Tom Toles for January 12, 2020

If you think it’s easy to decide whether something’s a lie, then you’ve not tried it in this context. Face to face, you can see the “tells” of a liar. Sometimes. If you’re good and they’re not. But online? It’s nearly impossible. Consider marking these:

“I’m smarter than average”

“People agree that I’m smarter than average”

“I’m smarter than the current president”

“I’m smarter than the average politician”

Or what about things like “I’m smart and the oceans are warming” or “I’m smart and the oceans are NOT warming”

Or even “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Khrushchev was right.

No, it’s not. 4 or 5 employees could easily verify everything.

Does it profit a stockholder if Facebook fact checks political ads?

Two-facedbook

Trump wrote the book on fibs, lies and whoppers….

Facebook? How’s about Buttbook. Not gonna go there…

Despite the good benefits of social media, its misuse has unleashed millions of voices who do not understand the principle that with Freedom of Speech comes RESPONSIBILITY.

But if you pay enough to say it often enough, it’s got to be true.

“Put On a False Facebook”

Before you let someone outside into your house,

You’d try to decide if he/she is a friend or a louse.

It’s something like this, of a quite similar kind,

If you’d let someone’s thoughts through words into your mind.

.

Is the one ringing your door bell a little Girl Scout,

Or a conspiracy-cookie smooth-selling lout?

Is that package left at your door a wholesome surprise,

Or a pretty-bowed box filled with subtly false lies?

.

Marshall McLuhan wrote the medium’s the message,

But you must figure the freight cost with the dunnage

That’s carried in the shipping container all with it,

Else be deemed a cyber global-village idiot.

.

Before you inhale into your thoughts that online air,

Is the page full of smog, or a polluted cloud there?

Is it an online hydrant that’s been wetted by dogs?

Is the info true, to be relied on from such blogs?

.

A facebook entry is not like an actual book

That you can see if it’s clean by its physical look.

Or a newspaper fresh and crisp just wrapped off the press,

Or a letter than can be traced to a real address.

.

That facebook page might have come from a virtual stall

That’s been sat in and shat in by a loose-bowelled thrall

Who, in crude symbolized terms never washes his hands

As he types excrement and flings it from unknown lands.

.

Would you gobble whatever is offered and dished

As true information seasoned just as you wished,

Or check at the other end of that long cyber spoon

Is not the grubby hand of some scheming poltroon.

.

These doggerel verses already much too long are.

No doubt some will think them trite and TLDR.

But can you see how I, though clumsily, have expressed

How facebook info can be sorely twisted and stressed?

As much as I hate to say this, I agree with Zuckerberg on this one. First Amendment and all that. If Americans have become so stupid that they can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, they deserve whatever they get.

Trump’s Minions Enable His Lies – {4 beats/line}

This is a fact which makes us sigh: -

- his lackeys enable his lie upon lie.

Factual facts they decry and deny

and distort and defy, – and thereby shanghai

what democracy needs: – the civil discourse

which democracy needs as its vital force.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here’s Thom Hartmann’s scary-for-us-too explanation that Hungary was quickly ruined by its current Trumpism-like regime: https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-4-more-years-of-trump-could-send-the-u-s-down-the-path-toward-corrupt-oligarchy/

Easy enough actually, if it comes from a Republican it is spin at best and probably a lie.. if it comes from trump.. no question it is a lie.

Its better than hot talk right wing hate radio.

Wow.

Facebook publishes and should be held to all the standards of other publishers.

Chaos – {1.40 limericks}

The Rightwing is unpatriotic

in keeping things bigly chaotic, -

- as our enemies want:

In Facebook they haunt

to make our governance despotic,

led by a president psychotic

who’s applauded by a base idiotic.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There are plenty of lies on FB.

Rupert Murdoch’s operations follow the same model as William Randolf Hearst’s yellow journalism with his distortion and sensationalism inciting wars for profit. One can’t discount the role of Cambridge Analytics’ multiplying clones, foreign and domestic, for this orgiastic deluge of profitable and vile propaganda via social media. But Murdoch’s performance since The Constitution was amended to allow foreigners to own major media companies would seem to affirm that the founders were right in the first place.

The people that work at Facebook have a conscience, something that Zuckerburg lacks.

“Facebook staff demand Zuckerberg limit lies in political ads”

https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/facebook-employees-vs-ad-lies/

They mean “unless it comes from a Democrat or someone on the left” don’t they?