The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Joe Camel, oops, I mean, Joe Facebook, has announced recently that the app they were developing for Instagram for Kids, suddenly under fire by critics accusing them of child brainwashing, wasn’t really meant for kids, it was meant for teens. Teens, to Mark Zuckerberg, are apparently adults. Mark Zuckerberg is the Purdue Pharma of the social media world, the man whose company knowingly addicts its clients in order to monetize their dependency. Facebook is the digital Oxycontin, advertising as a benign entity but in reality a purveyor of hate, bigotry, violence, conspiracy theories, bullying and disinformation. He knows the nastier the feeds, the more the revenue. Simple as that. Give them more Oxy and they can’t help but come back for more. Sweet deal if you have no ethics.

They know what they’re doing, known it for a long time. Trouble is, they’re addicted too. To profits. At any cost. Are they evil people, the folks who run Facebook? Hell yes, they’re evil people. Were the tobacco folks evil people? Damn right they were, simple salesmen of death, fully knowledgeable about the cancer rates and they knew how to jack up the nicotine in more ways than one. Evil, definitely, or evil has no meaning. Was Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers evil? C’mon, they pushed the sales, they knew the addiction rates and the death count. Evil? What do you call it when hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed for their bottom line?

And what do we call it when profits trump ethics? Was Facebook the only one running Russian bots, jumping conspiracy theories to the top of their feeds, playing off hate and bigotry? No, they weren’t. And are the good people who feast on this clickbait, are they just poor innocent victims? No sir, they’re culpable too. Facebook understands Pavlovian conditioning. Our society is made up of bored folks with nothing better to do than check their feeds, see if their classmates think they’re fat or ugly, click on vitriol and disinformation, spend their lives pumping crap into their brains. They follow the blood, the venom, the gossip, the bigotry and all the rest while they’re connecting with their grandkids, just harmless diversions. Meanwhile, the politics turn toxic, the democracy teeters on failure and Zuckerberg is contemplating hooking the kids. Just the teens, not the real little tykes, not yet anyway. You tell me if this is evil….

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