Tag: Social Media

The Least Intelligent Among Us

Every day there is some new conspiracy coming out of social media….from eating babies to flat earth to voter fraud to alien half breeds….it seems the least capable of critical thinking are the ones holding the day.

Why is this?

New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied suggests that people often overestimate their understanding of political facts. This tendency to be overconfident appears most common among individuals who actually know the least about politics and those who lean conservative. The findings provide evidence that psychological traits, like a desire for quick and definitive answers, help explain why some voters struggle to accurately judge their own political knowledge.

Erika K. Fulton, an associate professor of psychology at Idaho State University and head of the META Lab, led a team of scientists to investigate how well people gauge their own grasp of political information. The research team noticed a gap in the existing scientific literature regarding this specific type of self-evaluation. Most prior studies on political knowledge were conducted by political scientists, who often use different analytical methods than cognitive psychologists.

The scientists wanted to apply the strict measurement standards of cognitive psychology to political knowledge. As the researchers explained, “Metacognition is broadly defined as thinking about one’s own cognition. The type we studied is called metacognitive monitoring accuracy, or the degree to which judgments of what one knows matches what one actually knows.”

In simpler terms, this concept refers to a person’s ability to accurately recognize when they are right and when they are wrong. “People tend to be overconfident regarding what they think they know, and this has serious consequences in the political realm, such as when people vote on candidates and issues that they don’t understand as well as they think they do,” the researchers stated.

“We couldn’t find any political metacognition studies conducted by cognitive psychologists, specifically metacognition researchers, only by political scientists,” the researchers told PsyPost. “Experimental psychology has very specific measurement criteria that guide our study designs, and we wanted to employ those for a fuller, more nuanced understanding of political metacognition.”

https://www.psypost.org/people-with-the-least-political-knowledge-tend-to-be-the-most-overconfident-in-their-grasp-of-facts/

Fascinating!  Social media is driving this erroneous thinking.

The reason social media is so influential is a person’s attention span….

In 2004, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that the average attention span on any screen was about two and a half minutes, Houlihan explained in the clip. By 2012, it had shrunk to 75 seconds.

In the last 10 years or so, the average attention span has plummeted to an abysmal 47 seconds, with the median being roughly 40 seconds.

What better place to tap into the short attention span to influence people than social media.

There is the problem that needs repair…..but sadly in a world that demands instant gratification we will not find the repairs we need.

The turmoil we face today will be with us for a very long time no matter the damage it does to the people….

And that is the name of that tune…..

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Hateful Little Sh*ts

For some time now I have watched the GOP hate our democracy and have done a swell job of hacking at it until the shell is about all that is left.

To finish off the job started decades ago the young will be needed and it appears that they are embracing the MAGA line and letting their hatred show….

This from some chat and is very disturbing….

Politico got a hold of a group chat of leaders of Young Republicans groups across the country—which was teeming with racism, antisemitism, rape jokes, and other filth. Pejoratives like the homophobic f-slur, the n-word, and the r-word appeared more than 251 times combined in the Telegram chat, which contained Young Republican leaders from New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.

The chat, called “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM,” seemingly included young Republicans aligned with the “Restore YR” faction of the Young Republican National Federation, or YRNF.

Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the New York State Young Republicans, was “the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages,” Politico reports. (He apologized for the messages but told the publication he has “no way of verifying their accuracy.”)

In the group chat, Giunta reportedly referred to Black people as “watermelon people,” and wrote of an NBA playoff game: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” While discussing his support of another young Republican group, he wrote that “they support slavery and all that shit,” which he approvingly called “Mega based.”

On another occasion, Giunta told his fellow chat members: “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word.”

“I love Hitler,” Giunta joked elsewhere. He also said those who voted against his ultimately unsuccessful bid to become YRNF chair would be sent “to the gas chamber,” leading his fellow New York State Young Republicans to crack additional jokes about the Holocaust.

