I’m leery of social media, but I still lurk about its corners. It gives me ideas sometimes. But it’s supremely dangerous, and its purveyors know it. That doesn’t stop them from continually thinking of new ways to foist it upon us, but if we were actually smart enough to handle it, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Let’s face it – some people are quite literally whores when it comes to their social media presence. The fact that there are such a thing as “influencers” is a sad commentary on society. Not that being an influencer is a bad thing in itself. There have been plenty of influencers throughout history who’ve actually made a positive difference in society. The problem now is that the current state of the term tends more toward anyone who can sway public opinion simply by being inflammatory and boisterous.
And we fall for it.
I saw a recent thread on X detailing the failures of a journalist conducting an interview of a person of consequence, all broken up into segments of the entire interview. Now, the thread may have been on target in many respects, but who could really know? Every single reference (and there were more than a couple) I heard to that interview in other press and social media went exactly like this: “Did you see the clips…?” Not a single person asked, “Did you see the interview…?” All they needed were the broken-up pieces that supported their side of the story and that was enough.
I ran into something similar just this morning (it’s not hard to do, actually). A prominent personality called out Washington state for legislation that would pay people up to $2,000 to report incidents of “hate crimes” and “bias incidents” to a hotline with the state Attorney General. Sounds like an absolute nightmare if you ask me – something straight out of the Soviet Union.
Thing is, it wasn’t true. And how do I know? I read the bill.
I do stuff like this all the time. Whenever I see someone making a claim that seems just too wild to be true, I go into the source documents. I read bills. I read court records. I check everything I can, and if I can’t find something I’ll go to the one making the claims and ask where they’re getting the info (and on more than one occasion they’ve showed me and it’s checked out). This is what we should be doing instead of buying everything we personally love as the truth.
It’s time once again to invoke John Adams: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” When we are so easily fooled by our own tribalisms, it’s really hard to see how this can turn out well in the end…