Just Stop, Facebook, Please

A decade or so ago, John Stewart went on “Firing Line” with Tucker Carlson and some other Fox nitwit(s) and asked them to “just stop” everything they were doing. He told them they were “hurting America” and that they were making no useful contribution. And of course, they were and still are; hurting America, that is. Nobody on Fox makes a useful contribution as anything other than aural fertilizer. The same goes for Facebook and similar web ilk.

I recently met a reasonable educated person, a retired lawyer, who imagines himself to be scientifically literate because he follows “Facebook Science”; which assume is Facebook’s Skeptical Science clown car. From that ridiculous source he has learned a bunch of pseudo-technical words that he doesn’t understand, a ton of red herrings to use like lawyerese debate gibberish, and he decided that climate change is a farce because his Facebook “skeptical scientists” have told him that carbon is a reflector in the upper atmosphere that shields the planet from the sun’s heat; as opposed to being an element distributed throughout the atmosphere that absorbs heat and prevents it from escaping the atmosphere and disipating into space. The terms he’s memorized and random red herring collection of talking points allow him to believe he understands some of the science.

Not only is his “scientific knowledge” laughable, he is completely oblivious to the way Facebook works. He imagines that by years of “liking” various climate-change denier Facebook pages he has been exposed to a diverse set of opinions from scientific sources. He doesn’t realize that Facebook’s engineers and psychologists have designed a collection of tools to keep him coming back to the opinions that reaffirm his biases. There is no better reason to avoid “social media” than this dumbing-down echo chamber effect.

And there is no better reason to ask Facebook to “just stop” everything they are doing. If they won’t, the next best thing is to either require them to limit social media conversations to unimportant trivia; or we hunt the bastards down like rats in the corn crib or put them out of our misery. Ideally, every country would follow Germany’s lead and limit Facebook’s ability to track and manipulate consumers to the point that the company can’t make money. At the least, anytime some uses Facebook as a reference point for any adult conversation, you should laugh in their face until they leave. The best thing for everyone would be for Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social media crapbucket to die an unnatural and quick death. I don’t care how it happens, but it should happen quickly before we have no world left to fuck up.