Giunta lost the YRNF chair in August to Hayden Padgett, whom Giunta referred to as “Hayden F—t.” Numerous other members of the group chat used demeaning language against Padgett; for instance, Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, wrote, “RAPE HAYDEN.”

Another joke about sexual violence, unrelated to Padgett, came from Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, who called rape “epic” in a separate exchange.

(newrepublic.com)

Is this the future of the GOP?

It must be since the VP has come out in defense of these little sh*ts….

JD Vance has leaped to the defense of Young Republicans after alleged leaked messages showed them chatting casually in a racist, antisemitic and violent way.

Politico published leaked messages reportedly sent in a Telegram chat between senior members of the Young Republicans campaign group, including one writing: “Great. I love Hitler”. But Vance described the outrage over the messages as “pearl clutching.” Vance himself once compared Trump to Hitler, but he has since changed his tune on these comments.

…

Writing on X, seemingly referencing the Young Republican group chat, Vance wrote: “This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia. I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/young-republicans-leak-jd-vance-36071516

This could be our next supreme leader…..a pathetic waste of skin.

Sickening that any American could praise Hitler.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

“I Ain’t Dead”

Over the weekend social media exploded with all kinds of conspiracies on why Donny had not been seen or heard from in a couple of days…..but never fear he had something about these conspiracies….

Sometimes it feels like barely an hour can go by without hearing from President Trump. So when he didn’t appear for one day, then two, then three, speculation started to swirl online about his health. Not even a few glimpses of the president visiting his golf course over the weekend were enough to stanch the social media rumor mill fueled by political opponents. Trump was asked directly about it Tuesday at his first public event in a week, the AP reports. “How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” asked Fox News’ Peter Doocy. “Did you see that?” “No,” the 79-year-old Trump responded flatly. The senators and administration officials gathered around him for the Space Command headquarters announcement shifted their weight and smiled.

The president said he wasn’t aware that people were wondering if he had died, but he had heard there were concerns about his health. “I knew they were saying, like: ‘Is he OK? How is he feeling? What’s wrong?'” Trump said, calling the speculation “fake news” and saying he “was very active over the weekend.” Recently, Trump has been seen with bruising on the back of his right hand, sometimes poorly concealed with makeup, and swelling around his ankles. The White House has said Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which means veins in the legs can’t properly carry blood back to the heart, causing it to pool in the lower legs. It’s a fairly common condition for older adults.

As far as the bruising, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s from “frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin,” which Trump takes regularly to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Trump pointed out Tuesday that he gave a few interviews during the days when he wasn’t appearing publicly, plus he was posting on Truth Social, his social media site. He wrote some “long Truths,” as the posts are known, and some “pretty poignant Truths.” In one of those posts, from Sunday, he said he “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE.” On CNN Tuesday morning, anchor Audie Cornish had a short discussion about the topic, the AP reports. “At one point the term ‘Trump is dead’ was trending on social media,” Cornish said. “Not true.”

So all that wishful thinking by so many was for naught.

I am sure that the conspiracies will remain just subdued for now.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Even His Chatbot Thinks He Lies

It is a Friday and would like to close with a little something…..many people are using AI to get to the heart of a story (I think it is kinda lazy but that is just me)….

Most people with a functioning brain thinks Donny is a liar….even his own AI chatbot thinks so as well….

I thought it would be helpful to see what the new artificial intelligence chatbot Trump added to Truth Social on Aug. 6 had to say about whether he is trustworthy and whether his signature policies are popular.

Truth Social AI, the chatbot, offered me answers that echoed opinions from the new national polling and responded this way when I asked if Trump has a history of lying: “Yes. Major fact-checkers, courts, and official investigations have documented numerous false claims by Donald Trump over many years.”

So Trump’s own chatbot calls him out as a liar. How awkward for him. How candid and correct for the rest of us.

On the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Truth Social AI told me that “most national polling shows Americans disapprove” of it, though some people approve of “specific provisions” such as some tax breaks included in it.

