Town Square

Posted on by admin

Under Musk‘s ownership, Twitter stopped taking action against tweets breaching its Covid rules, as of Wednesday, 23 Nov 2022. Twitter had previously suspended more than 11,000 accounts for Covid misinformation as of September 2022.

The former president who promoted and supported an attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of the presidential election was also invited back. His account was permanently suspended after the insurrection. Apparently 62,000 suspended accounts have been re-instated. Twitter also reinstated the personal account of US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, banned in January 2022. Now that accounts that spread misinformation have been given amnesty, it is unclear if they will return, or new ones will be emboldened to share incorrect information, that could influence the decisions people make about their health.

I have used Twitter extensively throughout the pandemic to learn about the latest research and trends as the virus spread. I have been seeing these Twitter feeds report that they are loosing thousands of followers after Musk took control of the company. Republican politicians on the other hand are gaining thousands of followers. Notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Representative Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif.; and Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., lost about 100,000 Twitter followers since Musk bought Twitter, while Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, gained more than 300,000. Exactly what is causing these trends is not yet known.

Musk fired thousands of employees which will clearly result in far less moderation of hate speech and the resulting violence. He was forced to pause the initial launch of an $8 per month Twitter Blue service after users abused the system by purchasing blue check marks to impersonate brands and famous people. Drug company Eli Lilly, who manufactures Insulin, had to apologized for a misleading tweet in which someone pretending to be the company wrote, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”  After that debacle, the drug company suspended advertising on Twitter worth millions of dollars. Musk banned some impersonators before he shut the service down, raising questions about his definition of free speech.

Experts have argued that there has been an exponential increase in hate speech, harassment and misinformation on the platform since the billionaire purchased the social media site. Barbara F. Walter, has written about the potential for social media to fuel a decentralized civil war. She studied civil wars and insurrections in foreign countries for the CIA and realized that eh United States is backsliding towards armed conflict as well thanks in part to social media promoting extremism. Extremism generates more clicks.

 

 

 

Bureaucrat at Work

Posted on by Thor

Putin is a bureaucrat. He was in the KGB agent but as a paper pusher in Dresden Germany. When the Berlin wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed, so to did his world view.

When he retreated back into Russia, he rose through the ranks as a very efficient bureaucrat.   Russia’s first president, Boris Yelsen, who was trying to bring democracy to the country, took Putin under his wing. Putin lied and claimed he had the same ambitions.

In 1999 Yelsen made Putin acting prime minister but by the end of his life realized he had made a mistake. Putin violently invaded invaded Chechnya. Television which supplied news to Russians became state run. Putin then was elected president.

In a small town of Beslov, terrorists took a school full of children hostage. If Putin negotiated he might loose his macho image. Putin’s tanks and troops surrounded the school. The army shelled the school. An explosion detonated in the school and there was chaos. Troops had rockets grenade launchers and flame throwers. Many children were burned alive. Corpses of children were stacked like fire wood. Over 320 people died, half of them children, but Putin’s strong man image remained.

Today over 103 children have died from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and that number is likely much higher. Frustrated by the military’s inept advance, he has taken to killing women and children. There are reports of troops cheering when a child is killed. They specifically target civilians trying to flee. 378,000 children in need of protection and assistance on Ukraine’s front line, according to the U.N.

Ukrainian President Zelensky‘s wife Olena said Putin’s troops were ‘consciously and cynically’ killing children. She highlighted the case of Alisa Hlans, 7, who was one of six people to die when her kindergarten in Okhtyrka was hit by a cluster bomb on the second day of the Russian invasion. Her grandfather had tried to shield her. He died in front of her and she was rushed to the hospital where she later died. Olena Zelenska has asked NATO to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine to ‘save our children, because tomorrow it will save yours’.

A father discovered his wife and children were dead when he saw a photo on Twitter of their lifeless bodies lying dead in the street after a mortar attack. Their suitcases were packed lying beside them since they were attempting to flee. He was in an eastern Ukraine city helping his ailing mother.

The report today is that Moscow’s forces bombed an art school in Mariupol where more than 400 people had taken shelter. There was no immediate word on casualties. Civilians from the devastated southern city were being forcibly transported to Russia.

Killing babies is Putin’s ongoing plan.

Why are 30% of healthcare workers in America unvaccinated?

Posted on by Thor

Why are 30% of healthcare workers in America unvaccinated? Since they are on the front lines you would think they have seen enough people gasping their last breaths  and might prefer not to die the same way.

Among healthcare workers, those with the most years of higher education are more likely to be vaccinated. A study from Carnegie Mellon University found that 9 percent of physicians said they were hesitant to be vaccinated, while 20 to 23 percent of nursing aides and emergency medical technicians said they were.

