Reading Time: 5 minutes Like tobacco companies that made their products addictive on purpose, the drive for ever more “engagement” on social media pushes it to appeal to our worst tendencies.
social media
Posted inPolitics
The failure of Truth Social is very much on-brand for Trump
Reading Time: 2 minutes Donald Trump is no stranger to failure. Remember Trump Steaks? How about the bankruptcy of Trump’s Atlantic City casino? And who could forget Trump Airlines? So it shouldn’t be any surprise that Trump’s new social media venture—Truth Social—has also become a failure. Trump has built a brand on bluster and bravado. But his past is […]
Posted inPsychology
With social media, agreement gets addictive
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the same way that religion hijacks the evolution of our minds, social media hijacks the evolution of group psychology.
Posted inThe Secular
Is social media ‘church’ for atheists? I didn’t think so until now
Reading Time: 4 minutes Two weeks ago I had my Facebook account shut down for child pornography. Yup, you read that right. A couple weeks ago, I was lying on my couch on a Tuesday night, relaxing with a glass of wine and watching TV at about 10:30pm. Suddenly, a strange text message came in from a family member: […]
Posted inPolitics
Can regulation tackle the disinformation crisis?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Most Americans agree that social media is driving disinformation. Lies on social media can impact behavior and change the political beliefs of its user base. But there is no consensus about how government should respond. Some believe that the government should step in and regulate social media–and by extension the big tech companies–and force them […]
Posted inPseudoscience
Mercury retrograde has nothing to do with Facebook going down
Reading Time: 4 minutes Why was Facebook down for several hours yesterday? Here’s a technical explanation from someone who would know: Later Monday, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure, released a statement about Facebook’s service interruption saying the company was “sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.” Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes […]
Posted inUncategorized
Social Media Vs Mainstream Media: There is No “Vs”, the Lines Are Blurred
Reading Time: 2 minutes The long and the short of it: they are both the same, only separated (in the UK at least) by regulation. “News organisations” is another term for “information source”, which is a far more nebulous and in some sense accurate term. The modern person gets their information (some of which could be arbitrarily labelled “news”) […]
Posted inReligion
Speaking in Tongues on TikTok (LSP #207)
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! I saw a story a while ago that has me kinda sighing and laughing at the same time. Pentecostals are still doing their thing, but they’ve had to branch out into social media — especially now that it’s harder for big huge rowdy get-togethers. Of note, Religion News recently ran a […]
Posted inUncategorized
Calvinists, On Why People Dislike Calvinists
Reading Time: 8 minutes Recently, I discovered that Calvinists themselves have caught on to outsiders’ near-universal dislike of them. But as usual for extremists, Calvinists’ utter lack of self-awareness has led them to some really wacky conclusions about why that dislike exists.
Posted inGaming
Labor of Love: How Social Media Lets Passions Connect (LSP #192)
Reading Time: 7 minutes Last night, I was just thinking about how social media has made it so much easier and simpler for those with passions to connect with each other and share what they’re doing. It wasn’t like that when I was younger, that’s for sure. Today, Lord Snow Presides over one of the very best aspects of modern life: how the internet allows a labor of love to be shared so much more easily and widely than ever before.