On tariffs, Truth Social AI said, “Most credible analyses find Trump’s tariffs have been a net drag on the U.S. economy ‒ raising consumer and business costs, reducing overall employment and output ‒ though they can modestly lift employment in some protected manufacturing industries.”

Asked about how Trump is changing the federal government, Truth Social told me “approval is mixed and modest,” citing Associated Press-NORC polls showing “roughly 4 in 10 Americans approve.” That was interesting framing, since a clear majority in those polls don’t like how Trump is operating.

(usatoday.com)

Maybe he ought to put his IT guys to work corrected this oversight…..he just cannot have his own AI on his own social media site contradicting his words.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Where’s Your News?

For generations the American people would turn on their local news and then get the national news from reliable news sources……that has changed and social media is now the major sources of news.

Americans have officially put news websites and TV channels on the backburner, turning instead to social media and video networks like Facebook, X, and YouTube to get their news. Some 54% of people in the US now get their news from social media and video sites, making this the new main source, reports the BBC. In comparison, 50% get their news from TV and 48% from news sites and apps, according to an annual report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which surveyed nearly 100,000 people in 48 countries. Globally, 36% use Facebook for news each week, 30% use YouTube, 19% use Instagram, 19% use WhatsApp, 16% use TikTok, 12% use X, and 7% use AI chatbots and interfaces.

Yet 47% of respondents worldwide reported online personalities and influencers were a major source of false or misleading information. Populist politicians around the world are “increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favor of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who … rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse,” according to the report, which points out President Trump has invited social media influencers and content creators to press briefings while denying access to some traditional media outlets. The most widely-seen personalities in the US were Joe Rogan (22% of respondents reported getting news from him in the past week) and Tucker Carlson (14%), per Reuters.

The report finds “the rise of social media and personality-based news” is “happening faster—and with more impact” in the US than in other countries. The US had the highest proportion of people accessing podcasts for news at 15% and the biggest increase in scrolling news on X. Some 23% of Americans used the site for news, for an 8% increase over 2024, per the report. Rival networks like Threads and Bluesky are “making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news,” it adds, per the BBC. Author Nic Newman said this “represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers,” though consumers of news also see a problem: 73% in the US and 58% globally said they’re concerned about their ability to tell truth from fiction.

It is sad the people refuse to look for the truth instead outsource their thinking to the likes of social media where misinformation is rampant.

To me this is the problem of our nation….propaganda and misinformation is the rule of the day.

I can see the influence of social media in some of the comments IST receives….regurgitation of crap from social media.

This explain so much from so many people.

So sad and I weep for this nation that is becoming a nation of idiots.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Attack Of The Clones

WTF?

Okay, I admit it I am not very impressed with this new prez so far in his tenure….but I do find plenty of humor in his constant BS on social media….his newest stupidity has something to do with clones.

President Donald Trump boosted a mind-bending social media conspiracy that his predecessor, Joe Biden, was executed in 2020 and replaced with clones.

“There is no #JoeBiden – executed in 2020,” a Truth Social post shared by Trump on Saturday night reads.

“#Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. Democrats don’t know the difference.”

The obscure account boosted by the president posts daily on right-wing topics and obsesses over the “Lord & Savior” – Trump.

The Republican has been making increasingly wild claims about Biden, who recently revealed he had been diagnosed with an aggressive and advanced form of prostate cancer.

While refusing to offer any sympathy for the 82-year-old, Trump has instead used the diagnosis to suggesting that shadowy figures had been exploiting the presidency during the Democrat’s term.

His allies have also feverishly speculating about the timing of Biden’s announcement and made claims about a potential cover-up of the condition.

(tag24.com)

Was this suppose to be funny?  Was this a real belief from Little Donny?  Or could this be something deeper?

The more he opens his mouth or posts on social media the more I am starting to think that those that say he is losing his mind may be on to something….and this is not a new thing for Donny….but it does seem to be getting to the point of being troubling.

