It turns out
that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t any different than any other money-grubbing CEO. (Seriously,
why did I think otherwise?) He took money from the Russians to run fake
election ads in support of President Trump along with fake Black Lives Matter
ads to increase racial division which also benefits President Trump and white supremacists.
Russians
understand our gullibility and racism better than we do. They have played us
like a fiddle. They were able to do it with the help of CEOs like Zuckerberg.
Their troll farms worked facebook diligently. They weaponized facebook and
Zuckerberg profited from it. They were able to figure out that using social
media is the most cost effective way to influence our elections and that it is
a force multiplier. Not only were they able to reach people who weren’t
normally targeted with ads, they were able to design, rework and rearrange ads
for very specific groups, like those sympathetic to white supremacists views
though they may not self-identify as such.
Facebook,
Google and Twitter had employees assigned to specifically to help the Trump
campaign. Obviously they did a magnificent job.
They had inside information as to how to best manipulate users.
Zuckerberg
gives mea culpas after the fact. The election is over. He already made his
money. As it turns out facebook the corporation is good at polarizing and
dividing the country; that and making Zuckerberg filthy rich. Facebook gives
lip service to doing the right thing but so far what they do best is protecting
trolls, disseminating fake news pages, enabling those with evil intent like the
Alt Right/Nazis et al and herding users into more easily marketable niches.
Social media,
along with the Russians and President Trump, will continue pushing fake news
because it best suits their agenda of undermining a free press. A free press is
their competition. But they don’t have to have the expense of all those people
that it takes to support a free press. They just need laptops to make stuff up
and upload it to a waiting public willing to believe any garbage they produce
and ask for more. They understand the National Enquirer mentality and that
there are a lot of people who want to believe the worst about our country. The
leadership of the Republican Party has spent years helping make this possible.
Think about that.
Thousands upon thousands of sites pumping out disinformation 24/7. We are
drowning in it. The reality of what is actually taking place gets lost in all
the noise. Social media does it for money. The Russians did it to help elect a
President and destabilize our country.
Now we’re
faced with having a seriously flawed and challenged President undermining the
country with a fascist agenda and a Vice President pushing a theocratic agenda.
In the meantime government is crashing. Now this may be something that
President Trump supporters celebrate but be careful what you wish for. When
governments crash civilization usually unravels in the chaos that follows. There
are way more have nots than haves.