Posts Facebook Quotes

An open Facebook page is simply a psychiatric dry erase board that screams, “Look at me. I am insecure. I need your reaction to what I am doing, but you’re not cool enough to be my friend. Therefore, I will just pray you see this because the approval of God is not all I need.

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

They will hate you if you are beautiful. They will hate you if you are successful. They will hate you if you are right. They will hate you if you are popular. They will hate you when you get attention. They will hate you when people in their life like you. They will hate you if you worship a different version of their God. They will hate you if you are spiritual. They will hate you if you have courage. They will hate you if you have an opinion. They will hate you when people support you. They will hate you when they see you happy. Heck, they will hate you while they post prayers and religious quotes on Pinterest and Facebook. They just hate. However, remember this: They hate you because you represent something they feel they don’t have. It really isn’t about you. It is about the hatred they have for themselves. So smile today because there is something you are doing right that has a lot of people thinking about you.

Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year.

My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.

Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

So what are you suggesting?" Grandfather asked. "We find a more acceptable group of people, then bring the Sacrifice to them? How do you propose we find them, a Facebook post? 'Click here to apply for eternal life'?

Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we're not as smart as we thought we were, will be forced by life to surrender our attacks and defenses which avail us of nothing, and finally break through into the collective beauty of who we really are." [Facebook post, August 31, 2013]

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.

Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it's shit. Write some more. Repeat.

No job is complete until the selfie is posted.

I confess... if I typo a Facebook post I will edit it. I know it's only Facebook but it's an editing sickness.

With the selfies, a photographer has finally found his place in a photograph.

والبعض يشعر بالهلع إذا ما وجد الأمور تسير على ما يرام، فيسرع للبحث عن شئ يفسد به يومه، شئ يشغله عن الشعور بالسعادة، والاستمتاع باللحظة كما هي، حينها فقط يشعر أن كل شئ يسير على ما يرام حقاً، الآن يمتلك أمراً مأساوياً ليحدث عنه الجميع في السنوات القليلة القادمة https://www.facebook.com/marwah.write...

Pain doesn’t really go away because someone kisses it better. Sadness doesn’t recede because a person posts an inspiring quote on your Facebook wall. Grief doesn’t sink into the shadows the moment the sun comes up. You can’t sleep your way through misery. There are some hurts that become a part of you, like your blood or your eyes or your teeth. Those are the ones that need to be lived over and over again.

I was going to post something on Facebook until I asked myself why. David E Love, Journalist

Worse, neither of us has liked any of the other’s Facebook posts, the modern equivalent of pistols at dawn.

I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.

I dinnae get people, like they all want to be watched, to be seen, like all the time. They put up their pictures online and let people they dinnae like look at them! And people they’ve never met as well, and they all pretend tae be shinier than they are – and some are even posting on like four sites; their bosses are watching them at work, the cameras watch them on the bus, and on the train, and in Boots, and even outside the chip shop. Then even at home – they’re going online to look and see who they can watch, and to check who’s watching them!

So if you blame Facebook, Trump, or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. For millennia, much of what passed for “news” and “facts” in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons, and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit—yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.

It is the subtle things in life that you have to look for because the deepest love speaks at a whisper that only two people can hear.

A selfie has more face and fewer feelings.

Of course you're not egotistical. I checked, and you look very humble in all 900 of the selfies you posted on facebook.

In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state. Facebook’s advertising team had made this presentation for an Australian client that explains that Instagram and Facebook monitor teenagers’ posts, photos, interactions, conversations with friends, visual communications, and internet activity on and off Facebook’s platforms and use this data to target young people when they’re vulnerable. In addition to the moments of vulnerability listed, Facebook finds moments when teenagers are concerned with “body confidence” and “working out & losing weight.

Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA.

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

I’ve never heard of anyone on their deathbed saying, “I wish I would have spent more time watching TV or reading Facebook posts.

What you post on Facebook represents you, it can make you look bitter or better, forgiving or frustrated, resentful or rejoicing, choose wisely.

But posting on Facebook is a false kind of intimacy, and in real life they haven’t seen or spoken to each other for a long time

Was going to post something on Facebook until I asked myself why.

If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year.

If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet-tweets, Facebook posts, lists - you've read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you've read no books in a year.

If you'd like to keep CHRIST in Christmas this year, I'd humbly suggest that instead of just posting about it as a status on Facebook, that perhaps you try to find a family in your neighborhood who could use a little help or pehaps donate to a local food bank anonomously. That's keeping CHRIST in Christmas!

His Facebook post is pure Jamie: Hi all. I feel like a heel doing this over Facebook, but I can’t reach everyone by tomorrow. You’re all going to discuss me on Sunday, anyway. And in case you think my account was hacked, it wasn’t. As proof I’ll confess that I’m the one who broke Mom’s Christmas tree angel when I was seven. It was death by baseball, but I swear she didn’t suffer. Anyway, I have to catch you up on a few developments. I’ve taken the coaching job in Toronto, and I’ve declined my spot in Detroit. This feels like the right career move, but there’s something else. I’m living with my boyfriend (that was not a typo.) His name is Wes, and we met at Lake Placid about nine years ago. In case you were lacking something to talk about over dinner, I’ve fixed that problem. Love you all. Jamie

9 likes Like Facebook_icon “Read this to yourself. Read it silently. Don't move your lips. Don't make a sound. Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing anything. What a wonderfully weird thing, huh? NOW MAKE THIS PART LOUD! SCREAM IT IN YOUR MIND! DROWN EVERYTHING OUT. Now, hear a whisper. A tiny whisper. Now, read this next line in your best crotchety- old man voice: "Hello there, sonny. Does your town have a post office?" Awesome! Who was that? Whose voice was that? It sure wasn't yours! How do you do that? How?! It must've been magic.

While the Venezuelan people starve, the Chavistas post photographs on Facebook of their European vacations, their lavish parties, their designer outfits, the bouquets of fresh flowers that adorn their homes.

Okay, so I stopped posting status updates on Facebook a long time ago. I noticed that whenever someone posts something completely mundane and stupid, like 'Sushi 2nite!' seventeen people have to comment on that. 'I ♥ sushi!' and 'Spicy Tuna 4 meee!' But if you ever try to actually say something serious about your feelings or, like, your life, every one of your 386 "friends" is suddenly mute. So there you have it: My life is a post with no comments. Less interesting than spicy tuna.

May your home be so holy with laughter that wounded birds lean against your door to listen and heal. – Richard Van Camp's Twitter and Facebook Posts, July 22, 2017 (Ma traduction en français : Que votre maison soit si bénie par le rire que les oiseaux blessés s’appuient contre votre porte pour écouter et guérir.)

The accused rapist, Calvin Smith, had graduated from a small-town high school the previous June, where he'd distinguished himself as an athlete. Individuals who knew Smith have described him as "kind," "easygoing," and "goofy." But he had never had sex before meeting Kaitlynn Kelly, and a look at what he has posted on a social media site suggests that he was a frustrated, involuntary celibate. On January 11, 2011, Smith posted a line from the animated sitcom Family Guy on his Facebook page: "women are not people god just put them here for mans entertainment.

Ede says we should post some demotivational phrases on our Facebook pages. I can’t therefore I am. To be is to be condemned. The universe is a mistake. Hope is a kind of delirium. We don’t live even once. Dead days outnumber live ones. The use of philosophy is to sadden. Existence has never answered our questions. Death is the least of our problems.

one thing I do know for sure is that people’s lives are not always as perfect as the filtered photos or edited statuses they post on Facebook.

A newspaper runs a story, a friend posts a link on Facebook, a blogger writes a post, and it’s interesting. But the real intellectual action often takes place in the comments.

Have you ever read a wonderful quote that you want to post on your twitter/facebook/blog/whatever but you feel like it may come off as “not Christian enough” or just a little theologically lacking?

Those people who post pictures of their dinner on Facebook, only to be disappointed by the lack of “likes” from friends, are simply trying to appeal to the wrong audience. If there were such a thing as Facebug (Facebook for microbes!), a picture of your dinner would provoke an excited response from millions of users—and shudders of disgust from millions more. The menu changes daily: useful milk digesters contained in a cheese sandwich, armies of Salmonella bacteria hiding in a delicious dish of tiramisu.

What's Facebook? It's where moms like me post about how much we love the husbands who annoy the living bejesus out of us, and share expertly edited photos of our kids and generally talk about our loves like we're living in an enchanted fairy tale blessed by rainbow angel unicorns. In short, it's for lying. But I'm addicted.

I wait in front of the stadium, scrolling through Facebook on my cell phone. I swear if one more of my high school friends posts pictures of their lunch, kids, or dogs, I'm going on a spree reporting everyone as spam.

Really, you are. I know it doesn’t feel that way because everyone you know seems to be doing a better job at life than you are, but they’re not. They’re just really good at posting happy things to Facebook and Instagram.

Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel.

The real issue isn’t whether our generation is wearing enough bedazzled cross T-shirts; it’s whether we are allowing the message of Jesus to root deeper than our wardrobe, blog posts, music playlists, tweets, and Facebook statuses. We’ve become a tribe of people who rank our faith in a measurement of likes, re-tweets, and memory verses. We need to up our game.

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about.

