Social Media

Unethical Tweet of the Month: CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Could we possibly have more irresponsible, untrustworthy, detestable broadcast journalists than we have now?

CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins supported the assassin of UnitedHealthCEO Brian Thompson in the “Twitter/X” post above, directing readers to a site set up by the shooter’s lawyer that featured a prominent link to a GoFundMe for the murderer’s defense. Luigi Mangione, who strains the use of the term “alleged” as he was caught on camera shooting the victim in the back and arrested with incriminating evidence on his person has become the darling of the sickest of the sick among progressives. Leftists ranging from Elizabeth Warren to the most unhinged of my Facebook friends have rationalized Mangione’s cowardly crime as “understandable.” “You can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands,” slimed Warren (BOY she’s horrible!) Mangione faces charges of first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism.

After the disgusting tweet attracted appropriate criticism ( “This is @CNN — pimping the GoFundMe for a left wing assassin,” tweeted Ace of Spades, completely accurately) Collins took it down–this is known as “subsequent repairs” in negligence law—and then employed manifest deceit to defend herself. “In no way did I share a fundraising link for him,” she protested.

No, she posted a link to a website that had the fundraising link displayed at the top of its page. Her claim that the fact the website existed was “newsworthy” does not explain or excuse her promoting it on social media. Jorge Bonilla on Newsbusters rightly asks what the reaction would have been to a Fox News journalist who posted the address of a site that linked to a GoFundMe for J-6 rioters.

The Trump White House has opened the long overdue debate over whether openly biased, partisan, unprofessional and untrustworthy journalists should continue to have press credentials at White House briefings. I would expand that discussion to whether people like Kaitlan Collins should be recognized as journalists at all.

Doxxing, “Big Balls,” J.D. Vance and “The Racist Tweeter Principle”: A Tragi-Comedy With a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Like my old law school roomie who left “Gone With the Wind” at the intermission thinking it was over, I almost posted on this ethics mess too early. There were three acts, and there might be a fourth. I thought the ethics show was over after Act II.

Act I. The news media’s tantrum: Upon finding that Elon Musk and DOGE were serious about uncovering government waste, that he was employing some of his young computer nerds from SpaceX to do it, and that they had brought down USAID, a foreign aid, woke slush fund icon by exposing just how profligate and irresponsible it was, Katherine Long, a progressive reporter on the Wall Street Journal, targeted the young geniuses who may all be on the autistic spectrum (like Musk). One of them, a 19-year-old, she embarrassed by revealing that his social media handle when he was in high school was “Big Balls.” She also doxxed Marko Elez, writing that he was a “25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending” and had published troubling social media posts like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote on “Twitter/X” in September. Long revealed that his account declared, “Normalize Indian hate,” in the same month, expressing his disapproval of the large numbers of tech workers from India in Silicon Valley.

Ethics takeaway: Doxxing is unethical; so is using old social media posts to make a newly prominent figure a victim of the “cancel culture.”

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Addendum To “Groundhog Day Ethics Update: Post-Election Freak-Out and More!” [Item #8]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Phooey. Missed it by that much! When I searched my Facebook feed this morning for one of my FBF’s freakouts, all I could find was a relatively tame rant about Republicans giving tax cuts to the rich. Then, just a few hours later and after I had posted “Groundhog Day Ethics Update: Post-Election Freak-Out and More!,” this masterpiece was posted by someone whom I have known since 1978. After her name, there were over a hundred signatories.

Comments are solicited.

Enjoy!

***

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Ethics Observations on a Hollywood Controversy I Could Not Possibly Care Less About

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This story gets a Kaufman, the Ethics Alarms label for a topic that rates George S. Kaufman’s famous assessment of his interest in Fifties crooner Eddie Fisher’s difficulties finding younger women to date. (Eddie, you may recall, was the husband Elizabeth Taylor divorced to hook up with Richard Burton, and who earlier, with Debbie Reynolds, fathered Carrie Fisher.) Kaufman said, when posed with Fisher’s dilemma on a TV panel show,

“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

And yet there have been dozens of news stories and social media posts about the current story, and I feel compelled to comment.

“Emilia Pérez” is a 2024 Spanish-language “French musical crime comedy” about a Mexican cartel leader who enlists a lawyer to help her disappear so that she may transition into a woman. [Comment: Well, other movies with insane premises have managed to be good…] At the 97th Academy Awards, “Emilia Pérez” will have 13 nominations, including Best Picture. Karla Sophia Gascón, who plays the cartel leader, is the first openly trans woman to be nominated as Best Actress.

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Again: How Does One Ethically Respond When One’s Friends Are Slipping Into The Throes Of Madness?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Nah, the Trump Deranged aren’t losing their frickin’ minds…

That’s the most recent cartoon from Ann Telnaes, that witty, subtle, objective and non-partisan political cartoonist who quit the Washington Post who didn’t think her juvenile submission was worth publishing. So now she’s operates from her substack, issuing brilliant art like that. Incredibly, one of my oldest and most accomplished friends posted that crap—it’s the equivilent of a schoolboy drawing of the unpopular kid with blacked out teeth and horns—with approval on his Facebook page, where his decision was roundly praised as he revealed that he subscribed to her visual hate-fests. This is the equivalent of someone announcing that he has decided to subscribe to the “Turd of the Week” service. Another equally rational, intelligent Facebook friend until he went bonkers posted a long, irrelevant quote from the Nuremberg trials about the nature of fascism, and everyone metaphorically nodded and applauded as if it has anything to do with current events.

