Kara Swisher, Times tech journalist, begins her column:

…So when the Sri Lankan government temporarily shut down access to American social media services like Facebook and Google’s YouTube after the bombings there on Easter morning, my first thought was “good.”

Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them.

Kara left out the real reason she and, I suspect, her fellow propagandists wish that social media didn’t exist: “Good, because then people will have no alternative but to believe what we tell them.”

Here’s some full disclosure: I have a history with Kara Swisher. Small Washington, D.C. theater companies like mine, the late lamented American Century Theater, had to fight to get any notice from the Washington Post, and in the early years, the internet didn’t help much. Swisher was then the Post’s writer for a weekly column about under-the -radar developments among the smaller theaters, but unlike her predecessor in that role, Kara played favorites. She kept giving ink to the same narrow group of companies that matched her tastes, and the large companies too, which was neither fair nor the column’s purpose. I complained to her, and to her editor, and I wasn’t the only artistic director who raised the issue. We all celebrated when Swisher, who was incredibly arrogant at a tender age, left town. She was and is a classic example of current journalism: convinced that her viewpoint should control what the public has a right to know.

Social media has many flaws, and they are exacerbated horribly by a U.S. education system that appears incapable of teaching critical thought. It is true that morons are especially vulnerable to inflammatory, false, and silly posts on Facebook, Twitter, Insatgram et al., (Imagine: companies pay Kendall Jenner to like things on Instagram, and it works..) but that’s not the fault of the platforms. The news media and journalists like Swisher just want all the morons to themselves so they can manipulate, confuse and control them, and through them, the nation’s culture and political tilt. Continue reading →