Pain doesn’t really go away because someone kisses it better. Sadness doesn’t recede because a person posts an inspiring quote on your Facebook wall. Grief doesn’t sink into the shadows the moment the sun comes up. You can’t sleep your way through misery.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through photo slideshows at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections of their youth through the machinery of night, who clicking and poking and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural brightness of tiny screens floating across the tops of cities contemplating likes, who bared their brains to the network and saw who got pregnant and who got fat and who’s living the life best lived by posting Instagrams of themselves staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through newly cropped profile pics with radiant cool eyes obsessing over whose ex’s new lover is the best looking ex-lover’s lover, who breaking their backs falling out of ergonomic chairs while shouting into the icy streets, Everybody look how clever I am, Look how much fun I am having, Look at this amazing party I went to, Look at how well-liked I am, Look at my effortless carefully constructed casual desperate thrown together fun, Everybody look, This is fun, Look, Look, I swear to God I am having so much fun.

Facebook’s strategy, as he described it, was not so different from Napster’s. But rather than exploiting weaknesses in the music industry, it would do so for the human mind. “The thought process that went into building these applications,” Parker told the media conference, “was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” To do that, he said, “We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments.” He termed this the “social-validation feedback loop,” calling it “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He and Zuckerberg “understood this” from the beginning, he said, and “we did it anyway.

But the more I use social media, the more I realize that the great danger is not in simply overusing social media, it is in living through social media. The problem is not so much the way it wastes time, it is the way it frames time. Without limits, we begin to see our whole life through it. We see our whole day through a possible post. We look around, wondering what in our field of view is worth taking a picture of. We listen to every conversation for a tweetable quote, instead of trying to understand the human being who is talking. We avoid disagreement in public, yet we express our most ardent emotions in carefully crafted Facebook replies or all-caps tweets.

Only lame people make status updates about music on Facebook after college. Unless you’re actually a musician or music journalist or blogger or something, and have some direct involvement in what you’re posting, nobody cares about what the fuck you’re listening to or your thoughts on it.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the “like” button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed.

Empowered Women 101: Real women don't tell the world or elude to it on Pinterest, Facebook or any other social media platform that they are in an awful relationship. It is disrespectful to the person you say you love. Plus, it is self abusive to yourself. Ask yourself these questions: What if everyone you knew read it? Would your significant other be upset or humiliated? Why are you posting it (pity, anxiety, fear, desperateness, inmaturity)? And why do you want people to know?

Whether it's a social network post or a random act of kindness, I don't share for "likes" I share for love.

We live in a world where we will share everything about celebrities on social media but our friend's business posts are invisible.

I want to make a Facebook account and the name will be Nobody so when I see stupid crap people post, I can Like it. And it will say Nobody Likes This.

Where shall we express our hopes and fears? If we post our concerns on Facebook, we may forget to cast our cares on the Lord, the one who sustains us in our sorrows.

Every time I check Facebook, I get sick of my friends' pointless dramatic posts!

Ellen laughs, as we’ve both made fun of those nauseating Facebook posts that use a religious concept to justify their thinly veiled bragging.

A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn't celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.

I swear, they need to make an app for Facebook that has little electrodes hooked up to our private parts, so when we see some idiot spouting off about something he really doesn’t know jack shit about, as soon as we reach for the keyboard, it sends 110 volts coursing through our dis-functioning erectiles, or better yet, through HIS, before he posts it to begin with.

Social media has put an incredible pressure on the Facebook generation. We’ve made our lives so public to one another, and as a result we feel pressure to live up to a certain ideal version of ourselves. On social media, everyone is happy, and popular, and successful—or, at least, we think we need to look like we are. No matter how well off we are, how thin or pretty, we have our issues and insecurities. But none of that shows up online. We don’t like to reveal our weaknesses on social media. We don’t want to appear unhappy, or be a drag. Instead, we all post rose-colored versions of ourselves. We pretend we have more money than we do. We pretend we are popular. We pretend our lives are great. Your status update says I went to a totally awesome party last night! It won’t mention that you drank too much and puked and humiliated yourself in front of a girl you like. It says My sorority sisters are the best! It doesn’t say I feel lonely and don’t think they accept me. I’m not saying everyone should post about having a bad time. But pretending everything is perfect when it’s not doesn’t help anyone. The danger of these kinds of little white lies is that, in projecting the happiness and accomplishments we long for, we’re setting impossible standards for ourselves and others to live up to.

I see them on Facebook through the pictures Dad posts, but it’s like they aren’t real. It’s like they’re photoshopped Loch Ness monsters and the University of Whatever is going to prove the hoax by showing me the beam of light in the background is wavy or something. They’re real. Sometimes I wish they weren’t. And that’s horrible, so I stop wishing that. Or at least I try to.

Great game mechanics can even create achievement out of nothing. Airlines turned loyalty into a status symbol. Foursquare made it a mark of distinction to be a fixture at the corner bar. And by encouraging players to post their achievements on Facebook, online game makers have managed to convince people to proclaim loudly—even boast—that they spend hours playing computer games every day.

Be kind,” we post on Facebook, “for everyone you meet is facing a hard battle.” We attribute that quote to everyone from Aristotle to Marilyn Monroe, and then we go about our business doing our best not to look at the hard things. Unless they’re already over, in which case they’re not a hard thing anymore, they’re an obstacle overcome, an enemy vanquished. Now it’s a success story with a happy ending!

When a stranger criticizes your entire life because of one thing you posted on Facebook, that’s like someone driving by your house and yelling from his car, “Your yard is horrible, I bet your heart is too!

BE BRIEF. Brevity beats verbosity in social media. You’re competing with millions of posts every day. People make snap judgments and move right along if you don’t capture their interest at a glance. My experience is that the sweet spot for posts of curated content is two or three sentences on Google+ and Facebook and 100 characters on Twitter. The sweet spot for content that you create, such as blog posts, is 500 to 1,000 words.

The paper comes in plastic, a little thinner each week, a few more ads. Pretty soon there'll be no news. We'll be underwhelmed, over-bored & all storied out. The clouds ready to burst with our blue-skinned memories. Everyone with a blog, a website, an online store, dedicated server & two-dimensional quick-response-coded documentary made about their precious life. Our brains at maximum capacity, running optimization programs to recover what's left of our sanity. Still, we hope. We go see the latest blockbuster, buy the latest iPhone, zone out in front of our schizo-screens drinking jugs of moonshine corn syrup with our latent mutant meals. Facebook keeps us chained to our pasts, our posts, screwed in our seats... Scarecrows surrounded by night soil & spirits. Your acid shield may protect you from outside threat, but it'll never protect you from yourself.

Indeed, the preoccupation—some would say obsession—with computers and other digital gadgetry, especially among the young in what is commonly called “social media” (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), may be resulting ironically in more self-absorption and less physical interaction; texting, blogging, posting, and tweeting all avoid eye contact. Increasing divorce rates, expanding use of day care, and greater geographical mobility have all contributed to a society that lacks constancy and reliability. Personal, intimate, lasting relationships become difficult or even impossible to achieve, and deep-seated loneliness, self-absorption, emptiness, anxiety, depression, and loss of self-esteem ensue.

Reader, I did the stupid thing. I looked her up on Facebook. It didn't take more than forty minutes to filter this Katie Ingram from the other hundred or so. Her profile was unlocked, and contained the logo for the NHS. Her job description said: "Paramedic: Love My Job!!!" She had hair that could have been red or strawberry blond, it was hard to tell from the photographs, and she was possibly in her late twenties, pretty, with a snub nose. In the first thirty photographs she had posted she was laughing with friends, frozen in the middle of Good Times. She looked annoyingly good in a bikini (Skiathos 2014!! What a laugh!!!!!), she had a small, hairy dog, a penchant for vertiginously high heels, and a best friend with long, dark hair who was fond of kissing her cheek in pictures (I briefly entertained the hope that she was gay but she belonged to a Facebook group called: Hands up if you're secretly delighted that Brad Pitt is single again!!).

It occurred to Yancy that, in the time they’d known each other, he hadn’t once seen her look at her cell phone. She never texted, tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, or posted a single picture when they were together. He found this behavior alluring. The

Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.

Around this time—while he’s personally ordering us to take down posts that don’t violate our Community Standards—Mark starts opining publicly about freedom of speech. The day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, where twelve people were murdered, he posts, “This is what we all need to reject—a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world. I won’t let that happen on Facebook. I’m committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence.

It’s time we stop using Facebook to post pictures of kittens and start using it as a platform to expose darkness and to declare the word of the Lord! End-time warriors awakened in the fire of the coming Church will use every vehicle they can to awaken others!

I smiled for the camera. A grinning domesticated animal. By the time we reached the bottom, the picture would have been posted to Facebook and “liked” dozens of times. I’d be expected to “like” the “likes”, and the friendship of sheep would continue unabated.

Truth be told, if you say you are not an objector, you are ranged against democracy. If you have a different point of view, say you are a dissenter. Post ten things on Facebook daily and say openly, 'Yes, I have a difference of opinion.' Being an objector is no crime.

Facebook, Oliver. You’d know what I’m talking about if you logged in more than once. All you’ve posted is an off-centered picture of a blurry raccoon.” “I’m still getting acclimated to the camera feature.” “You also only have two friends, and they’re both fake accounts.” “They told me I had funds available in a deceased relative’s account that they would help me retrieve. It sounded promising.” A sharp laugh hits me. “You didn’t even accept my friend request.” “You weren’t offering me two-million dollars.” Another laugh that prompts my own.

Facebook automatically catalogued every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people's names they searched and did not befriend. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a "friend coefficient". The people rated closest to 1 would always be at the top of your news feed.