These are just a few of the recent remarks made by one of two major candidates for president of the United States. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has spent years saying the unsayable to entertain, goad and grab attention. But his pronouncements over the past few weeks have plumbed new depths of absurdity and incoherence.

Trump, 78, increasingly slurs or stumbles over his words, raising fears over cognitive decline. He is slipping in polls against Kamala Harris and knows that defeat could lead to criminal trials and even prison. After a decade of dominating American politics, critics say, Trump could be in the throes of a final meltdown.

His verbal output now is “absolute batshittery”, according to Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “These are not the musings of a well-adjusted adult. He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/06/trump-behavior-final-meltdown

But seriously folks….CLONES!

At what point does the nation start question the mental stability of this person?

I have seen nothing that indicates that this was a one off thing and with the progression of his vicious BS things are only going to get worse.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Is He A Russian Asset?

This post is NOT an endorsement of this ever trending meme.

Let me say here and now that I am not saying he is only that some things that are being done could lead people into believing this conspiracy.

One of my favorite movies is the original “Manchurian Candidate”….and when I saw this article and all the memes going around about Trump I had to include it in my post….

Almost overnight, Washington under Trump has turned against its post-war Western allies, threatened to end Nato, halted aid to Ukraine and publicly humiliated its leader, adopted the Russian version of the cause of the war, stopped the Pentagon from operating psy and cyber ops against Russia, and started talks to end US sanctions and to relaunch Nord Stream pipelines moving natural gas between Russia and Europe.

Whether Trump is a card-carrying Russian agent, an asset or merely a useful idiot is immaterial. The end result is that he is threatening to end the whole transatlantic alliance that has roughly defined what we call “the West” since 1945, and potentially realigning the United States with Russia. This may not be as shocking as many people seem to think.

Let’s not forget that the two countries were allies during the second world war. And shortly after their historic rapprochement with Mao’s China, Henry Kissinger told Richard Nixon that in the decades ahead, the US might have to realign with Russia to balance geopolitical power against a resurgent China. Now I am not criticising or applauding any of these developments, but merely observing with a great deal of trepidation and also some amusement.

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/world-opinion/article/3301172/donald-trump-real-life-manchurian-candidate

But I will admit that some of the actions taken by the Trump Administration is somewhat suspect.

Trump’s War Department has been told to stand down….

Russia has been pretty happy with the United States lately, and the latest news out of the Pentagon will likely continue that streak. US officials tell CBS News that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has issued an order to US Cyber Command to suspend planning against Russia for now, including any offensive digital initiatives. It’s not clear what spurred the directive, and the New York Times notes that the “precise scope and duration of the Defense Department order is not clear, as the line between offensive and defensive cyberoperations is often a blurry one.”

But the paper adds that Hegseth’s move is a “huge gamble” for the Trump administration, with US officials warning that Russia continues to try to infiltrate US networks, including via ramped-up ransomware attacks. “The order could derail some of the command’s most high-profile missions involving a top US digital adversary, including in Ukraine,” the Record notes. On Sunday, national security adviser Mike Waltz told CNN’s State of the Union that he’d been previously unaware of Hegseth’s order, but he insisted that “there will be all kinds of carrots and sticks to get this war [in Ukraine] to an end,” per CBS.

Why then the order?

Plus Russia is smiling ear to ear on the dust up between Trump and Zelenskyy….made Putin happy….

Now those Ukrainian refugees are about to lose their status here under Trump….

Under the Biden administration, more than 1.8 million migrants from various nations were allowed into the US via temporary humanitarian parole programs. Now, the newest White House occupants seem further intent on undoing that initiative: A senior Trump official and three other sources tell Reuters that the Trump administration plans to yank legal status for 240,000 Ukrainian refugees who fled the Russian invasion to come to the US, with an internal email from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showing those refugees could then be possibly fast-tracked for deportation.

