People blame less than 1% of the population, but the majority who enabled the past 3 years and every atrocity in history is the unquestioning NPC.
December 19, 2022
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
The lag time between what government does and the rest of greater society is mind-numbing. As the majority of people believe legalization of weed and recognition of gay marriage are nonstarters, politicians are still dragging.
But that also plays in our favor because while the government is slow and reactive, the private sector is relatively quick and proactive.
Social media is like guns: it’s as bad as the user of it. You can have a happy cat video filled experience, or an abysmal doom scrolling experience depending on how you choose to use it. That’s not a secret, and in fact, advertisers count on those patterns to reach their audiences reliably.
Algorithmically, while it’s not the “intent” of the platform (as the platform itself has no intent), it is the inevitable byproduct that you wind up in a sort of self-curated echo chamber.
If you’re mindful of this, you can have a healthy relationship with the social platforms. In the same way you can have an occasional glass of wine and not become an alcoholic or buy a lottery ticket and not become a degenerate gambler.
That’s basic self-awareness and accountability.
But no longer is it just your actions on the platform… it’s the actions behind the scenes. Specifically the actions of the “Alphabet Bois” influencing and manipulating what is or isn’t shared to the public.
The individual things the FBI, DHS, and DOJ did or didn’t do, while bad, is more symptomatic of a much larger issue: that of the fascistic collaboration and cooperation between the federal government and private industry.
The biggest defense of Twitter “shadow banning” or Facebook “deprioritizing” content is that they are private entities. Which is true until they start serving the interests of government rather than their users. Then you’re a government extension with a private facade; or as someone put it, a “subsidiary” of the platform.
If in fact these larger platforms took their policy and practice cues from the FBI, and would not have otherwise done this on their own, that’s not a private company. It’s not quite a government entity, but that ain’t private, that’s for sure.
They had a choice. They could’ve said no. T-Mobile was also approached and they refused to cooperate. But Twitter and Facebook decided to not only cooperate but in the case of Twitter, they hired on ex-FBI employees to key positions of influence:
Twitter’s top ranks were filled with over a DOZEN ex-FBI agents and executives which stitched social media giant even closer to the Bureau – as ‘Twitter Files’ uncover cooperation over account details.
That they targeted a certain person or a certain group of people or a story isn’t the real story. It’s that they COULD do this. It’s that large private entities with tremendous public influence are okay with allowing this.
This isn’t going away. Elon Musk will have his own misgivings — and has — in the way he manages the platform. We will have disagreements on what constitutes “free speech” from a private company perspective.
But when whole stories are erased, and entire sides of a very important discussion on public health are silenced, it becomes another layer of control. It’s one thing to serve up content based on personal interest. It’s another to suppress — or in some cases serve up — content based on government interests.
If we accept that all this was in service of government interests, then the other side of the “why did you suppress X” question is “why did you allow Y”. If misinformation and public safety are at the forefront of this government involvement, then how did school shooters with massive parades of red flags and illicit sexual content with minors make the cut, while doctors from Stanford and Harvard were silenced?
Clearly, I don’t believe the public safety or misinformation claims. I think it’s obvious at this point that it is more agenda driven. What exactly the agenda is, I don’t know.
The irony is, the very government that is manipulating US social media platforms is also fearful of Chinese manipulation from TikTok.
Once you know, what matters is what you do with that knowledge, if anything.
We knew government was using private companies for the purposes of surveillance. We knew that they did this in the name of safety at least since the Patriot Act passed. Edward Snowden’s revelations through 2013 was all the evidence we needed, but a preponderance of even more continued to roll out nonetheless. National Security is a cow with a LOT of milk.
All that said, it’s not news that the main stream media — and by extension social platforms — have a particular fixation on tragedy and bad news. When COVID-19 hit, you would’ve thought that catching the virus was a death sentence, but the reality was a 99% survival rate for those under 70, and 97% survival rate for those over.
Good news doesn’t sell. It doesn’t get clicks or engagement or likes the way controversy and tragedy do. Antony Davies from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) did a talk on this very thing, and it’s important that while we are protecting our privacy, we are seeking perspective.
So yes, do all the things to protect your identity and assets. Get a VPN, get an LLC, get a trust. These are helpful tools that don’t require much in the way of time or money to put into place. But perspective is what helps cooler heads prevail. The world isn’t on fire. Death and destruction aren’t waiting for you around every corner. The world isn’t worse off than it was 100 years ago.
The people who told you Iraq had WMDs, and “two weeks to flatten the curve” are the ones determining what is “disinformation” or “misinformation”. They are sanitizing our feeds, and consequently history in real time.
The most important imperative in all this, is to defend the market place of ideas no matter how repugnant the ideas. Let each person sort through it and figure out their own conclusions. Appeal to reason rather than punitive mandates and bans to change hearts and minds. Even if you don’t agree with it, it should be up to you to reject it, not others to reject it for you.
This is the lesson: We cannot trust or allow government or large holding companies to decide for us… or more accurately manipulate us… into carrying their water for them. Disagreement is fine. In fact it’s good and healthy. We need it. Desperately. Have a different take, but let it be YOUR take.
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