SPECIAL REPORT: Big Brother is Watching You
THYME to Leave Social Media
Ten years ago I joined Facebook. It was fun at first. There were old friends to keep up with and new ones found through common interests. It was a place where one could exchange ideas and baby pictures. Ironically it was a business model Mark Zuckerberg had built from a site called ‘Facemash’ he had built in college. That was a place where geeks who couldn’t get a date could ‘rate’ girls on appearance. So began the commoditization of our personal interactions. Our ideas and baby pictures – indeed our lives – are reduced to a commodity upon which Facebook cashes in on advertising revenues.
Gradually Facebook became a go to place for finding a plumber, Facebook became a news source. Facebook became an ‘authority.’ Facebook created a monopoly. We used to ask a neighbor when we needed a plumber or a house designer. Now we seem to just go to the internet. Here’s the problem: You won’t find the ‘best’ plumber, you’ll find the one who buys the most ads. His price will reflect the extra advertising revenue he puts out. I even fell victim to this mentality because I lost the phone number for Kevin Burns, a great local roofer – but I had a leak I needed fixed rapidly, so I ended up with a guy from Homeadvisor who charged three times what Kevin would have for the same repair. Expensive lesson!
Meanwhile, I found Kevin’s number on one of those roadside small signs you get at Staples for fourteen bucks apiece. Guess who gets to replace my aging roof? It will NOT be the guy from Homeadvisor!
Facebook has also become a news digest, telling us what is “true” and what is “false” with “independent” fact checkers. The problem is they reveal in doing this a bias and an agenda. Social media limits the reach of Conservative ideas while putting up banners for their more Leftist preferred causes. The end result is that Facebook and other sites are no longer a place for the free flow of ideas. They are another big media with an agenda.
The final straw came as election fraud was being investigated in big cities. Rudy Guliani has over fifty pollworkers from various cities who testify of some pretty flagrant violations to election law. These need to be investigated and prosecuted, but big media and big social media ignore vote harvesting in the Somolian community by Ilhan Omar, discarded military ballots and refusing to allow observation of the count of the controversial mail-in ballots. They simply decide to declare a ‘winner.’ This is not good journalism, it is propaganda. It is simply an attempt to sweep the real news under the rug. That is why I am not going to participate. I get most of my business from referrals and I can read a variety of news sources myself. Those of you I truly count as friends – we’ll still email or text pictures of our family. But Mark Zuckerberg, I will cease to be a commodity to you.
You laugh, but I call to mind Yahoo, AOL and Myspace. Creative destruction will eventually catch up with even the best business idea. Sometimes we simply discard it and return to the old ways and are far happier for it.
