Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
Yes, TikTok harvests your data. But social media like Facebook and even retailers like Whole Foods and Amazon do too. Banning TikTok? The difference, of course, is that the latter are US companies harvesting data to sell you stuff. Whereas the former is a Chinese company doing so to turn you against your own country.… Read more.
For posting this prayer after reading about Colin Powell’s death at ABC News, The Guardian, and The New York Times: This of course is the same Facebook whose former product manager, Frances Haugen, testified at a congressional hearing just weeks ago about it willfully peddling products that “harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and… Read more.
Mark Zuckerberg denied his 3.5 billion users the ability to get high (er, likes) on Facebook and Instagram for nearly six hours on Monday. But if you believe his configuration story about this outage, you probably believe Donald Trump’s fraud story about the 2020 presidential election. I think the temperamental Zuckerberg just reacted in a… Read more.
A grifter is as a grifter does. And so Donald J. Trump, the former, twice-impeached president of the United States, is doing this: Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday filed proposed class-action lawsuits targeting Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey, as well as YouTube and its parent company’s… Read more.
Celebrities vow to quit social media As clickbait goes, celebrities posting tweets pledging to quit social media takes the cake. Pam Anderson is the latest to take the pledge. But in seeking more fame, she just looks lame. Of course, social media platforms are rife with social malignancies, physical dangers, and moral hazards. Thus, if celebrities made public service… Read more.
Calls to boycott Facebook are becoming pandemic among businesses worldwide. Numerous businesses are pausing their advertising campaigns on Facebook (FB) – and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook – to boycott the company’s policies around what content it moderates and how. The campaign, called ‘Stop Hate for Profit,’ and organized by the NAACP, Color for… Read more.
I have no illusions about ending the social menace of cyberbullying, trolling, or fake news. But each would be greatly reduced if bullies, trolls, and fakers of all stripes were required to use their real names … like everyone else; alerts were required to rate news sources and highlight lies, misinformation, and disinformation; and networks… Read more.
Twitter: the case for banning political ads Last week, Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would ban all political ads. The media lionized him. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said political ads, including manipulated videos and the viral spread of misleading information, presented challenges to civic discourse, ‘all at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.’ He… Read more.
Speaking to a live audience at Georgetown University on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s role in providing a voice to more than 2 billion people of around the world. While he admitted that some types of misinformation can do harm, Zuckerberg said that Facebook and other tech companies shouldn’t be the ones to… Read more.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is trending for insisting that the only way to hold it accountable is to break up its social-media monopoly. Clueless Facebook responded by insisting that it’s too successful to break up. This might sound like big banks insisting that they’re too big to fail. Except that it’s even more absurd and… Read more.