The Telegraph calls the anticipated move, which could come as soon as April, an “extraordinary reversal” of President Biden’s open arms to refugees from the war-torn country. The report comes amid increasing tensions between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which worsened last week during Zelensky’s visit to the White House to discuss a peace plan involving Ukraine and Russia. Reuters notes, however, that this planned move on the refugees was in the works before Friday’s tense meeting, and that it’s just part of Trump’s desire to take away legal status from the full range of immigrants who came into the US under the Biden parole programs.

That includes 70,000 Afghans here after fleeing the Taliban, as well as 530,000 or so Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans; the latter group could see their legal status pulled as soon as this month, say Reuters’ sources. During his campaign, Trump had vowed to undo the programs, saying they crossed the boundaries of US law. The Kyiv Independent notes that about 5.2 million Ukrainians have taken shelter abroad, most settling in countries in the EU, as the war in Ukraine wages on. A Homeland Security official tells Reuters that the department has no comment at this time. The White House didn’t respond to the news agency’s request for comment.

Sorry but this sound like he has something special going on with Russia.

But the meme that has been flying around social media that in 1987 Trump was recruited by the KGB….

In the last few days, several U.S. media outlets have been reporting that three former KGB agents of the old Soviet Union now allege that it began grooming Donald Trump as their deceived asset in the 1980s. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), established in 1954, thus near the beginning of the Cold War, was the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence and domestic security agency. (Of course, those Communists tried to do that with other people.)

These former KGB agents claim this happened mostly for two reasons: (1) Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana, was a modeling immigrant from Czechoslovakia, an Eastern European nation then a satellite of the Soviet Union, and (2) Donald’s father Fred was a very successful real estate tycoon in the greater New York City area. Then, according to these former agents, the KGB learned from its data gathered on Donald that he is a classic narcissist susceptible to flattery. That’s what the Soviets, and later, the Russians, seized upon when Donald was trying to build a big Trump hotel in Moscow. By various means they impacted Donald to favor Russia, hate NATO, and question the USA’s opposition to Russia.

The Hill reported last Wednesday (“Was 40-year old Trump recruited by the KGB?“), “The former head of Kazakhstan’s intelligence service, Alnur Mussayev, recently claimed in a Facebook post that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987, when the 40-year-old real-estate mogul first visited Moscow.” Mussayev provides no documentary evidence” because “he alleged that Trump’s file is in Vladimir Putin’s hands.”

The Hill further reports, “Several years ago, Yuri Shvets, a former KGB major now resident in Washington, D.C., served as one of the key sources for Craig Unger’s best-selling book, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery.”

The Hill continues, “Just after Mussayev made his claim, another ex-KGB officer living in France, Sergei Zhyrnov, categorically endorsed the allegations in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist. According to Zhyrnov, Trump would have been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room. Zhyrnov said that Trump’s every move would have been recorded and documented, and that he could have been either caught in a “honey trap” (“All foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB — one hundred percent,” he said) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.”

(patheos.com)

Again please do not assume that I believe any of these accusations all I am doing is pointing out there is some evidence that could lead one into the mind set.

If you have a point make it without going too damn nuts.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Misogyny is Facebook Approved

It appears that FB now allows women to be referred to as property.

I have never trusted Facebook or that prick Zuck and now this just shows that I was correct to distrust this prick.

Meta’s new hate speech rules — or lack thereof — now allow users to make shockingly misogynistic claims on the company’s social networks.

A perusal of the latest update to Meta’s “hateful conduct” rules reveals that a number of rules that barred users from comparing minorities to inanimate objects, including references to “women as household objects or property,” have been removed.

As part of the tech company’s transparency efforts, users are able not only to see updates to policies, but also a change log of what had been added and stricken out between updates.

For its January 7, 2025 update — which went into effect seemingly just after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday a sweeping content overhaul that was derided as a clear effort to curry favor with president-elect Donald Trump — Meta’s confusing new rules strike out a number of formerly prohibited types of speech, much of which relates to women and gender minorities.