In Alabama, which a 46% vaccination rate statewide, around 50 percent of hospital workers are currently unvaccinated. Hospitals nationwide are responding in recent weeks and months by implementing vaccine mandates for their workers. These mandates are resulting in protests from the stupid.

An anti-Vaccine summit was held in Ocala Florida. Seven doctors who attended that conference tested positive for COVID-19 within days of attending. One of those infected, Bruce Boros, is a 71-year-old cardiologist who advocated for the use of Ivermectin as an effective treatment against COVID-19 during the event. “I have been on Ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,” Boros said at the event, according to The Daily Beast. “I have never felt healthier in my life.” He fell ill with COVID-19 two days later.

Houston Methodist Hospital fired a doctor for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The doctor insisted that vaccine mandates are wrong and shifted her practice to focus on treating unvaccinated patients. She has also used her personal Twitter account to promote the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin as a treatment for the COVID-19, despite warnings from public health officials advising people not to take it.

Av Med Health in Florida reversed its decision to have vaccine mandates for it’s healthcare workers after Florida Governor Ron DeathSantis signed a bill making vaccine mandates illegal. He wants to give healthcare workers the “freedom” to infect their patients. He also wants to give moms the “freedom” to have their children infect other children.

QAnon Zoom

Posted on by Thor

On social media during lockdown I was amazed to discover how many “Friends” who I thought were smart, sentient, reasoning individuals were actually QAnon conspiracy theorists. The art work I have been creating would ignite their remaining brain waves, turning them in to vicious trolls.

My Facebook accounts have been hacked and shut down so I haven’t been following the insanity online as much this past month. The promise of a vaccine leaves me feeling like I might soon wake from a year long coma. People seem to have too much time on their hands and with no creative outlet they turn into mindless zombies who prefer conspiracy theories to science.

Q is a fictional mysterious figure whose cryptic, evidence-free posts  are accepted by many as gospel. They promote the idea that there is a satanic cabal of pedophiles that runs rampant in government and Hollywood. The former president, was supposed to expose and defeat that cabal. Instead he lost the election and has been reduced to crashing wedding parties at Mar-a-Lago to spread his lies.

After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the social media platforms that had long allowed the falsehoods to spread like wildfire — namely Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — got more aggressive in cracking down on accounts promoting QAnon. Hollywood. QAnon has continued to survive in the darker corners of the Internet. In these fringes white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups continue to flourish.

QAnon podcasts are available through Apple and Google. There is big money to be made from the mindless. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently defended QAnon adherents. QAnon has even gained a foothold in the halls of Congress, where two Republican members have openly supported some of the movement’s baseless ideas. The zombies are roaming the halls of the capitol long after the insurrection.

Twitter Distraction

Posted on by Thor

Twitter has had to add fact checking links to President Donald Trump‘s tweets about voting by mail. As the country has to come to terms with the loss of now over 100,000 people, the president is focused on just one thing, the upcoming election. He falsely claimed that voting by mail would be “substantially fraudulent.” He himself votes by mail but wants …. …. to stop others from doing the same during a global pandemic. Clicking on the link on Trumps post takes users to a Twitter “Moments” page titled, “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”

Trump has claimed he is a war time president and now that Twitter is fact checking him he has something to fight about. He is threatening to regulate or even shut down social media companies he feels are out to get him. The Associated Press pointed out that the president, does not have the power to “unilaterally regulate or close …. …. companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Tweeted, “There is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this.” He added that Twitter will “continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.” …. ….”This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions,” Dorsey wrote.

The White House is expected to issue an executive order that will curtail some of the legal protections for social media companies. As of this writing it is still being drafted. It is hard to imagine that the government can regulate a private publishing platform.

This is another Trump distraction. He will have another sheet of paper to wave around. It is more grandstanding instead of substance. Fact checking the lies of this president is a nightmarish situation to step into. The media has to daily fact check the presidents tweets but they have been dubbed “the enemy of the people.” Now Trump has a new…. …. enemy in his favorite social media platform.  As of April 14, 2020 the president has made 18,000 false or misleading claims according to the Washington Post.  I would much prefer that President focused his attention on listening to health experts and scientists during this health crisis, but that might be too much to ask.

While Trump is claiming Twitter is infringing on his freedom of speech, his campaign  organization tried to remove a political cartoon from an online site called Redbubble. The cartoon showed Trump serving his followers bleach from a tub using a ladle.  They claimed trademark infringement since the artist depicted the followers in MAGA hats. The cartoon was re-posted after the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and other free speech organizations got involved. This makes it seem like the Trump campaign has a system in place to trawl online for materiel they find objectionable. Cartoonist Michael de Adder tweeted that the Counterpoint political cartoonist Twitter account was suspended. The account went live again the same day, but their 10,000 or so followers all disappeared.

“The freedom of the Press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic Governments.” – Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776