Mark Zuckerberg was testifying again on Capitol Hill about Facebook ads and “truth.”
This gets into the area of “free speech” and “fake news” and “false advertising” and at the end of it all we have a mess. But it’s not the mess Mark Zuckerberg created.
It’s the mess we created. Facebook is us. We are a mess. We like our echo chambers. We like our convenient personal truths and we want that reflected. We don’t want to see something outside of the truth we have built. Facebook can be a place where we can create nice echo chambers and then when an ad comes through challenging that echo chamber truth, we get offended.
We want Facebook to “police” it, when in fact we can do that ourselves. We just don’t want to go through that exercise. Instead, we’re “triggered” and we want the pipeline bringing us that triggering event to shut down.
Facebook is us. We have become less able to filter information and discern truth over time. We have instead let our minds become open sewer pipes allowing anything in and we don’t know how to filter and discern. We want someone upstream to put in the filters. We don’t want to argue over a matter. We want to humiliate anyone opposing our view and have them shut down completely.
Facebook is us.
And now we want someone else monitoring FOR us and shaming everyone not like us into silence.
When we can learn to change, to debate properly, to research well, and be able to present truth (or at least our position) better, lo and behold Facebook might change. Because Facebook is us.
We know the medium. We know the platform. We know the ability of others to “hack” the medium and present “false information.”
A couple of generations ago it was television. People would complain about the content streaming through their TV. It was what the networks provided, so it was what you had to watch or, perish the thought, just turn off. Then, to counter it along came the video tape.
One person joked, “I can’t believe the garbage that is coming through my VCR these days!”
This is our dilemma. Social media is a medium we control. We can learn to scroll past garbage, or, perish the thought, turn it off.
It’s just… we can’t. We’re addicted. And we want someone else managing our addiction.
Facebook is us.
Apprentice 2 Jesus 