During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show. Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I’d post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable “push-back,” or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click “like” and “share” so readily? One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all “like” Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can recite our favorite lines. Indeed, we all can quote Yoda, and we all have tried out our best impression of him. When someone posts a meme of Yoda, many immediately share it, not just because they think it is funny (though it usually is — it’s hard to go wrong with the Master), but because it says something about the sharer. It’s shorthand for saying, “This little guy made a huge impact on me, not sure what it is, but for certain a huge impact. Did it make one on you, too? I’m clicking ‘share’ to affirm something you may not know about me. I ‘like’ Yoda.” And isn’t that what sharing on Facebook is all about? It’s not simply that the sharer wants you to snortle or “LOL” as it were. That’s part of it, but not the core. At its core is a statement about one’s belief system, one that includes the wisdom of Yoda. Other eminently shareable icons included beloved Tolkien characters, particularly Gandalf (as played by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellan). Gandalf, like Yoda, is somehow always above reproach and unfailingly epic. Like Yoda, Gandalf has his darker counterpart. Gollum is a fan favorite because he is a fallen figure who could reform with the right guidance. It doesn’t hurt that his every meme is invariably read in his distinctive, blood-curdling rasp. Then there’s also Batman, who seems to have survived both Adam West and Christian Bale, but whose questionable relationship to the Boy Wonder left plenty of room for hilarious homoerotic undertones. But seriously, there is something about the brooding, misunderstood and “chaotic-good” nature of this superhero that touches all of our hearts.

me that had been rusted and clotted with disuse. He had given me hope and taught me to trust that life held surprises if you allowed it to reveal itself. You did not clutter it with camera shots and Facebook postings. You gave yourself to the situation. That was Jack’s great lesson.

I was too busy. But with what? I constantly obsessed over what other people—many of them complete strangers—were posting on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or my fraternity group chat. My time was being eroded by a hundred little distractions every day. I was literally clicking my life away. I realized something else—I was depleting my sexual energy in a downward spiral of online porn consumption. I was investing my sexual passions and fantasies into digitized non-companionship. I was desensitized, enervated, lonely, weary, and way too young to feel all those things at the same time.

Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

In newspapers and magazines I read about what’s happening. Apparently Facebook exists to extinguish friendship. E-mail and texting destroy the post office. eBay replaces garage sales. Amazon eviscerates bookstores. Technology speeds, then doubles its speed, then doubles it again. Art takes naps.

Use social media with caution , because social media is poisonous. With just one post or tweet .Your career, reputation or life can be over. How far are you willing to go for likes, comments and retweets ? Don't be too thirsty for attention. You will be mislead by thinking everything you do is right.

But it’s not just that it’s not nice, and it’s not just that it’s weak, it’s that it’s impolite, we’re taught. When your cousin posts a misogynistic comment on Facebook, you could YELL AT HIM FOR REPEATING NONSENSE THAT IS NOT MERELY FACTUALLY INCORRECT BUT ALSO MORALLY WRONG OMFG I CAN’T BELIEVE I EVEN STILL HAVE TO SAY THESE THINGS. Then he—and probably several other people—will respond that you might have a point, but he can’t listen to you when you’re so shrill. So angry. You need to make your point more politely if you want to be taken seriously. Be nice, be strong, be polite. No feelings for you.

I wrote a blog post about how the book is different from the blog and why I chose to go the self-publishing route. I wrote guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch, which helped immensely and for which I’m very grateful. I used my social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Quora, and Pinterest.

Genuinely support people in ways you can. If you build great relationships and people get to like you for you, they will eventually promote what you do and would want to do business with you. The bottom line is that people love to do business with those they love and trust. Learn to understand people, your audience, their needs, and their real problem. If you are using a Facebook page or even your own profile, involve your friends in a fruitful discussion. Don’t just make a post and leave to expect likes and comments. Take time to leave a note for a friend, ask about their business and what interests them.

He manages engagement for Mark and Sheryl’s social media using all of Facebook’s tools,” she says evenly. “You don’t want to know any more than that.” “Does this explain why they have millions of followers and ridiculous amounts of engagement on their posts? Are they gaming the algorithm?” “You don’t want to know,” she says.

Thankfully, the give : ask ratio has been well-studied. Television averages 13 minutes of advertising per 60 minutes of air time. That means 47 min are dedicated to ‘giving,’ and 13 min are dedicated to ‘asking’. That’s roughly a 3.5:1 ratio of giving to asking. On Facebook, it’s roughly 4 content posts for every 1 ad on the newsfeed.

I spend my life holding myself to everyone else’s standards. Comparing myself to everyone else, what they’re doing, what they’re posting online, what they’re saying at brunches or announcing on Facebook. But what I’m comparing myself to a lot of the time isn’t even real, anyway.” Jack nods thoughtfully. “You never get the full story,” he says.

Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught: BERNIE: I think America should get a pony. HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony? BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn't deserve a pony. BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies! HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies. BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #whichhillary #witchhillary HEADLINE: 'Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony" DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies? WEBSITE HEADLINE: 'Congressional Inquiry into Clinton's Pony Lies' TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

Google has lucrative partnerships with all the large vaccine manufacturers, including a $715 million partnership with GlaxoSmithKline.52 Verily also owns a business that tests for COVID infection.53 Google was not the only social media platform to ban content that contradicts the official HCQ narrative. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, MailChimp, and virtually every other Big Tech platform began scrubbing information demonstrating HCQ’s efficacy, replacing it with industry propaganda generated by one of the Dr. Fauci/Gates-controlled public health agencies: HHS, NIH and WHO. When President Trump later suggested that Dr. Fauci was not being truthful about hydroxychloroquine, social media responded by removing his posts.

Metaphorically we walk in circles—watching silly TV shows, surfing the net, posting to our Facebook page—while waiting for a sense of wholeness, or peace of mind, or purpose to arrive. The rug-scratches of distraction, avoidance, and indulgence are not changing anything of importance. We need a place we can be comfortable, in the original etymological sense of that word: with (com) strength (fort, like “build a fort,” from the Latin fortis). Living with our strength in the world requires far more of us than distraction, avoidance, and indulgence. If you want to find peace of mind and purpose, you will have to let go of finding a way out and instead pivot toward finding a way in. I am acutely aware that this is easier said than done.

We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.

In addition to this artistic photography, white people have also started to take pictures of their food before they eat it. Some white people do this as a spiritual tribute to the food they are about to eat, but most white people do it so that they can post to Facebook or Twitter and prove to their friends that they ate from a cool food truck before it became too popular.

Totalitarian regimes move the line on what’s admissible. Something that seems safe to post on Facebook today—support for some idea or leader or book or musician or movie—could change tomorrow or in a year and users would pay the very steep price. Whatever we and they believe today may not be the case tomorrow. There is no security for anyone to rely on in a regime like this.

That’s the fear of missing out (FOMO for short). It’s the anxiety we feel at the prospect of being unable to take advantage of opportunities. And it’s a common reason many of us say yes even when we realize saying no would be a better decision. For example, at the workplace, we take on new projects because we fear that declining them will impede the advancement of our careers. With our friends, we commit ourselves to activities because we’re afraid to miss out on rewarding experiences. Social media only reinforces this tendency. We’re constantly reading Facebook on our phones and tablets, watching others post about their experiences, and chiding ourselves for not having our own to post. We end up saying yes to things just so we don’t feel left out.

I believe that social media has become a treacherous platform for love interests. Before the Internet invaded our lives, I’m sure that each single person liked a lot of people at one time. Before falling into a committed relationship, there are steps taken to get there. Often, this involves talking to and even dating a few people at once. That’s logical. But with Facebook, your competition is suddenly splattered in your face. All I had to do was click onto Number 23’s profile and scan one after another wall post from ladies who may or may not be his mating potentials or mating pasts. I see their names and faces. When I click onto their photos, I open a Pandora’s box into their lives. I see their friends, professions, achievements, hobbies, and bodies. I evaluate, I compare, and when I’m insecure, I tear apart. I copy, paste, email, and text the images to my friends, so that they can assure me that I’m prettier, smarter, have bigger breasts, clearer skin, have something that would make him a fool to want her over me. Suddenly, I am stalking, letting fits of rage overcome me with violent hatred for these women who I’ve never met.

Questions to Ask When Creating Facebook Micro-Content Is the text too long? Is it provocative, entertaining, or surprising? Is the photo striking and high-quality? Is the logo visible? Have we chosen the right format for the post? Is the call to action in the right place? Is this interesting in any way, to anyone? For real? Are we asking too much of the person consuming the content?

Christians want to whine to everyone under the sun about their problems, instead of actually going to the only one who not only cares, but can actually do something about their problems. Next time you are sick, broken hearted or having problems, before you call your friends, post it on Facebook, or tell your pet fish, try going to God with it, and see how much better that works for you.

What if we are attempting to exchange wisdom for shortcuts? One requires years of life experiences, while the other simply requires a Google search. Today, we face a huge gap between who we are and who we want to be simply because we can actually see that gap better than ever before. By just opening Instagram or reading Facebook posts, we see a different, perhaps ideal, self we wish we were.

Alone Together I want us to be together, but I want to stay connected. I want your attention, but I want to manage mine, opting in and opting out, sponging up what's relevant, discarding the expendable. I can't get enough of you, not too close, not too far, at a manageable distance, at a convenient time. Let me tell you how much I loveyou, let me count the ways, by text, by email, by post, by Tweet. If I've said too much I can edit. If I've show myself too vulnerable I can delete. If I'm at a loss for words I can Google. Come to think of it, I'd much rather text than talk. Come to think of it you're dispensable too. I just need the illusion of love, without all its messy demands, without its unpredictability, without the risk. I just need Facebook because nothing beats being alone together.

