There is a movie out called “The Social Dilemma” that deals with this subject and IMO is well worth watching. My opinion is that it doesn’t go far enough into the dangers but is informative and shows how through manipulation we have become the products sold by these unconscionable manipulators. Sorry if it has been mentioned elsewhere.
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(Adds it to film que 
)
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First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Martin Niemöller
The people who support the wholesale banning of groups in our society don’t understand that it is only a matter of time before they wind up on the wrong side of this behavior. People in this country are divided into two tribes, for the most part, left and right, Democrats and Republicans. Because of my life, I don’t do so. However, I do belong to the American Tribe, which is how I identified during my years abroad. As an American I’m dismayed and alarmed at the tunnel vision of so many people here. I promise, this shit will bite everyone in the ass eventually. Only fools and madmen believe it won’t.
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Yeah. She believes in not giving her info to Google or Facebook, but handing it directly to her Chinese overlords! 
/chuckles
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Excellent and very wise advice.
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They are the main producers of vape gear, trust me, I know what I’m doing 
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I quit using FB (Instagram/ SnapChat/ Twitter/ all social media except Reddit & other forums) about 4 or so years ago! I’d been on it since the days of needing a personal invite AND a college email address to join 
I was sick of seeing ads pertaining to conversations I’d only spoken about (as others have said before); I was tired of being friended by random strangers being creepy, friended by old bullies, friended by old distant coworkers I barely knew/ other people that never talked to me IRL 
plus all the catfishing, photoshopping, scamming, data collection, privacy invasions, narcissism, just yuck 
I personally feel FB is more evil than good. I avoid it 
Zuckerberg is a 
lol jk but FB has always been evil. it started out as college guys being creeps, giving themselves & their peers a platform on which to “rate” the students on campus as “hot or not” based off their photos. Zuckerberg stole the idea from the friends he was working on it with & monetized it without their knowledge or consent.
EDIT Link to Wiki History of TheFaceBook/ FaceSmash. TLDR; Zuckerberg pissed off his co-founders by stealing the group idea & using it for his own site (FB); when an on-campus investigation was launched into him about it, he took private user’s passwords & hacked into the email accounts of those looking into him… lol FB was basically founded on judging by looks, privacy intrusion & data abuse.
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I use a chromebook where I can easily switch to Linux if I want. Maybe one of these days you can help me out using Linux.
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Thank you for turning me on to Niemoller. I love your quote by him. The tunnel vision in our society is suffocating and the buried truth sinks deeper under the weight of lies, rumors and conspiracies piled one on top of the other. There’s a story in the Lotus Sutra about the excellent physician who saved his sons who drank poison and didn’t realize their house was on fire. Even though he called out to them they wouldn’t move and had to run in after them. The poison they took was delusion.
I’m sure there are different versions of the story but point taken.
If humans refuse to seek out the truth they perish in their own delusion.
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That about sums it up.
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Here’s one paragraph from an article I found interesting:
Berin Szóka: When Facebook bans somebody, that’s not censorship. Censorship is when the government makes a private company take something down — period, end of story. So we really need to stop using that term in that broad way. But if you want to have social media, and you want to have it moderated responsibly, you need Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] to do both things: to protect against lawsuits for hosting content but also ensure that websites can take down egregious content. That’s what’s allowed the internet to develop, and it’s not perfect, but that’s just how speech is, and we can’t regulate the things people are complaining about because of the First Amendment.
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By Elizabeth R. Purdy
Censorship occurs when individuals or groups try to prevent others from saying, printing, or depicting words and images.
Censors seek to limit freedom of thought and expression by restricting spoken words, printed matter, symbolic messages, freedom of association, books, art, music, movies, television programs, and Internet sites. When the government engages in censorship, First Amendment freedoms are implicated.
Private actors — for example, corporations that own radio stations — also can engage in forms of censorship, but this presents no First Amendment implications as no governmental, or state, action is involved.
Various groups have banned or attempted to ban books since the invention of the printing press. Censored or challenged works include the Bible, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the works of children’s authors J. K. Rowling and Judy Blume.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and press, integral elements of democracy. Since Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court has applied the First Amendment freedoms of speech and press to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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I use facebook and understand it for what it is. Some family uses it to post little things they are doing and such. If I don’t respond and they think it important, they will call, text, or email. Beyond that, facebook is garbage. None of the ads are vetted and many are all out scams. Political crap is just that on facebook. I am not afraid of reading propaganda because I can spot it for what it is. It’s an interesting study in human social behavior for sure. A lot of character defects are front and center. I’ve lost the compulsion to answer posts and ignore has become habit. I don’t check my “friends” list as it means nothing to me. Pretty useless service for the most part.
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Here are a few articles I found
The second article states that no crime has been committed, I disagree.
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In my past life, I was in the nuts and bolts of the IT world. I remember and participated in IRC and a couple of online forums in the 90’s. When MySpace came along, something in me said, “I think this can be used to track me in ways I don’t agree with.” and did not join. When Facebook came around, I did not join for the same reasons. I am realistic enough to know I am being tracked by my online purchases and forum participation, but for some reason it doesn’t bother me as much as Facebook. Different strokes for different folks, but I continue to stay away from Facebook, Twitter, Link’din and other platforms. To each their own and live and let live.
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I know, I wasn’t getting my hopes up here. I know government is deeply entrenched in this BS.
It was more a reaction to @muth’s statement that they weren’t censoring people.
The info in the screenshot is new and of course it’s about politics.
That’s why I stay away from these platforms.
It is a fact though that these platforms generate more money than governments and they can break governments with the info they spread.
Government knows, hence little tax and other forms of looking away.
We seem to have gone from democracy into technocracy and I don’t like it.
I’m amazed at FB’s ability to remove posts that contradict the official Covid story.
It happens with lightning speed.
Compare that with their total inability of removing child-porn from their platform, including links to other sites where you can buy the sex. 
People have been reporting this since forever, organisations have been set up to persuade FB to do something about it.
Result NADA!
EVIL 
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Hold your horse’s there. It wasn’t MY statement. I posted a statement from a Yale professor describing the difference between censorship and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I neither agreed nor disagreed with it, just thought it was interesting.
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And all this I agree with.
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Know that I am not challenging your opinions but when making a statement such as this it helps to produce evidence to back it up.
Not that I don’t believe you but where? Can you produce some examples?
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Thank you for all the content, Mikser. I like to read as much as I can and, of course, I am always looking to cut through the entanglement of information. Like you I’d like to know my freedom is ensured but question where that freedom originates, from without or within?
The Greenwald article I read was an opinion piece so I didn’t get all the angles I would have liked but thx for posting it. I did learn a lot. Mostly about Greenwald and the current state of journalism. I was following links all over the place, lol. Truth Unmuted is a Christian publication which is fine by me but I always approach religion influenced writings with an air of caution. But that’s just my basic approach to everything I read…with caution and deep analysis.
Hope you have a decent Monday and may it be free of digital lurkers 
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