The Bizarro World of Mark Zuckerberg

SPECIAL REPORT

The Bizarro World of Mark Zuckerberg

It all began when Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend dumped him. The Harvard student proceeded to indulge in adult beverages to drown his sorrow and when he was sufficiently drunk he created FaceMash. It was a site where Mark hacked photos of female students from the college directory and used a coding system to ‘rate’ them on appearance. Zuckerberg’s ‘prank’ went viral. It crashed the college computer system. Thus an indulgence in drunken despondency became the model for social media. The rest is history. Zuckerberg created Facebook and made his fortune. Coding systems now gave the jilted Zuckerberg power – to control and influence great numbers of people – and alter the course of world events!

It’s like a bad science fiction plot really. Come 2020 and the jilted genius now has performed even more experiments with code and manipulation and he uses this information to sway public dialogue. As you know, college students joined Facebook by the droves. Then grandma got involved. At first Zuck resisted the oldsters but then realized the market potential of hosting the family media get together. Baby pictures, recipes, all manner of sharing became ‘content’ for the Zuckerberg marketing empire. But in 2020 the evil genius of science fiction stature flexed his algorithm muscles. Conservative content was suppressed. Zuck’s favorite social causes became ‘banner issues.’ Zuck’s ‘fact checkers’ and inserted banners told you what the ‘truth’ was – according to Zuckerberg that is.

I thought the internet was broken one morning as about every millennial I knew had a black square instead of their profile picture. Never fear, Zuck was promoting ‘Black Lives Matter.’ (or Burning, Looting Marxist Miscreants if you prefer). The clueless were promoting Critical Race Theory like it was going out of style and saying “unfriend me if you disagree.” So much for open and reasoned dialogue. Worse, if you had a different perspective than the Zuckerberg narrative, you might get banned from the platform. Certain topics became “off limits” on Facebook. Among them were Election Fraud, Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, reasons not to take the ‘vaccine,’ and any number of reasonable adult discussions. I was in a Free Speech forum in a group on Facebook but our posts and links kept getting banned. It became increasingly clear that Zuck wanted our family photos, our recipes and our idle time attention, but only as ‘content’ for his marketing vehicle. Our ideas were not welcome (unless they were his too).

So I decided to ‘fast’ from Facebook during June. I only went on once to put up a link to THYME Magazine. Zuck ignored Memorial Day but went all out for his pet causes. I wondered what he would do with the Fourth of July. And here is where things get stranger still. A video was posted of Zuckerberg riding his $12,000 hoverboard carrying an American flag as John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ played. Obviously a publicist had told Mark he’d better do something to ‘look patriotic.’ But a Leftist Globalist multimillionaire riding a surfboard that for most of us looks like an indulgent luxury somehow doesn’t seem very convincing. In fact, our ‘Truth Detector Software’ has made the slight adjustment below to the ‘Take Me Home’ video. And I'm really enjoying life without Facebook. I just might stay off of it all Summer!

Big Brother IS Watching You, It is Time to Leave!

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.