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is committed “to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience” with others.8 Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences. In the name of “sharing experiences,” people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it. If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the “likes.” In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions. People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. Pundits often blame such feelings of alienation on the decline of religious and national bonds, but losing touch with your body is probably more important. Humans lived for millions of years without religions and without nations; they can probably live happily without them in the twenty-first century too. Yet they cannot live happily if they are disconnected from their bodies. If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.

Do you want to know what finally changed things for me?” “What?” My voice is barely above a whisper. Dappled sunlight falls across his face, highlighting his flushed cheeks. “I met someone. She’s about five-six, golden brown hair, devastating smile. The kind that warms you from the inside out. And she made me so mad. Not two weeks after I started the job, she called to grill me about a story I posted on Facebook. She insisted I edit it because I didn’t get the wording right.” He adopts a mock falsetto voice. “ ‘It isn’t the “Panama Canal” cruise. It’s “Panama Canal and the Wonders of Azuero.” Fix it, please.’ ” My muscles go limp and my knees nearly buckle. Because he’s talking about me. “Finally, someone who wasn’t walking on eggshells. She actually snapped at me, and it was like she snapped me out of my fog. I may have been unnecessarily combative after that, just to get a rise out of her, but I started to feel again. Irritation, at first, but then more. After a while, I began getting out of the house. Seeing a therapist. Playing hockey. I adopted Winnie—best decision ever. I actually started looking forward to waking up in the morning.” Graeme steps closer, but I’m glued to the spot. Heat sizzles through my veins when he reaches up to run his knuckles along my cheek. “And staff meeting Thursdays? They became my favorite day of the week. Because I got to see her face.” My heart is hammering and my lungs seize. The sound of guests approaching rumbles closer, but I don’t look away. I swallow past the lump that’s lodged in my throat. “After this cruise, they’re my favorite day of the week too.” Reaching up, I run my fingers lightly along the hand that’s cupping my cheek. Graeme’s eyes widen and his lips part. Gathering every ounce of resolve I can muster, I step away just as Nikolai and Dwight crest a nearby hill. We continue through the highlands, fastening our platonic coworker facades into place. But an unspoken understanding hangs in the space between us, heavy and undeniable… This just went way past any bet.

And she figures it’s your fault that things have changed.” “That’s just idiotic!” Ximena said. “I know!” I said. “It’s like Savanna being mad at me for having been in a TV commercial once. It makes no sense.” “How do you know all this?” asked Ximena. “Did she tell you?” “No!” I said. “Did you know about the note beforehand?” “No!” I said. Summer rescued me. “So what did Ellie say when she read Maya’s note?” she asked Ximena. “Oh, she was so mad,” answered Ximena. “She and Savanna want to go all out on Maya, post something super-mean about her on Facebook or whatever. Then Miles drew this cartoon. They want to post it on Instagram.” She nodded for Summer to hand me a folded-up piece of loose-leaf paper, which I opened. On it was a crude drawing of a girl (who was obviously Maya) kissing a boy (who was obviously Auggie Pullman).

Well, she’d chosen this. She’d chosen to live by the beach, as if she had as much right as anyone else. She could reward herself for two hours’ work with a walk on the beach. A walk on the beach in the middle of the day. She could go back to Blue Blues, buy a coffee to go and then take an arty photo of it sitting on a fence with the sea in the background and post it on Facebook with a comment: Work break! How lucky am I? People would write, Jealous! If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself. Or she could even post, Mad as hell!! Ziggy the only one in the class not invited to a birthday party!! Grrrrr. And everyone would write comforting things, like, WTF? and Awwww. Poor little Ziggy! She could shrink her fears down into innocuous little status updates that drifted away on the news feeds of her friends.

That evening, I had planned to relax with a cup of Bovril and listen to a very interesting radio program about South American politics, after completing my usual checks on what Johnnie Lomond was up to. He’d sent a desultory tweet about a character in a television program and posted a photograph on Facebook of a new pair of boots he wanted. A slow news day, then. Hearing from Mummy on a Monday was an unexpected, unwelcome surprise.

In one tragicomic incident in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he wrote “Good morning!” An automatic algorithm made a small error when transliterating the Arabic letters. Instead of ysabechhum (which means “good morning”), the algorithm identified the letters as ydbachhum (which means “kill them”). Suspecting that the man might be a terrorist intending to use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli security forces swiftly arrested him. He was released after they realized that the algorithm made a mistake. But the offending Facebook post was nevertheless taken down. You can never be too careful. 29 What Palestinians are experiencing today in the West Bank might be just a primitive preview of what billions will eventually experience all over the planet.

With 21 million people following her on Facebook and 18 million on Twitter, pop singer Ariana Grande can’t personally chat with each of her loves, as she affectionately calls her fans. So she and others are spreading their messages through new-style social networks, via mobile apps that are more associated with private, intimate conversation, hoping that marketing in a cozier digital setting adds a breath of warmth and a dash of personality. It’s the Internet’s equivalent of mailing postcards rather than plastering a billboard. Grande could have shared on Twitter that her most embarrassing moment on stage was losing a shoe. The 21-year-old instead revealed the fact during a half-hour live text chat on Line, an app built for close friends to exchange instant messages. It’s expensive to advertise on Facebook and Twitter, and the volume of information being posted creates uncertainty over what people actually notice. Chat apps including Line, Kik, Snapchat, WeChat and Viber place marketing messages front and center. Most-used apps The apps threaten to siphon advertising dollars from the social media leaders, which are already starting to see chat apps overtake them as the most-used apps on smartphones, according to Forrester Research. Chat apps “demand attention,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at consulting firm Altimeter Group.

WHAT IS SOCIAL NETWORKING? – it’s a way for submissives to tweet, nudge and post their way to oblivion. While dominants get on with using their time to create things and dominate the world, the submissives fritter their time away in the most futile stream of trivial consciousness ever known. The intergalactic static that provides the microwave echo of the Big Bang has come to life in the shape of Facebook and Twitter. Now we can hear the vacuum speak.

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print. Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.

Most twentysomethings know better than to compare their lives to celebrity microblogs, yet they treat Facebook images and posts from their peers as real. We don’t recognize that most everyone is keeping their troubles hidden. This underestimation of how much other twentysomethings are struggling makes everything feel like an upward social comparison, one where our not-so-perfect lives look low compared to the high life everyone else seems to be living.

Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don’t look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?’ – you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got.

advances in AI are poised to drive dramatic productivity increases and perhaps eventually full automation. Radiologists, for example, are trained to interpret the images that result from various medical scans. Image processing and recognition technology is advancing rapidly and may soon be able to usurp the radiologist’s traditional role. Software can already recognize people in photos posted on Facebook and even help identify potential terrorists in airports.

Gen X straddles the pre- and post-internet worlds. The youngest Gen Xers belonged to the last graduating class to finish college pre–social media.2 Facebook was invented in 2004. The iPhone came out in 2007. How fitting that many younger Gen Xers and older Millennials were introduced to computing by the bleak Oregon Trail—which frequently ended with you and all your friends dying from dysentery.3 Personally, I loved the game. Again, again! Maybe this time we’ll get cholera!

Instagram and Facebook, she’d found out, literally rewired your brain. Likes and comments on a user’s post were found to release bursts of dopamine, which made the user happy. That made sense; everyone enjoyed getting likes on a Facebook post. But this essentially turned the phone into a personal dopamine stimulator. Brain scans showed that in cases of people who were addicted to social media, the brain rewired itself, making them desire more likes, or retweets, or smiling emojis.

Pardon me for budging into concoction of the aristocrats blowing their trumpets, the demagogues' doctrines, the antagonists' squeals, the hypocrites' assertions, the sycophants fawning adoration, the facebookers' slants, the youthful sneers, the pragmatic notions n of course some acquiescent aspirants....this facebook page is so bombarded by myriad posts....maddening to read n like all.....so here's wishing each one of the revered contestants all the best.....may the deserving win.....

But once a website starts to make decisions about what it’s going to allow and not allow on its platform, it goes from a “platform” to a “publisher,” at least in the eyes of the law. Once Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram start to ban people or remove content, they’re no longer just interested observers of content who sit back and let their users run the show. They’re publishers just like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Clearly, this is what they’re doing. They’ve admitted it themselves.

44 percent of college-educated white women and 54 percent of college-educated white men voted for Trump. Stop pretending you care about people of color or LGBTQ people or Muslims in your saccharine Facebook posts. Turning your profile pic into a rainbow for Pride Month doesn’t undo the fuckery you unleashed upon LGBTQ people when you voted for Trump. Being LGBTQ yourself doesn’t give you a free pass either." From "The Challenge of Staying Hopeful in the Age of Trump," The Advocate, April 28, 2017

In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this: The thought process that went into building these applications Facebook being the first of them... was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"... And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone like or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you... more likes and comments... It's a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Earlier in the interview, he said, "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." In short, iGen [beginning with those born in 1995] is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?

Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana said. “We demand comprehensive action to ensure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote and with it American democracy.” We decided that instead of making broad, lofty demands, we would focus first on quickly actionable points,8 especially given the tight timeline and Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior. We distilled them down to three demands of Facebook: to enforce its own policies and remove posts inciting violence; to ban ads that seek to delegitimize election results; and to take measures to prevent disinformation and misinformation about the election results. It was a sign of the times that within twenty-four hours, Facebook acted on all of them. It never admitted it, though. Instead, it attacked our members. In those months, much of what Rappler had discovered about Facebook and social media based on our own data and research, as well as many of our suspicions, was slowly being confirmed by reporters, whistleblowers, and even the companies themselves.

