A wise person once said “The pen is mightier than the sword”. The meaning is clear. By convincing many people of a specific point of view it is possible to create an army almost instantly. And now we have weaponized an entire world with Social Media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and all the rest can do more harm in a day than all the armies ever to roam and pillage the earth. Think about it…terroristic organizations, bomb building instructions, inflammatory and misleading information, fraudulent fund raisers, scams of all kinds, personal pressures leading to body shaming and possibly suicides–all these negatives are very real and a matter of recent news reports. States are one-by-one banning the Chinese-controlled TikTok out of fear that a foreign power is learning too much about us. Twitter has de-activated tons of accounts because of the messages they contained. It’s only a matter of time before every social media platform will be discredited. If we consider the only value of the social media mechanism to be the ability to easily contact others–why not enable people to create an E mail list of groups so that contacts are limited to known recipients. And even if we do that the Internet will still be a cause for concern with the “dark web” and all the mayhem it could cause. That would need policing as well. How is an uncontrolled social media process any different from an uncontrolled nuclear device? If you fear the use of nuclear weapons you should also fear Facebook, Twitter and all such communication liabilities. We need controls–we don’t have many with guns and look where that has taken us.
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