I do think there’s a lot of blaming of facebook when what mean is technology + human nature.
Aren’t old people the problem right now? The average age of that crowd storming the capital had to be above 50 based on what I saw.
social media, or if you want to call it “technology” encourages the worst in human nature though. humans always had the potential to be dipshits. this brings it out.
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Sure. I meant, I think it’s silly that people dump specifically on “Facebook” when really it’s Social Media, Phone Addiction, Game Addiction, Big-Tech Surveillance, and Ad Driven revenue. All things that thrive without Facebook.
Average age is 41 of those arrested.
Other than social media, I dont see how those listed bring out the worst in humanity.
I just mean:
- It’s not just Facebook. Lots of things are “social media” including twitter, reddit, youtube, newspaper comment sections, etc.
- It’s nothing Facebook is ‘doing’. They aren’t acting more predatory than other corporations. They just happen to be selling a drug of choice. Perhaps we need to regulate (or ban) them-- in the same way we do casinos-- but it doesn’t really make sense to blame them.
Yes I use facebook to also mean twitter. YouTube not as much because you have to make a choice to look at things, whereas on facebook and maybe twitter your friends share things or things just appear in the newsfeed that you did not seek out.
I think Twitter has a wider range of info from really helpful to awful shitholery.
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It really depends on who you follow/interact with.
I have a couple of classmates from way back when I chat with, a handful of other actuaries, people doing data science/dataviz, the muni bonds folks, Art Deco/Art Nouveau, MERL:
It’s your own fault if you interact w/ trash
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One of the most popular things I’ve done on twitter is create an opera twitter list:
https://twitter.com/i/lists/105200271
“your own fault” or not, it leads to bad things for society. that’s my point.
That is exactly my age 
Well then happy birthday!
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I follow actuary twitter, covid twitter in my state, and some guy who shared my birthday, plus a few IRL friends. Oh and my 2 favorite bookstores.
Let’s face it, it is not social media alone. It is relative anonymity. This has been going on for a very long time.
This morning I was reading about how Abraham Lincoln got into a duel because of letters to the editor submitted under a psuedonym that he created that then his wife and another woman continued using to ridicule some politician. Cooler heads eventually prevailed and talked them out of the duel.
Those letters were compared to today’s twitter and anonymous social media posts.
So I would say the latent human nature to do that has always been there, but social media has managed to magnify it significantly.
Yes that’s pretty much what I said. Social media brings out the worst in humanity and it is far more magnified than a letter to the editor. I started seeing this on the ao before Facebook was really a thing and then the nastiness exploded to the entire world with social media.
Not just the anonymity, but that adds to it. I think it is the screen. Everyone is a badass troll conspiracy theorist when you are sitting behind a screen alone rather than face to face.
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I think one problem is a disassociation of internet from reality. People that live perfectly normal, happy lives and make a good living and spend time around a bunch of other perfectly happy people making a good living and never deal with very much adversity are also getting on the internet and constantly talking about how everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
They never stop to think about how good they have it or why their life looks so different from what they think is going on based on what they read online.
A great example is this. My sister’s family’s school district had people in the meeting discussing mask mandates for the upcoming school year yelling and jeering that had no relation to any students in the school system. They were so bent out of shape about something that had 0 impact on their life that they went to protest over it. That doesn’t make sense to me.
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Didn’t that happen at just about every public school district board meeting this summer, at least any that had proposed a mask mandate? It happened at mine as well.