A Personal Essay by John M Jones III (11/30/18)
There are a few things that educated & informed voters must realize when it comes to their social media accounts and their usefulness in their daily lives. Gone are the old days of AOL when we were all enthralled this new thing called chat rooms. Gone also are the myspace pages where tom periodically dropped by to tell you hi. Todays, generation of social media available from our mobile phones now allows 24-hour access to people, and things across the planet.
This fantastic growth of our internet society though is fraught with unforeseen problems. One major problem for many is the many social media users have forgotten their common-sense filter. They ignore the rule to never say something to someone you wouldn’t say to their faces or treat other like you want to be treated. They think that just because they might be hundreds or even thousand of miles away that they can verbally attack or threaten people. So many social media users are constantly rude, crude, and socially unacceptable and they think that it’s perfectly fine behavior.
Another problem is that people just do stupid things. We’ve all done them whether it be just out of stupidity or a simple mistake. However, now that we have social media even innocent mistakes and not so innocent ones can, will, and has led to the destruction of people lives all for the sake of the entertainment of the masses.
People also mistakenly use social media as their sole news source. So, when a story breaks all they see a giant headline designed to inflame the reader, but when the time comes to read the story they can’t. They can’t or won’t because within seconds another story designed to outrage them shows up on their timeline or twitter feed. This constant outrage syndrome or C.O.S. is driven by emotion and hatred not news and not by facts of any kind.
Rather than a force for productive behavior todays, social media has become a place for so-called justice warriors tear people and things down to: call everyone entire groups of people racists, sexists, micro-aggressors, homophobic, xenophobic, and much worse because the color of their skin or political affiliation. They call: milk racist, Charlie Brown racist, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer “problematic”, Christmas music sexist, they even call the constitution of the United States of America racist. Social media users blatantly provokes and divide America not build her up and many social networks allow this behavior to continue unabated.
The social media networks are also extremely biased and are not bound by the 1st amendment of the bill of rights. ALL social media networks and all social media profiles are NOT the property of the users. All facebook profiles are owned by facebook and all twitter profiles are owned by twitter. WE DO NOT OWN our social media profiles. We use them with the gracious permission the facebook and twitter and if they choose to they can put ANY limits on content they want to and we can’t do one thing about it, except stop using them.
Facebook has admitted to deleting thousands user profiles they don’t agree with or they say tried to influence an election (note: objectively how do you prove how a facebook user can influence a national election enough to warrant its deletion?). They also constantly censor content based on a set of subjective rules and then don’t even tell the users which so-called rule they violated when they lock them in facebook jail. Twitter employees have been caught admitting they shadow ban certain users, so their followers couldn’t not see their content. Youtube demonetizes their own users because of their political or religious beliefs.
All educated & informed voter MUST realize what social media really is and what it’s good for. While it is a cool tool for one’s entertainment and amusement it is NOT news source, it is NOT an outrage machine, nor a means for so-called sjw snowflakes to endlessly complain. It’s a place to meet your friends and share photos and interesting things. If you want to complain about something first vote then go to a town hall meeting, or write a letter to the editor, or call you representative.
Finally, if you want to call someone a bigot, racist, sexist or worse perhaps you should look in the mirror first then, afterwards, if you still feel the need then you should meet them in person and say it to their face!!
(1) https://socialnetworking.lovetoknow.com/Reasons_Why_Social_Networking_Is_Bad
(2) https://socialnetworking.procon.org/