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Two Executive Orders, One Extra-Constitutional, the Other Unconstitutional (and Unethical Too)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Let’s talk about the “un”-EO first. Federal District Court judge, John C. Coughenour, temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil, the so called “anchor baby” phenomenon. Three days after Trump issued his executive order, the judge sided with the first four states that sued, saying, “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.” 22 states, along with activist groups and expectant mothers, have now filed lawsuits to halt order on the grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment. Courts have always interpreted the amendment’s section stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States” as applying to (almost) every baby born in the United States.

“Frankly,” Judge Coughenour added, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” Well, lawyers don’t usually state propositions, even Hail Mary theories like this one equivocally. I think Trump’s lawyers told him that the order would almost certainly be found unconstitutional, and maybe they told him that it is unconstitutional. I am pretty certain it is, and that nothing short of a Constitutional amendment can change the law.

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Pro Ethics Tip: If Your Boyfriend Asks You To Be The Bride In a “Fake Wedding,” Run Away

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

An Australian woman had been dating her husband-to-be for a few months in Melbourne after meeting him on a dating app. Then he invited her to a “white party” in Sydney, telling her to bring a white dress to fit the theme of the event. When she arrived at the party venue, the only other people there were the boyfriend, a photographer, the photographer’s friend, and a marriage officiant. The friend explained that he had planned a fake wedding to increase his social media following (he has 17,000 followers on Instragram) and he needed her to play the bride.

She is, I should interject here, an idiot, because she shrugged and said, “Ok!” She did call a freind to ask if there were any risks to being a bride in a “fake wedding,” and the friend said, “Nah! Go ahead!” Here’s another pro tip: if you are an idiot, the chances are high that your friends are idiots too.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about. We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. We want to tell the truth.The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we’re not gonna fact check anything,’ and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff. Anyway, I think it’s really shameful.”

—-President Joe Biden, attacking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decision’s to end its biased, censorious fact-checking system that relied on partisan propaganda operations like PolitiFact and Snopes.

What’s shameful is a President of the United States advocating speech censorship. Like many of Biden’s brain-addled outbursts lately, however, he has committed the cardinal political sin of saying what he and his puppeteers really believe out loud. So now we know, at least those of us who weren’t paying attention before and couldn’t read the metaphorical neon signs flashing before our eyes, Joe Biden and his entire party advocates the censorship of free speech on social media, including opinion, adverse positions and anything that might expose its rotting proto-totalitarian party for the threat to democracy it has become. Thanks, Joe! But it was pretty obvious already.

I’m glad that I have waited to post the resolution of the “Worst President Ever” inquiry until tomorrow, because so much applicable information has been flowing regarding just how awful Joe Biden has been. I think all who have read the series carefully have figured out that the finals are going to come down to Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson and Biden, and it doesn’t take a PhD to guess who the last two competitors will be either. Once I thought the ultimate “winner” was clear-cut, but Joe is fighting for the title to the bitter end.

He and his fellow censors circulated lie after lie before and during the Presidential campaign (among them that only Donald Trump lies) yet Biden has the astounding brass to talk about wanting to tell the truth. You know, truth like Biden being sharp as a tack. “Truth” like the border being secure.

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And As Long As We Are Talking About Doing The Right Things For (Perhaps) the Wrong Reasons: Zuckerberg and Meta

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and its alter-ego Meta’s chief executive, announced that his flagship social media platform, along with Instagram and Threads, will end its longstanding (and biased, and flawed) fact-checking program, moving instead to a “community notes” system like the one employed by Elon Musk’s reinvention of Twitter.

Good. What took so long?

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

In truth, anyone should have been able to figure out that Facebook’s “fact checkers” were progressive, dishonest, partisan hacks. The censors included Snopes (EA dossier here) and PolitiFact (even worse dossier here), which Ethics Alarms, among many others, had marked as biased and untrustworthy years ago, indeed well before Facebook turned to them as censors. The truth is that one person’s “bad stuff” is another’s stimulating opinion or analysis. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept, but in the Age of the Great Stupid, it is. The 21st Century Left likes censorship, indeed has relied on it to hold power, and has embraced the practice on college campuses, social media, and in the news. Sad but true.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Ford’s Anti-Israel Tweets

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Some questions present themselves, such as,

How much trust should we place in the management of a company that can’t staff and oversee its social media accounts better than this?

Is mere firing sufficient punishment for an employee who would post those? Such an egregious level of betrayal of an employer should carry a lifetime brand, like the scarlet letter.

What could someone guilty of such conduct do to redeem himself?

Ford’s headquarters are in Detroit, an area with a large Arab-American population with strong pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel sentiments. You would think that this incident would be sufficiently predictable that special care would be taken to avoid it. Clearly, that didn’t happen. The incident is also magnified because of the ugly legacy of the company’s anti-Semitic founder, Henry Ford, who among other things promoted the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Henry’s company’s apology was about as inept as one would expect from one that allowed this to occur: “Our X account was briefly compromised and the previous three posts were not authorized or posted by Ford,” a spokesperson said. “We are investigating the issue, and apologize for any confusion caused.”

Ford apologizes for the “confusion”?