Among the strikethroughs in the “hateful conduct” policy change log is the removal of a section barring users from comparing people to inanimate objects or “non-human states.” That rule, now rescinded, banned referring to women “as household objects or property or objects in general.”

You don’t have to a be a scholar in feminist theory to know why it’s seriously messed up to refer to a woman as someone else’s property — and that’s without getting into the history of chattel slavery in the United States, when white men owned and abused Black women for hundreds of years.

In the age of Trump 2.0, the concept of a man “owning” a woman is a logical — and terrifying — endpoint of the so-called “trad wife” movement, which seeks to reinstate traditional gender roles by will or by force. It’s also the undercurrent of the anti-choice push that the president-elect’s cronies hope to enact further once he takes office again in a few weeks.

That same regressive and misogynistic energy also seems to be on display in another peculiar removal from Meta’s new hateful conduct policy.

While the policy used to ban “generalizations that state inferiority” based on physical appearance and sexual activity — like calling people “slut,” “whore,” or “pervert,” per the old rules — the new overhaul now simply prohibits “insults” about character.

Though the new update added language saying that users should not post allegations about another person’s “sexual promiscuity or other sexual immorality,” it’s unclear what the difference between that addition and the exclusion of the “slut” and “whore” language would be, and we’ve reached out to Meta for clarification about that.

Within the context of Zuckerberg’s newfound Trump fandom, meanwhile, this policy overhaul feels very much like the “grab ’em by the pussy“-era misogyny of the president-elect’s 2016 campaign — and Meta has a lot of explaining to do if it wants the women who use its platforms to believe any different.

(futurism.com)

For the life of me I cannot see why anyone would use or continue to use this platform…..he has his subscribers by the nuts and they love it.

How sick is that?

Then I read an op-ed about time to pull the plug on FB…..I have been saying that for years…..please do it….and do it NOW!

There’s a guy named Christopher Langan who claims, because of his alleged super-high IQ, to be the smartest person in the United States. And maybe he is—I have no idea because I am decidedly not. But when Langan appeared in 2008 on the TV quiz show 1 vs 100, he fell short of the top prize widely seen as a gimme for a genius. And what struck most wasn’t just that he failed to win the million dollars on offer, but that he was forced to use the “ask the mob” option so early in his appearance, turning to them twice at the $100,000 level to answer a question about Abbott & Costello.

I was reminded of this moment while reading the news of Meta’s decision to suspend its third-party fact checking program, and to replace it with a “Community Notes” system modeled on Elon Musk’s Twitter. (I will not call it “X” because that’s a stupid name and I see no reason to honor somebody’s request not to deadname their company when they refuse to do the same for their own daughter.)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/status-update-its-time-to-pull-the-plug-on-facebook/

This final part is for all those that are interested in getting out of Facebook….

Facebook has been a staple for many people for nearly — checks notes — two decades at this point. But there are several reasons why you might finally be considering deleting your account. Whether you’re concerned about privacy, want to reduce time spent on social media, or simply no longer find Facebook useful, deleting your account is a huge step toward a digital detox — one that comes with both benefits and consequences.

Before you go through with it, let’s go over what deleting Facebook means and how to do it on different devices.

When you delete your Facebook account, it’s permanent. Most of your data — including your profile, photos, posts, and videos — will be permanently removed without the possibility of recovery. Some residual information, like messages sent to friends, will remain visible in their inboxes. You’ll also lose access to any apps or services you logged into using your Facebook account, such as Spotify or Pinterest, so you need to reset your login credentials with the various platforms to continue using them.

https://www.pocket-lint.com/how-to-delete-facebook-account/

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this article for like I have said many times…I have NEVER been on Facebook so I do not need to delete my account….but if you try please let my readers know if it is accurate.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Social Media–A New Year’s Resolution

Many of us at the beginning of a new year make resolutions that we seldom keep…..and this year I have heard some say they want to try and wean themselves off of social media…

To that I say good luck.

