A Brief Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper
Posted October 4th, 2021 on Niagara At Large
At a time when we are bombarded with so much bad news in this word, here – at least for a few hours – is some good news.
For the better part of this Monday, October 4th and at least up to the time of this posting, the online services of Facebook or that corporate equivalent of “the evil empire, as I call it, has been suffering what it calls “outages.”
In other words, many of us cannot even get on our own Facebook page if we have one, let alone anyone else’s, and I have to say that is fine with me.
And I am speaking to you as a journalist and a publisher of a news and commentary outlet, Niagara At Large, that has felt the need to repost all of the pieces on the NAL site on Facebook because, unfortunately, it is the way many people get their news or whatever else you want to call it.
For better or worse, I have close to a thousand Facebook “friends” who then get the NAL posts, and have plenty of so-called “friends” of their own that they can share NAL posts with if they wish too. So for me, it has become a necessary evil.
I have been as guilty as countless millions of others around the world in posting information on the Facebook platform, even while knowing that Facebook has been a major source of baseless trash that has caused people undo feelings of stress, paranoia and depression, and has been a purveyor of information that serves to undermine democracy and cause people to address the COVID pandemic in ways that might kill them.
As for the “friends” business? I know that some of the people who fall into that category on my Facebook page are truly friends. But the majority of them are people that may be nice, but whom I have a vague relationship with.
If you don’t think that is true, try – just for the hell of it, -contacting these “friends” during a winter storm to ask if they might want to come over and help shovel the snow out of your driveway because you are suffering from a bad back and desperately need your car. You know how many of them would come? Try probably ZERO.
What gets me as someone with a Master’s degree in journalism and has worked for newspapers for much of my adult life, are the number of people out there, including people who seem fairly intelligent, who write newspapers off as “mainstream media” issuing “false news,” and yet will trust the information they get from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
So Pulitzer Prize winning reporters at newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post or The Globe and Mail in Canada, are peddling propaganda and lies,while some nut bar on Facebook who does not have to face the same penalties of libel and defamation that a reporter at a newspaper or the CBC does, and is telling you to try drinking bleach or swallowing a horse de-wormer drug as a safeguard against COVID is okay.
These outages Facebook is now wrestling with are coming at a time when volumes of the corporation’s own internal documents, leaked by a whistleblower, are showing that Zuckerberg and the other reptiles that run this monstrous operation know that so much of the content they circulate is hurting countless people. Yet they continue to allow it to be posted because it makes them big money.
So I am pleased for the outages and I hope that some of those I know who may be having the shakes like an alcoholic deprived of a drink right now can find away to get over it.
I urge you to watch this if you missed the interview with the Facebook whistleblower on the investigative news program 60 Minutes, this past Sunday, October 3rd . The following is a wrap-yp on that interview, broadcats on the MSNBC news program Morning Joe this October 4th –
In my view, few have done a better job of ranting about what a pervasive threat Facebook is to us than American satirist and HBO host Bill Maher.
To watch some of what Bill Maher has had to say about this evil entity, click on the screens immediately below –
NIAGARA AT LARGE Encourages You To Join The Conversation By Sharing Your Views On This Post In The Space Following The Bernie Sanders Quote Below.
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