in media reporting: “But it’s far from obvious to Supreme Court justices, all of whom are lawyers over the age of 50.”

Age has no relevance in the argument except in the mind of the reporter who somehow thinks age is relevant to one’s tech understanding. Click in to read about my age and qualifications in tech.

The CDC emits a continuous stream of inconsistent, often contradictory and generally incoherent messages – after failing to do its job back in January-March – and then blames the public for not understanding their message. The CDC Director is an idiot.

I have largely ended my use of Twitter, as of this week. Also this week, I was doxxed on Facebook, for no apparent reason, after commenting in a private group about some privacy issues in a proposed government regulation. Social media is dangerous for our mental health and our security.

The FAA and other officials, using high tech gear, are unable to locate any drones among the media reports of unknown drones cruising over the skies of Colorado, then Nebraska, and now California and North Carolina. This post includes a listing of numerous well publicized drone sightings, alleged near misses and collisions that turned out to have never occurred. But such wide spread publicity led to mass hysteria, which is itself a technique of propaganda messaging.

State of Colorado says no evidence of criminal activity, finds evidence of people confusing stars, planets and toys as a drone fleet in the sky.

Facebook lost about $113 billion market capitalization this week (per news reports). Twitter share price also fell about -20%. One pundit on Twitter remarked that while government did nothing about Facebook’s privacy scandals, the free market itself just assessed a $100 billion fine on Facebook, of which about $16 billion came out of Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket.

At a local comic con, of all places, a cosplayer and recent sociology graduate introduced me to the term “mean world syndrome”. Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Source: Mean world syndrome – Wikipedia She says sociology, as a field, suffers from mean world syndrome as all they do today is study things…

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Source: Newspapers run IDENTICAL letters slamming Trump’s Supreme Court pick | Daily Mail Online At least one of the signatories to the letter says she never sent the letter and suggests that her name was lifted off a petition. This was an astro-turf propaganda operation, flooding the world with a message that is made to look like it comes “from the people” (grass roots) when in fact, it was manufactured by an organization or public relations agency working on behalf…

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The company said it would invest in more “authoritative” news videos to counter the conspiracy-theory clips that plague the site. It will also insert “text articles” in feeds when breaking news occurs, and will roll out an “information panel” promoting videos from legitimate news groups. Source: YouTube Will Invest $25 Million to Fight Fake News – The Daily Beast Presently, Youtube already stuffs my Youtube video feed with news videos, usually CNN but sometimes other networks. I do not watch…

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