A good all round assessment of where Facebook is going.

A good all round assessment of where Facebook is going.  Fake News is the new catchphrase being used to censor people who want to get their message out.  The real fake news comes from the mainstream media, deliberately sown wrong information.  Censorship of social media is growing – automated systems which screen out stories that are not wanted by those who own the media.  Stories are allowed out but are tagged with warning messages –  such as badging the site as  ‘State-sponsored’, or other things designed to unsettle readers.  Any news source can screw up.  Small operations like The Tap don’t have resources to verify stories, and mistakes get made with the best will in the world.  People prefer to read writers whose hearts in the right place than read the mainstream media output penned by those whose souls were sold long ago.  The mainstream is not surprisingly is trying to fight back.  People have to educate themselves about the topics that interest them.  You can’t trust channels. (paraphrase of video extracts)

TAP – Just subscribed to The Spectator magazine again after a gap of ten years.   I thought it might be fun to follow some stories from some of their writers who are verging on alternative, although that might be imitation rather than true content, in reality.  I thought it might help to decode the political goings-on in the US and UK.  I was, however, shocked when picking up the very first issue to see that war propaganda stories like Bana in Aleppo are given prominence and swallowed hook, line and sinker by a supposedly intelligent magazine.  If I see much more of this, I’l  be hitting the cancel subscription button very quickly.    War needs propaganda, and propaganda needs media willing to carry lies and untruths.  And such media in turn, needs idiots willing to read and believe it all.  Intellectuals are the easiest people to dupe, as they like the notion that they’re a little bit higher up than the average person, which makes them easy meat for propagandists intent on murdering large numbers of human beings, in the nicest possible way.