Convoluted by a serial crime spree of countless pivots and recalibrations in amending policy and common sense to an unrecognizable and confusing bureaucratic mess of conciliatory rules, the galactic social networking leader is a few self-driving vehicle wrecks short of a happy meal. And this is only the beginning of the wild and infuriating political roller coaster ride down the gravity well, as the largest of the social media conglomerates plans to ban political advertising coinciding with the election, a ceremonial gesture that apparently atones for the 2016 Russian invasion into terrestrial politics, at least according to the broken record objections of the progressive base.
The Super Bowl of political seasons has already kicked off, with the Trump lobby receiving the first severe penalty flags, a red flag in itself (no offense to the yellow markers of football referees everywhere) to the distinct possibility that the entire matrix of F***book was and is out of control. In all, 38 variations of a streaming advertisement produced and purchased by the Trump reelection campaign attacking Job Biden’s immigration policy and the increased risk of Coronavirus infection, were chopped off at the neck, fed to the moderating hounds, and finally cast into internet purgatory. Of course, the company did not refund the money. This is simple a prelude of what is to be expected as the election propaganda ramps up.
When the works of both George Orwell and Christopher Buckley are applicable to the current reality of societal issues, movements, and the abomination that has become the social justice movement, adding a dash of Thompson, Rand, or Huxley into the mix, or Dick, Barry (Max), Gibson, Bruen, Dorsey or Lem is not even needed in echoing the putrid and frightening circus of a dystopian three ringed act of cultural masochism, where the tax payer is forced to shoulder the burden of indirectly funding the slow and painful death of the world.
The crude and sporadic penmanship adorning the walls of the main lobby at the F***book corporate campus bordering the picturesque San Francisco bay has been amended, erased, crossed out, tased, glossed over and torched, so many times, that the corporation spent $4.9 million on molybdenum isotope capable of withstanding the winds of change in preserving at least some evidence of a ledger as to not lose touch with the original commandments adhering to the intended mission statement. The recent edits to the heavily damaged and blundered surface housing the corporate manifesto are patently obvious, if not thoroughly disturbing, and curiously demand accusations of plagiarism for ideas savagely plucked from Orwell’s Communist politburo pigs engaged on the pathway to Sugarloaf mountain, Leninism, and totalitarianism throughout the plot of Animal Farm.
The infamous amended commandments of the ruling pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm.
It has really reached a point of unresolvable sadness and surrender throughout the nation that a popular destination for online social interaction has devolved into an inconsistent and schizophrenic destination of alarming misconstrued platitudes, thanks to the everchanging boundaries of what is considered to be acceptable and appropriate from the perspective of the end user. Snowball and crew are alive and well, with a heavy dose of Squealer handling all of the public awareness channels.
The ambiguity surrounding the interpretation of the “terms and conditions” dictating community conduct, which effectively gives the corporation the opportunity for government kickbacks and the added revenue source of selling the preferences of account holders to the advertising and marketing industries as big data solutions, has been reworded so many times that the ink drying on the sacred walls is a nuisance to newer and more dire stipulations, regardless of the consequences.
While F***book has officially crossed into the territory of knucklehead cognitive dissonance in launching multiple unilateral companywide campaigns to effectively bury conservative leaning content, while forwarding a selfish and left leaning narrative, the treatment of political advertising when weighed against the steadfast accountability displayed by traditional and broadcasting entities is egregious to say the least. Hiding behind the new world order of digital standards is one thing, but parlaying an ongoing aversion to basic level of decency and transparency is another.
A screen grab of F***book’s preamble to the dizzying set of political ad restrictions and which makes one almost forget the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
While television, radio, and print are bound by the federal government to provide political candidates and issues with on open forum for advertising at a cost, and with a substantial paper trail, online entities are not held to the same federal requirements, as witnessed by the billions of bot accounts afflicting various matrices, and the prevalence of felonious content spewed by both sides in a viral volley of the latest and greatest targeting instant gratification. Biased moderating bots aside, the irksome platform requirement is exemplified in a recent slew of electronic Trump campaign ads garnering approval by a team of humans haphazardly applying the impossibly fluidic criteria before almost instantaneously exercising the guillotine of corporatized censorship. The atmosphere of overt pathological redundancy is indicative of just how far the once noble dream of pure deregulation throughout the internet, has unilaterally drifted away from embracing the essence of the First Amendment. A virtual reality public street corner is even more sanctioned than Soviet state actors staunching organic conversation in the capitals behind the Iron Curtain in the devastating aftermath of World War II.
As Mark Zuckerberg and the brass of F***book are vehemently unscrupulous in continuously and unethically transforming policy for gains in revenue and playing politics, the key motives of the target account holder demographic align almost perfectly with the key directives of the corporate entity. Both tech and business parties have a vested interest at the very minimum to reconfigure history, and ultimately reengineer culture to achieve undisputed control, which is feasible thanks to all the eggs existing in the hardware and software of devices and AI. The selling point to the most vocal groups of the population, who feel exploited and unrecognized, is the idea of scrapping status quo for an achievable paradise. The vilification of the past and the present are vital in creating this illusion, and what more appropriate a backdrop for crafted subversion than the volatile nature of the digital construct.
While the treatment of political advertisements proves a minor cog to the nefarious intentions of various actors in hijacking society, the surface level disruption demonstrates just how severe the damage is if one is possesses the fortitude to dig under a few layers of the sociobiological hierarchy hosted by a continent of servers.
The simplest solution of the pending nightmare is to simply ignore social networking, and find something better to do with one’s time. However, simplicity has been annihilated and the entire planet is now forced to live in the reality of being invaded by the login monsters of devices. Effective warfare begins and ends with the diminutive battles won in simply by the ability to remember once was, fifteen minutes ago and within a temporal interface that included only a page of do’s and don’ts and where sticks and stone was still part of the online experience. The addiction to information and the infrastructure of social media being warped beyond recognition, makes for an uphill fight back to reason.
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