I was not one of those people for I have absolutely no social media presents other than a blog….for me social media is where the brain goes to die…as an old fart I want my brain to keep working as long as it can.

It is the first Sunday of the New Year and I want to help as best I can so this is my first FYI for 2025.

Part of living on the modern internet is realizing that a social network just isn’t useful or fun anymore. The thing that you used to get from social media—friends, jokes, or information—have disappeared, generally replaced by some combination of rage, churn, and monetization schemes. 

Even knowing this, though, it can be hard to give up the habit of visiting Facebook, X, Instagram (or whatever network you still use) that’s been part of your life for years or even decades. Part of this is just human nature—we’re creatures of habit. Another part of this is that most social networks employ teams of brilliant psychologists and designers who work hard to make quitting as hard as possible. 

The good news? You can fight back, turning the tricks these companies use against you to your advantage. A new year is about to begin—resolve to stop spending time on a website that you hate. Here’s a few ways you can do that.

The companies that build social networks work hard to reduce friction—those moments of annoyance that might cause you to do something else. If a page takes a while to load, for example, you might decide to do something else instead.

Knowing about friction can help you train yourself to visit particular social networks less often: you just need to add some friction. If you tend to reflexively open a social network on your phone, for example, you could remove the icon for the social network from your phone’s home screen, meaning you’ll have to scroll through your list of apps in order to launch it. Or, to make things more annoying, you could uninstall the app entirely.

https://www.popsci.com/diy/how-to-quit-social-media/

I realize that an addiction is a hard mistress but if you are serious about the break then I hope this did help a bit to ease your recovery.

Have a wonderful Sunday….and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Why Do We Believe?

That is the question that avoids a good answer….although many have tried….

For instance a couple of stories from just the last couple of weeks….

Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating people’s pets! The U.S. government directed Hurricane Helene to hit North Carolina to chase people off their property so the government can seize land in a secret effort to mine and control lithium! The government is taking FEMA money away from Americans hit by hurricanes and giving it to illegal immigrants! This is the worst economy in history. ALL of the aforementioned stories are outright lies with zero evidence to back them up, but yet, many Americans believe the lies to the point of condemning anyone who does not accept them, and they are promoting these lies as the truth.

Let’s not forget the ever popular, for now, the Dems are controlling the weather and directing hurricanes to punish Red States.  (If this one does not make you laugh then you have a serious problem).

But why do so many latch on the these ‘theories’ and run with them?

Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax? The answer to these questions is, “No,” yet a committed subculture of conspiracy theorists vigorously argues the opposite.

Many scholars dismiss conspiracy theorists as paranoid and delusional. Psychological data bolster their case: people who harbor conspiracist thoughts are also more inclined to paranoid ideation and schizotypy, a mild form of schizophrenia. As conspiracy theory expert Timothy Melley of Miami University has put it, these beliefs are often dismissed as “the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe.”

Yet these antiestablishment ideas are surprisingly widely held. According to a national poll released last April by Public Policy Polling, 37 percent of Americans believe that global warming is a hoax, 21 percent think that the U.S. government is covering up evidence of the existence of space aliens and 28 percent suspect a secret elite power is plotting to take over the world. Only hours after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, people suggested, in YouTube videos and elsewhere on the Web, that the attack might have been an inside job and even that the entire event was a hoax.

With so many people ascribing to weakly supported explanations for news events, belief in conspiracy theories cannot be a mere symptom of pathology. The questioning of officialdom is critical to a functioning democracy, as the recent revelations of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance efforts illustrate. Yet new data suggest that conspiracy theories can diminish public engagement, eroding interest in issues of great political importance. Attaining a better understanding of why these ideas persist can help us devise new ways to combat misinformation.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories/

I will go with the delusional thing.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”