I like to browse my Facebook time line and occasionally “Like” a photograph posted by a random friend from thirty years ago. I would never in a million years call that friend and say, “That was a real cute photo of your baby that you posted.” But liking the photo is my way of connecting with someone that I felt close to at some point in my life, even if it was only because her locker was next to mine in junior high school. Guess what? Turns out, using social media in this way releases oxytocin. You know you feel good when you do it. Do it more.

Comedy is tragedy plus x, with x being an amount of time defined by the person experiencing the tragedy. Some people need less time than others. I joked about Dad’s death as it was happening. But that gave some friends the impression they could join in . No . My dad, my jokes. A Facebook friend posted one day after Dad died: “Welcome to the Dead Dad Club.” I hated him instantly. He was an Early Orphan. I scrolled through his profile pictures, I saw smiles . Life had gone on for him. I didn’t want to be in his stupid club, I didn’t want to read his wry asides.

Finally (and here is a sentence I never imagined writing), I thank my conversation partners on Facebook. A couple of years ago, my friend Finn Ryan set up a Facebook author page for me. Grateful as I was, my skepticism about the medium kept me from posting anything there until six months before I finished this book. I am very glad that I took the leap. The folks who share that space with me have helped me refine a number of key ideas, allowing me to write a better book than I could have written alone. Many thanks to all my Facebook “friends” as well as my face-to-face friends.

So why is Chinese social networking booming despite the censorship? Part of the reason is the Chinese language. Posts on Twitter and Twitter clones such as Weibo are limited to 140 characters. In English that comes to about 20 words or a sentence with a short link - in effect, a headline. But in Chinese you can write a whole paragraph or tell a whole story in 140 characters. One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. In some ways, Weibo (which means "microblog" in Chinese) is more like Facebook than Twitter. As far as the Chinese are concerned, if something is not on Weibo, it does not exist.

Back to that webinar for a second. Why does it matter that this book came from my webinar? Well, unlike “regular people,” I didn’t think about the pros and cons of doing a webinar, or spend even one second worrying about what would happen if it failed. I didn’t test my theory. I didn’t even come up with the presentation for it beforehand. I simply said, “You know, I think that people can benefit from what I’ve learned about how I use my ADHD to my advantage, and I think it’d be fun to see if I can help people.” An hour later, I’d reserved a webinar time, and posted on Facebook that people should save

So if you blame Facebook, Trump or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. For millennia, much of what passed for 'news' and 'facts' in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. [...] Some fake news lasts for ever.

Many of us who have observed our own behavior don't need science to prove that technology is altering us, but let's bring some in anyway. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter that records certain experiences in our brain (typically described as pleasurable) and prompts us to repeat them, plays a part not only in sex and drugs, but also the swiping and tapping we do on our smartphones. Scott Barry Kaufman--- scientific director of the Imagination Institute...gave me the straight dope on dopamine. "It's a misconception that dopamine has to do with our feelings of happiness and pleasure," he said. "It's a molecule that helps influence our expectations." Higher levels of dopamine are linked to being more open to new things and novelty seeking. Something novel could be an amazing idea for dinner or a new book. . . or just getting likes on a Facebook post or the ping of a text coming in. Our digital devices activate and hijack this dopamine system extremely well, when we let them. ...Kaufman calls dopamine "the mother of invention" and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on "increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art--- or on Twitter.

For example, Twitter and Facebook—both of which happily hosted Kim Kardashian’s nude bottom—removed the word “vagina” from an advertisement marketing a book about female anatomy, written by prominent gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter.21 Similarly, journalist Sarah Lacy found that she was unable to advertise her book, entitled A Uterus Is a Feature, on Facebook.22 Plus-sized women have had their Instagram accounts removed for posting selfies in bikinis—something that skinny women do all the time without reprisal.23 Both platforms have also blocked advertisements for information about teen pregnancy, proper bra fitting, and gynecologist visits.24

I don’t mention how just last night, in the scrolling insomniac dark, I’d read a vague Facebook post from someone I went to grad school with about a person in our cohort—his ex-partner, maybe? His best friend?—who had killed herself. I couldn’t remember her full name, but when I googled “experimental poet Gabriela suicide Iowa” I got zero results. Because I’d actually typed this set of words not into a Google search but as a comment on my grieving classmate’s post. I deleted it and held Chicken under the covers while I finished having an imaginary stroke. “Why am I like this?” I asked Nick in the dark. But he was sleeping, like people do.

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

«Non è che potresti aggiungere tre… ehm… marshmallow… alla mia cioccolata, magari mettendoli sopra alla panna, e disegnare Topolino?». «Vuoi… che ti disegni Topolino sulla cioccolata?» ripeté l’altro, per essere sicuro di aver capito bene. «Sì, mi serve per un videogioco, quello che ho comprato la settimana scorsa» spiegò Stefano. «In questo gioco bisogna fotografare i simboli di Topolino e… be’, è scoppiata la moda di fotografarli anche nella vita reale. Nel gruppo Facebook a cui sono iscritto è stato creato un post per raccogliere tutte le foto. Naturalmente io la condividerò ringraziando il mio cameriere super sexy e super gentile, che asseconda ogni mia folle richiesta».

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.

Those baby-ghosts love to whisper; they love to hypnotize me every time I smell a newborn’s head or even look at Facebook posts of toddlers splashing in bathtubs and playing in pumpkin patches. But the truth is, those whispers are small echoes of a life that wasn’t supposed to be—a life I unknowingly abandoned when I stepped foot in that classroom and used my time to care for other people’s children. Those whispers taunt from some innate, ancestral, maybe even mystical place of wonder that, surely, I’ll never understand. What I do understand is the transformative value—how to use those voices to repair others and bring meaning to my life. For every student rocking in that blue chair, I have purpose.

It was December 15, 2012, the day after twenty-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I remember thinking, Maybe if all the mothers in the world crawled on their hands and knees toward those parents in Newtown, we could take some of the pain away. We could spread their pain across all of our hearts. I would do it. Can’t we find a way to hold some of it for them? I’ll take my share. Even if it adds sadness to all my days. My friends and I didn’t rush to start a fund that day. We didn’t storm the principal’s office at our kids’ school asking for increased security measures. We didn’t call politicians or post on Facebook. We would do all that in the days to come. But the day right after the shooting, we just sat together with nothing but the sound of occasional weeping cutting through the silence. Leaning in to our shared pain and fear comforted us. Being alone in the midst of a widely reported trauma, watching endless hours of twenty-four-hour news or reading countless articles on the Internet, is the quickest way for anxiety and fear to tiptoe into your heart and plant their roots of secondary trauma. That day after the mass killing, I chose to cry with my friends, then I headed to church to cry with strangers. I couldn’t have known then that in 2017 I would speak at a fund-raiser for the Resiliency Center of Newtown and spend time sitting with a group of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook. What I’ve learned through my work and what I heard that night in Newtown makes one thing clear: Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world. Today there’s a sign that welcomes you to Newtown: WE ARE SANDY HOOK. WE CHOOSE LOVE. That day when I sat in a room with other mothers from my neighborhood and cried, I wasn’t sure what we were doing or why. Today I’m pretty sure we were choosing love in our own small way.

Soon, the thoughts of rebuilding myself, like an architect armed with a blueprint, consume me. And it's easier than I thought. I create a new Facebook profile with my middle name. Essie Marie might have no friends yet, but Essie Marie is the me in a parallel universe, the person who is still unmarried and whisking her way around Soho. She doesn't have the same friends as me, nor will she ever. She posts links to articles from Jezebel and The Atlantic. She likes offbeat Greek comedies and shares links to obscure indie songs. Her Facebook page is a blank enough slate, but she is a cool girl, and one I would want to be around. More importantly, Essie Marie' on Facebook hasn't gone through any of what Esther Green has.

I post a petition on my Facebook page. Which of my friends will see it on their news feed? I have no idea. As soon as I hit send, that petition belongs to Facebook, and the social network’s algorithm makes a judgment about how to best use it. It calculates the odds that it will appeal to each of my friends. Some of them, it knows, often sign petitions, and perhaps share them with their own networks. Others tend to scroll right past. At the same time, a number of my friends pay more attention to me and tend to click the articles I post. The Facebook algorithm takes all of this into account as it decides who will see my petition. For many of my friends, it will be buried so low on their news feed that they’ll never see it.

TO THE ATHEIST WHO IS CURRENTLY DYING IN HOSPICE: While you have the energy, invite all your friends over for a last supper. As they enjoy their meal of bread and wine, look at them and say, "One of you will betray me." Because, dear Atheist, there is a Judas among your apostles. A secret Christian in desperate need of a deathbed coversion to brag about at church. A friend who will wait until you are alone, then ask you to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Who can blame this person? Convincing an atheist to die a Christian is the faith version of getting the Verizon guy to switch to Sprint. The moment your stage 4 fate was posted on Facebook, you went from being a regular dick to some Christian's Moby Dick. Believe me.

