To my FB friends
The disclosures about Cambridge Analytica have influenced me to delete my FB account. I know FB is important to many and will continue to be. My plea is to not let it take over politics. The manipulators aren’t dumb, and once they profile you they know what sort of message you (or others like you) are likely to believe.
We may all feel superior to the individuals who did the little fun questionnaires and somehow mentioned an interest in the occult, and they got scammed by the Hillary-runs-a-satanic-thing-in-a-pizzeria-basement. But what of less ridiculous memes that circulated before the presidential election? Memes that purported to come from friends on the left, yet may have had no function but to poison the well and reduce voter turn-out or increase votes for Jill Stein? Like “bought and paid for.” Are you kidding? (Anything one is 100% guilty of, the playbook trick is to accuse the other side of equal guilt, even if they are maybe 5% guilty--and this false equivalence and dampening of good judgment works so often!)
And now, apparently a poisoning of an election happened on the Brexit vote in Britain. This is not something we should assume will soon be corrected for us.
The crisis continued to deepen yesterday as evidence was reported that wealthy Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who sits on the FB Board, had a hand in the election mess, originating with a “personality quiz” that people filled out on FB. I’m reluctant to even post a “like” on a page anymore, and that's too bad.
I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m back to email and telephone. I’m sorry for what I’ll miss of your personal news. And of groups I've enjoyed being in. Hopefully we can catch up in other ways.
Jean
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