MountainMornings

We are a lucky generation. Just as Alzheimer’s was about to kick in, we could casually pick up our cell phones and retrieve a distant piece of the past in an instant. Who was that actress who played in that movie? Before you know it, we not only had her name, but the name of the whole cast and the movie! But we may not all be aware at how insidious big tech companies have become; you may want to queue up two Netflix documentaries about how our data is manipulated and our minds scrambled in the process.

“The Great Hack” https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 is about the 2016 election and how Cambridge Analytica targeted and harvested our personal data, “…It uses the scandal as a framework to illustrate the data mining structures and algorithms that are undermining individual liberty and democratic society, one Facebook like and meme at a time.”

And then there’s “The Social Dilemma.” https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224 just out this year. If you’d rather not learn how our brains are being rewired by advertisers who would like us to pay attention to their products, I’d understand. But we need to understand how social media sites like Facebook not only “…seduce us into spending time and sharing information so they can sell both” – they can also encourage extreme ideologies in the process.

This week I did a little experiment of my own on Facebook. I posed this question: FB friends, please type into Google – “The election is” And comment with your first pop-up response. For instance, mine was “not over”

Out of 31 responses, 17 people, counting my comment, got the same result! Nearly half of my admittedly ‘selection biased’ results were ambiguous – The election is NOT OVER! Really? I’m calling my group of FB friends biased because I’m pretty sure they are all Biden supporters. And to think, right about this time on December 12, 2000, the SCOTUS decided with Bush vs Gore to stop the counting of votes in Florida! What happened in Florida 20 years ago still matters. https://www.propublica.org/article/why-bush-v-gore-still-matters

This morning, a front page article in the Washington Post tells us: “Just 25 Congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s Win.” 25 out of 249 legislators!!!

Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 222 GOP members of the House and Senate — nearly 90 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/survey-who-won-election-republicans-congress/2020/12/04/1a1011f6-3650-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html

And yet, President-Elect Biden has said that many of his GOP colleagues have called to congratulate him on his win! What is going on here? Why would Google amplify this disinformation campaign designed to create chaos? According to the AP, “When the count is complete, Democrat Joe Biden will likely have racked up around 80 million votes – and won the White House by a greater margin than any president this century other than Barack Obama in 2008.”

If you’d like to get out of this funhouse feedback loop on your social matrix, you may want to disengage from Facebook, and use a different search engine. I’ve heard that duckduckgo isn’t too bad and doesn’t collect or sell your data, nor does it try to persuade! https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-vs-duckduckgo/301997/#close