I would dance all day in my basement listening to Off the Wall. You young people really don’t understand how magical Michael Jackson was. No one thought he was strange. No one was laughing. We were all sitting in front of our TVs watching the “Thriller” video every hour on the hour. We were all staring, openmouthed, as he moonwalked for the first time on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. When he floated backward like a funky astronaut, I screamed out loud. There was no rewinding or rewatching. No next-day memes or trends on Twitter or Facebook posts. We would call each other on our dial phones and stretch the cord down the hall, lying on our stomachs and discussing Michael Jackson’s moves, George Michael’s facial hair, and that scene in Purple Rain when Prince fingers Apollonia from behind. Moments came and went, and if you missed them, you were shit out of luck. That’s why my parents went to a M*A*S*H party and watched the last episode in real time. There was no next-day M*A*S*H cast Google hangout. That’s why my family all squeezed onto one couch and watched the USA hockey team win the gold against evil Russia! We all wept as my mother pointed out every team member from Boston. (Everyone from Boston likes to point out everyone from Boston. Same with Canadians.) We all chanted “USA!” and screamed “YES!” when Al Michaels asked us if we believed in miracles. Things happened in real time and you watched them together. There was no rewind. HBO arrived in our house that same year. We had

For many, Facebook is less about looking up friends than it is about looking at friends. Research tells us that, on average, Facebook users spend more time examining others’ pages than adding content to their own. The site’s most frequent visitors—most often females who post and share photos and who receive status updates—use the site for “social surveillance.” These social investigators usually aren’t getting in touch or staying in touch with friends as much as they are checking up on them. And my clients are right: Judging and evaluating are involved. In one study, nearly four hundred participants examined mock-up Facebook pages and rated web-page owners for attractiveness, only to decide that the best-looking owners were the ones with the best-looking friends.

People were indeed comfortable with sharing, Zuckerberg told him. A third of his users, he said, share their cell-phone numbers on their profile page. “That’s evidence that they trust us.” Graham was startled at how emotionless and hesitant this kid was. At times, before he’d answer a question—even something that he must have been asked thousands of times, like what percentage of Harvard kids were on Thefacebook—he would fall silent, staring into the ether for thirty seconds or so. Does he not understand the question? Graham wondered. Did I offend him? Nonetheless, before the meeting was over, Graham became convinced that Thefacebook was the best business idea he’d heard in years, and told Zuckerberg and Parker that if they wanted an investor who was not a VC, the Post would be interested.

The firm did this at the local level, creating right-wing pages with vague names like Smith County Patriots or I Love My Country. Because of the way Facebook’s recommendation algorithm worked, these pages would pop up in the feeds of people who had already liked similar content. When users joined CA’s fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them. Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement. Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data.

If you want to further understanding of systemic racism even more among the people you interact with, you can try to link to the systemic effects of racism whenever you talk about racism. Instead of posting on Facebook: “This teacher shouted a racial slur at a Hispanic kid and should be fired!” you can say all that, and then add, “This behavior is linked to the increased suspension, expulsion, and detention of Hispanic youth in our schools and sets an example of behavior for the children witnessing this teacher’s racism that will influence the way these children are treated by their peers, and how they are treated as adults.” I do this often when I’m talking about racism, and pretty regularly somebody will comment with something like, “That’s an aspect of this situation I hadn’t considered, thank you.

Quem percorre as redes sociais encontra facilmente referências a jornalistas e comunicadores prediletos de boa parte dos militantes e eleitores do Chega, a quem atribuem poderes de super-heróis dos injustiçados. Entre eles está, por exemplo, Camilo Lourenço (comentador de temas económicos, com canal digital próprio e amigo pessoal de Ventura, «um tipo muito sensato, em privado», disse). Também Tânia Laranjo, jornalista do Correio da Manhã , condenada em 2022 pela Comissão para a Igualdade e Contra a Discriminação Racial por práticas discriminatórias. «Black Friday — Promoção especial: leve 2 e não pague nenhum», escreveu no Facebook, num post com imagens da ex-deputada do Livre Joacine Katar Moreira e do ativista Mamadou Ba. Em 2017, Ventura apresentou o livro Mãe, não desistas de viver!, da autoria desta repórter.

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape. "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said. Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon. The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person. But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being. Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society. Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance. Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, up to 57 per cent of rape survivors suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in their lifetime, with "triggers" including inflammatory words like rape causing deeply traumatic recollections. Beware desensitising the term "rape", Newcastle Herald, June 6, 2014

It hadn’t always been this way. Something must have changed for them somewhere. They just couldn’t work out what. They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name every single update – the intro­duction of likes and notifications, video sharing, picture posting, tagging. But any attempt to draw a connection between those minutiae and the way in which social me­dia had spread through every aspect of their lives was so reductive as to miss the point entirely, like wondering whether it is at the first twig or the third tree that a forest can be said to be on fire.

The big problem here is that getting any young person with a short attention span to spend ten thousand hours doing something can be an uphill battle. That’s never been more true than these days when whatever kids do has to compete with so many attractive options. It can be surfing the Web, playing video games, tweeting, or Facebook. Back in my day, I confess that I played my fair share of Donkey Kong, but even than there was no Web for me to surf and I didn’t have a status. Well, yes I did, it just wasn’t posted anywhere yet. Whatever you want to do in this life, I’m here to encourage you not to lose hope or give up during the first hundred or so of those ten thousand hours that it takes to get good. You should know that in my case it took me a while to “get the bug” for guitar, as my grandpa used to call it. He always said it would happen, almost like a slow sickness. And he knew it would take time.

The problem, Augustine came to believe, is that if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word “pride” has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the things associated with you. When we use it negatively, we think of the arrogant person, someone who is puffed up and egotistical, boasting and strutting about. But that is not really the core of pride. That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don’t associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it’s just that they are giving themselves a D– rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way. One key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety. The proud person often appears self-sufficient and egotistical but is really touchy and unstable. The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity. The proud person is competitive. But there are always other people who might do better. The most ruthlessly competitive person in the contest sets the standard that all else must meet or get left behind. Everybody else has to be just as monomaniacally driven to success. One can never be secure. As Dante put it, the “ardor to outshine / Burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.” Hungry for exaltation, the proud person has a tendency to make himself ridiculous. Proud people have an amazing tendency to turn themselves into buffoons, with a comb-over that fools nobody, with golden bathroom fixtures that impress nobody, with name-dropping stories that inspire nobody. Every proud man, Augustine writes, “heeds himself, and he who pleases himself seems great to himself. But he who pleases himself pleases a fool, for he himself is a fool when he is pleasing himself.”16 Pride, the minister and writer Tim Keller has observed, is unstable because other people are absentmindedly or intentionally treating the proud man’s ego with less reverence than he thinks it deserves. He continually finds that his feelings are hurt. He is perpetually putting up a front. The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact that he is happy—posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest—than he does actually being happy. Augustine suddenly came to realize that the solution to his problem would come only after a transformation more fundamental than any he had previously entertained, a renunciation of the very idea that he could be the source of his own solution.

The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here’s one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an “I Voted” icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the “I Voted” icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn’t, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results.

I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead. Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me: Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. After sending that, she continued: Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there. Linda added that she was coping

In under two weeks, and with no budget, thousands of college students protested the movie on their campuses nationwide, angry citizens vandalized our billboards in multiple neighborhoods, FoxNews.com ran a front-page story about the backlash, Page Six of the New York Post made their first of many mentions of Tucker, and the Chicago Transit Authority banned and stripped the movie’s advertisements from their buses. To cap it all off, two different editorials railing against the film ran in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune the week it was released. The outrage about Tucker was great enough that a few years later, it was written into the popular television show Portlandia on IFC. I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake. I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago (thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye. Oh, also, that photo was from New York). I manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reported them to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them. I paid for anti-woman ads on feminist websites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it. Sometimes I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” the headline read.

Israel has an extremely vibrant hi-tech sector, and a cutting-edge cyber-security industry. At the same time it is also locked into a deadly conflict with the Palestinians, and at least some of its leaders, generals and citizens might well be happy to create a total surveillance regime in the West Bank as soon as they have the necessary technology. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook or travel from one city to another they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones or spy software. The gathered data is then analysed with the aid of Big Data algorithms. This helps the Israeli security forces to pinpoint and neutralise potential threats without having to place too many boots on the ground. The Palestinians may administer some towns and villages in the West Bank, but the Israelis control the sky, the airwaves and cyberspace. It therefore takes surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively control about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.

Your job is to identify three to five products that your ideal person might buy. You don’t need to worry about how to make it or how you will sell it—we’ll fix that later. Just brainstorm what your person already buys and potential things he or she might like to buy. People who do yoga buy mats, towels, and blocks. That’s three products. What else might they buy? Clothes, travel cases, or yoga pillows? Do people who do yoga buy other things, too? Like tea, meditation cushions, or essential oil? And do people who do yoga have different shopping habits than others? Do they buy organic, or avoid synthetic skin creams? Write it all down. You don’t need to worry about how you’re going to do anything just yet—just know that the internet has opened up opportunities for anyone who wants to create something from scratch. Anybody can do a Kickstarter campaign. Anybody can sell on Amazon. Any website can rank in Google. Anyone can run an ad on Facebook. Anyone can post on Instagram and connect with any influencer. Your job is to find out where your customers are, and drop your bait into that pond.

The existence of God is a matter of feeling! It is not a formula of algebra that we sit down and prove! If we carefully observe the humans, animals, nature etc., then the existence of God can certainly be felt. Say, I mentioned in one of my Facebook posts that the 4 fingers of our hands are located side by side but one finger, that is, the thumb is much away from other fingers, structurally small and much different compared to other fingers. Now, it would be foolishness to say that the location of the thumb is such by coincidence. God knows it well that if all the fingers in the hands were of same size and structure, then it would be rather difficult or impossible for us to hold anything or do any work! So, He placed the thumb of our hands in the distance. It would be clearer if I explain it in a different way. As the parents become exceedingly cautious about the newly born baby, its spontaneous feeding, walking, talking etc. are carefully monitored by them, likewise, God has given the specific formation, shape and structure to the humans and all the animals by keeping their overall well-being, advantages and easiness in mind!

