Friday, May 25, 2012

Is Facebook Bad For Society?



By Reginald Kaigler (DEMCAD)

I was listening to former investor Ann Barnhardt on Warren Pollock's talk about how Facebook is being used to as a domestic spy network. She argued that Facebook is being used by the government as a self-reporting personal database. Essentially, people are sharing deeply personal information about themselves and therefore possibly making themselves political targets.

She draw a scenario where political dissents could be vanished by the government. She even compared Facebook to the Soviet spy program of yesteryear. Whether you think she's paranoid or not, there is a relationship between Facebook and the NSA. Both the CIA and NSA are using Facebook to gather data.


 The Soviet Union didn't have a highly armed population. There's 300 million people in this country and there's even more guns than people. Logistically, it would have nearly impossible to implement a national wide kidnapping/assassination operation on every political dissent or critic. Maybe the strategy would be to vanish some and the others will remain quiet.

The problem is that when you're dealing with a culture that is desensitized to violent, people may not hesitate to fight back. After all, do you really think people are going to just let strangers grab family and friends when they have the means to fight back? You start that sh!t in this country and the people will come after your ass. They wouldn't care who you are.

I just visited family in Detroit and I can tell you that if some idiot decides to become the neighborhood spy, he or she will have a very short career. The police are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods. Nationwide, there's probably 500,000 law enforcement officers, no more than 3.5 million active duty personnel in the military and somehow they're going to have a martial law/Soviet Union crackdown in America.

What about the millions of veterans in the country? The millions of gun owners? If only a very small percentage resist this, the campaign would likely fail, since it would require a great deal of logistics. And it would be highly unlikely to all of the police and military would want to participate in this. I think it's easy to overlook the normal cops and focus on the assholes who step out of line. But the fact of the matter is that most cops aren't psychos who want to live in Soviet America.

In my opinion, Facebook is just a hub to sell customer information to corporations.

I don't doubt that the NSA collects data from Facebook and I understand why many people don't want to offer their personal data, but I don't think Facebook is going to lead the way to Soviet America. However, I am concerned that America will gradually transform into a fascist state over time. If that happens, it wouldn't be the doing of Facebook, it will be our fault. It will be our failure to stand up for our freedoms.

But Barnhardt hit on something very important about Facebook. She mentioned how 1/3 of divorce filings have some mentioning of Facebook. She derailed the morality bankruptcy on the Facebook culture. So I will ask you this: Is Facebook Bad For Society?

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