Here are pictures of the sources for Daoist mijue "master to disciple" oral teachings, as shown in the manuals used by Daoist masters themselves. The manuals are insufficient for the casual reader to use, the oral koujue explanations given on a personal one-to-one basis are essential. After seeing how Daoists from Longhu Shan,as well as foreign ("american") Dao for $$$ have falsified their use, I am reluctant to share them in full, until a true Qingwei or Zhengyi Grade five and above master ask to see them. The Qingwei (5 thunder-vajra") Daoist seen performing the purification mudra in image #5 below (a mudra shared by Daoists, Tendai Tantric Buddhists in Japan, and Tibetan masters) said when he had seen the manuals shown in pictures 1-4. "Where is the other half of the Thunder-Vajra manual?" Then I knew that it was OK to give it to him! He gave me his address in Jiangxi province; I intend to bring the mijue manual to him on my next trip to China, as Master Zhuang asked me to do, (before his death in 1976, an order given to his maternal great grandfather by the 61st Longhu Shan master, in 1868)! [Saso facebook post, May 7 2015]

Evan slung his arm over my shoulder. “That’s my mom and dad,” he pointed to a couple approaching us as families trickled onto the field. “Mom! Get a picture of me and she-wolf?” “Sure, sure,” the strawberry blonde lady said, digging in her purse. “Aha! Here it is. I’m Elaine, Evan’s mom,” she announced to us. “Now smile!” I smiled but just before the flash went off Evan kissed my cheek. I gasped in surprise, probably making the funniest face known to man. Evan snatched the camera from his mom and laughed. “That is totally going to be my facebook profile pic. Take a look she-wolf.” He turned the camera so I could see the image on the screen. Oh, God. I narrowed my eyes and pointed a finger at Evan. “You better promise me that, that picture never sees the light of day.” “Well, technically it’s already seen the light of day, seeing as it’s the morning and all.” “Evan, you know what I mean.” “Fine,” he lowered his head, “I won’t post it on facebook.” “Or twitter, instagram, or any other picture sharing site. Got it? Maybe you should just delete it now?” “Nah,” Evan grinned. “I’m keeping this forever and ever as proof that I kissed the she-wolf.

1. True trolls are internet users who set out to ruin someone else’s day. Everyone else is merely someone who disagrees with you, which is allowed. It is hard to differentiate between someone who is ‘generally disagreeable to the entire world’ and ‘currently disagreeing with me’. So we move to… 2. They can’t speak proper, innit. Their punctuation, spelling or grammar is so far round the spout it’s actually random. Of course, this could also indicate someone with a learning difficulty, so to be kind we need to check off some more identifying factors such as… 3. They say extremely unreasonable things. Not just ‘Yeah well, so what, copper?’ but posting on the Facebook memorial pages of murdered children that they deserved it, searching out women to call them whores, or sending rape and death threats. This isn’t normal debate. 4. They are not friends with logic. If you question them, ask them why or suggest substantiating this or that, they will scream, kick a table or call you a Nazi. 5. The sheer volume of their posts –either in word count or frequency –indicates a serious personality disorder. 6. If you saw them on the bus, you would sit elsewhere.

The remaking of the self that mothers experience- the struggles of overcoming bordeom, fatigue, irritation; of being persistently present; of trying to survive a love that can feel like an ocean one can't swim- is not of great concern to a world focused on having. So many fall back on a system of rewards, products, and achievements that fits into the framework of success in which they've operated for most of their lives: this is the "Mommy Olympics," as de Marneffe calls it. Or they can resort to cliches, which mask the complexities of individual experience and squash it into a quote to be hung above the dining room table or posted on Facebook. There is no way to articulate and venerate being in a society so focused on having. One of the ways, which we have mostly lost, would be ritual. In a void where few rituals, stories, and symbols are available to mothers, women have responded by conjuring a shadow universe of fear and darkness and loss. The immense passion and confusing energy that motherhood generates gets channeled into a never-ending series of disaster scenarios necessitating vigilant prevention. The wide-open and terrifying potential for being narrows into a relentless pursuit of security.

Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do. Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don’t look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?’ – you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got. Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.

There are, I think, three crucial reasons why it is worth coming on this journey with me. The first is that a life full of distractions is, at an individual level, diminished. When you are unable to pay sustained attention, you can’t achieve the things you want to achieve. You want to read a book, but you are pulled away by the pings and paranoias of social media. You want to spend a few uninterrupted hours with your child, but you keep anxiously checking your email to see if your boss is messaging you. You want to set up a business, but your life dissolves instead into a blur of Facebook posts that only make you feel envious and anxious. Through no fault of your own, there never seems to be enough stillness—enough cool, clear space—for you to stop and think. A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus. A different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.

The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all. I was out there every day from seven a.m. to seven p.m., and every day it was: How do we turn ten rand into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? How do I turn fifty into a hundred? At the end of the day we’d spend it on food and maybe some beers, and then we’d go home and come back and it was: How do we turn ten into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? It was a whole day’s work to flip that money. You had to be walking, be moving, be thinking. You had to get to a guy, find a guy, meet a guy. There were many days we’d end up back at zero, but I always felt like I’d been very productive. Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.

Your story isn’t powerful enough if all it does is lead the horse to water; it has to inspire the horse to drink, too. On social media, the only story that can achieve that goal is one told with native content. Native content amps up your story’s power. It is crafted to mimic everything that makes a platform attractive and valuable to a consumer—the aesthetics, the design, and the tone. It also offers the same value as the other content that people come to the platform to consume. Email marketing was a form of native content. It worked well during the 1990s because people were already on email; if you told your story natively and provided consumers with something they valued on that platform, you got their attention. And if you jabbed enough to put them in a purchasing mind-set, you converted. The rules are the same now that people spend their time on social media. It can’t tell you what story to tell, but it can inform you how your consumer wants to hear it, when he wants to hear it, and what will most make him want to buy from you. For example, supermarkets or fast-casual restaurants know from radio data that one of the ideal times to run an ad on the radio is around 5:00 P.M., when moms are picking up the kids and deciding what to make for dinner, and even whether they have the energy to cook. Social gives you the same kind of insight. Maybe the data tells you that you should post on Facebook early in the morning before people settle

During the 2016 election, the Trump campaign employed overt information-warfare tactics through intelligence firms like PsyGroup and Cambridge Analytica.16 PsyGroup’s proposal called Project Rome was presented to Rick Gates, who represented the Trump campaign; it offered “intelligence & influence services” for $3,210,000.17 It also proposed recruiting online influencers to disseminate Trump’s message to fringe “deep web” locations. Parscale was a man who knew the power of the internet. He was linked to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and the infamous Cambridge Analytica company.18 Cambridge was a data-mining and message-amplification firm that ran a program that analyzed social media users and crafted highly specific messaging that would appeal to each individual user’s biases, likes, and hobbies. They mastered how to weaponize a person’s inner racism or bigotry. For example, they could identify a white, rural, conservative gun enthusiast who drove a Ford truck based on Facebook posts and buying preferences. That user would then be flooded with messages on illegal immigrants and white families murdered by “urban” Blacks and photos of Ford trucks flying Trump flags. Cambridge also took and amplified Russian-intelligence-crafted themes extolling the glory of Trump. Through the firm’s effort to read social media down to each person’s tastes, it made every Republican in America consume highly targeted Russian memes and themes as nothing less than God’s honest truth.

By March, front-line doctors around the world were spontaneously reporting miraculous results following early treatment with HCQ, and this prompted growing anxiety for Pharma. On March 13, a Michigan doctor and trader, Dr. James Todaro, M.D., tweeted his review of HCQ as an effective COVID treatment, including a link to a public Google doc.48,49 Google quietly scrubbed Dr. Todaro’s memo. This was six days before the President endorsed HCQ. Google apparently didn’t want users to think Todaro’s message was missing; rather, the Big Tech platform wanted the public to believe that Todaro’s memo never even existed. Google has a long history of suppressing information that challenges vaccine industry profits. Google’s parent company Alphabet owns several vaccine companies, including Verily, as well as Vaccitech, a company banking on flu, prostate cancer, and COVID vaccines.50,51 Google has lucrative partnerships with all the large vaccine manufacturers, including a $715 million partnership with GlaxoSmithKline.52 Verily also owns a business that tests for COVID infection.53 Google was not the only social media platform to ban content that contradicts the official HCQ narrative. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, MailChimp, and virtually every other Big Tech platform began scrubbing information demonstrating HCQ’s efficacy, replacing it with industry propaganda generated by one of the Dr. Fauci/Gates-controlled public health agencies: HHS, NIH and WHO. When President Trump later suggested that Dr. Fauci was not being truthful about hydroxychloroquine, social media responded by removing his posts.

In 2014, the American media exploded with news of ISIS beheadings in Syria—six thousand miles away from the United States. Meanwhile, the beheading capital of the world is just to our south, a stone’s throw from American homes, businesses, and ranches. When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria first began posting videotaped beheadings online, it was as if no one had ever heard of such barbarity. In fact, decapitation porn was an innovation of the Mexican drug cartels.45 One “ISIS” video circulating in 2014 showed a man being beheaded with a chain saw. Then it turned out the video wasn’t an ISIS beheading, at all: It was a Mexican video from 2010.46 After American David Hartley was shot and killed by Mexican drug cartel members while jet skiing with his wife at a lake on the Mexican border, the lead investigator on the case was murdered and his head delivered in a suitcase to a nearby military installation.47 In 2013, there was a huge outcry over Facebook’s video-sharing policy when an extremely graphic video of a man beheading a woman appeared on the site. That, too, was a product of Mexico.48 Where is the 24-7 coverage for these champion beheaders? If it seems like you never hear about all the dismemberments in Mexico, you’d be right. In a search of all transcripts in the Nexis archive in the first eight months of ISIS’s existence as a jihadist group, “beheading” was used in the same sentence as “ISIS” or “ISIL” 1,629 times. During that same time period, it was used in the same sentence as “Mexico” or “Mexican” twice. Indeed, in the previous five years Mexican beheadings were mentioned only sixty-six times.49 If a tree falls and beheads a woman in Mexico, does anyone hear it?

But if somebody does want a productive conversation and genuinely believes that being called “cracker” is the same as being called “nigger” and feels angry and invalidated by the insistence that both do not meet your definition of racism, they will say so. This is an educational opportunity. This is a great way to let that person know that you do hear them, and that your experiences do not erase theirs because even though their experience is valid, it is a different experience. A response I’ve used is, “What was said to you wasn’t okay, and should be addressed. But we are talking about two different things. Being called “cracker” hurts, may even be humiliating. But after those feelings fade, what measurable impact will it have on your life? On your ability to walk the streets safely? On your ability to get a job? How often has the word “cracker” been used to deny you services? What measurable impact has this word had on the lives of white Americans in general?” In all honesty, from my personal experience, you are still not likely to get very far in that conversation, not right away. But it gives people something to think about. These conversations, even if they seem fruitless at first, can plant a seed to greater understanding. If you want to further understanding of systemic racism even more among the people you interact with, you can try to link to the systemic effects of racism whenever you talk about racism. Instead of posting on Facebook: “This teacher shouted a racial slur at a Hispanic kid and should be fired!” you can say all that, and then add, “This behavior is linked to the increased suspension, expulsion, and detention of Hispanic youth in our schools and sets an example of behavior for the children witnessing this teacher’s racism that will influence the way these children are treated by their peers, and how they are treated as adults.” I do this often when

Self-Obsession & Self-Presentation on Social-Media" Some people always post their cars/bikes photos because they love their cars/bikes so much. Some people always post their dogs/cats/birds/fish/pets photos because they love their pets so much. Some people always post their children’s/families photos because they love their children/families so much. Some people always post their daily happy/sad moments because they love sharing their daily lives so much. Some people always post their poems/songs/novels/writings because they love being poets/lyricists/novelists/writers so much. Some people always copy paste other people’s writings/quotes without mentioning the actual writers name because they love seeking attention/fame so much. [Unacceptable & Illegal] Some people always post their plants/garden’s photos because they love planting/gardening so much. Some people always post their art/paintings because they love their creativity so much. Some people always post their home-made food because they love cooking/thoughtful-presentation so much. Some people always post their makeup/hairstyles selfies because they love wearing makeup/doing hair so much. Some people always post their party related photos because they love those parties so much. Some people always post their travel related photos because they love traveling so much. Some people always post their selfies because they love taking selfies so much. Some people always post restaurant/street-foods because they love eating in restaurants/streets so much. Some people always post their job-related photos because they love their jobs so much. Some people always post religious things because they love spreading their religion so much. Some people always post political things because they love politics/power so much. Some people always post inspirational messages because they love being spiritual. Some people always share others posts because they love sharing links so much. Some people always post their creative photographs because they love photography so much. Some people always post their business-related products because they love advertising so much. And some people always post complaints about other people’s post because they love complaining so much

When we left, we were told it would be another month before the winner was announced. Then I felt really discouraged. Friends were telling me that my injuries and my fitness level guaranteed me the cover. I felt the opposite. I didn’t feel I was as fit as the others and I felt like the war was too controversial a topic for the magazine to want to feature a wounded veteran. I had completely talked myself out of even the slightest possibility of winning by the time I was back on a plane to New York a month later to find out the results. My family didn’t believe that I didn’t know already. They thought I’d been told and kept asking me about it. But I really didn’t know. The winner was being announced live on NBC’s Today show. I had made my peace with not winning and Jamie and I were just excited to go to New York and be on Today. We had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and when we landed there I had a voice mail from my friend Billy. His message: “I thought we had to wait to see who won? It’s already out!” I clicked onto my Facebook app and saw that Billy had posted a picture of him and some of his buddies at a truck stop in Kentucky posing with a Men’s Health magazine--and I was on the cover! I was shocked. But even then I was convinced this wasn’t real. Maybe the editors had decided to give the cover to all three of us and we each had a different region of the country. It felt incredible to see myself on the cover of that magazine but I just wasn’t convinced I was the outright winner. Jamie and I got to our hotel room late. I called my contact at Men’s Health, Nora, and said, “I’ve already seen the magazine.” There was a beat on the other end of the line before she flatly said, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” So Jamie and I went to bed. The next morning we met up with Finny and Kavan and headed over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the Today show. I didn’t say a word about what I’d seen. When we arrived, Nora was at the door. I waited for the others to go in before I said to her, “So we’re not going to talk about what we’re not going to talk about?” I was smirking a little but quickly wiped the grin off my face when I saw the look on Nora’s. “You’re not the only person in this competition, Noah. Not everyone knows.” Roger that. I wouldn’t say another word.

Cultivating loyalty is a tricky business. It requires maintaining a rigorous level of consistency while constantly adding newness and a little surprise—freshening the guest experience without changing its core identity.” Lifetime Network Value Concerns about brand fickleness in the new generation of customers can be troubling partly because the idea of lifetime customer value has been such a cornerstone of business for so long. But while you’re fretting over the occasional straying of a customer due to how easy it is to switch brands today, don’t overlook a more important positive change in today’s landscape: the extent to which social media and Internet reviews have amplified the reach of customers’ word-of-mouth. Never before have customers enjoyed such powerful platforms to share and broadcast their opinions of products and services. This is true today of every generation—even some Silent Generation customers share on Facebook and post reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. But millennials, thanks to their lifetime of technology use and their growing buying power, perhaps make the best, most active spokespeople a company can have. Boston Consulting Group, with grand understatement, says that “the vast majority” of millennials report socially sharing and promoting their brand preferences. Millennials are talking about your business when they’re considering making a purchase, awaiting assistance, trying something on, paying for it and when they get home. If, for example, you own a restaurant, the value of a single guest today goes further than the amount of the check. The added value comes from a process that Chef O’Connell calls competitive dining, the phenomenon of guests “comparing and rating dishes, photographing everything they eat, and tweeting and emailing the details of all their dining adventures.” It’s easy to underestimate the commercial power that today’s younger customers have, particularly when the network value of these buyers doesn’t immediately translate into sales. Be careful not to sell their potential short and let that assumption drive you headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that younger customers are experimenting right now as they begin to form preferences they may keep for a lifetime. And whether their proverbial Winstons will taste good to them in the future depends on what they taste like presently.

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.

I am here on Facebook only for pleasure, happiness, and humor and also posting my writings to all my friends. Please do not take anything seriously and personally from my comments, status and any posts that are based only on humor, I know sometimes my comments and posts go a bit far of the reality, and create the confusion. Please also keep in mind that I am not always online though my network is on, and sometimes administrators update my FB, even comments, status, and other things. Please be civilized and gentle at the wall and inbox. I do not reply at inbox except a few ones. I answer only necessary matters that you inbox. If you ask personally, not on the wall or in comments since those are for the public, not private. Neither I have taken of you seriously anything, nor I will ever do that. I only take serious all matters of my family and friends whom I know personally. Thanks. Ehsan Sehgal

But how do all those marvels of convenience really stack up against prior innovations? How much have they actually changed our world and lives? Consider Gordon’s way of contrasting our recent digital-age progress to the major inventions of the nineteenth century: A thought experiment.… You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A, you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3:00 a.m. on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose? I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for option A is so obvious. The audience realizes that it has been trapped into recognition that just one of the many late-nineteenth-century inventions is more important than the portable electronic devices of the past decade on which they have become so dependent. Again, this doesn’t make the Internet unimportant. Indeed, in Gordon’s view, it’s the most important thing that’s happened across the last fifty years, the source of our only major post-1960s productivity surge. (Theranos was a pleasant fiction, but the Amazon effect is real.) But that surge, and its effect on our everyday lives, is still a blip compared with the cascade of changes between 1870 and 1970, and a letdown compared with what we dreamed about not so very long ago.

you want to further understanding of systemic racism even more among the people you interact with, you can try to link to the systemic effects of racism whenever you talk about racism. Instead of posting on Facebook: “This teacher shouted a racial slur at a Hispanic kid and should be fired!” you can say all that, and then add, “This behavior is linked to the increased suspension, expulsion, and detention of Hispanic youth in our schools and sets an example of behavior for the children witnessing this teacher’s racism that will influence the way these children are treated by their peers, and how they are treated as adults.” I do this often when I’m talking about racism, and pretty regularly somebody will comment with something like, “That’s an aspect of this situation I hadn’t considered, thank you.

Compare Facebook posts to Gutenberg’s Bible, and civilization seems to be going down the drain. But compare tweets to indulgences, and it’s much of a muchness.

You can clear up so much misunderstanding with a phone call. Not a text, an email, a veiled Facebook post, a subliminal Instagram, a trifling Tweet or the greatest mistake of all: simply *assuming* something is not worth talking about. Personal relationships are as important as we make them.

posted Daniel 11:36 on their Facebook walls, “And the king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods. He shall prosper till the indignation is accomplished; for what is decreed shall be done.

We develop what some social scientists have termed “ambient awareness” of the lives of those in our social graphs and intuit, Jedi-like, when they’ve been absent from the network. Our vision becomes geared toward looking at how many likes or comments a post has received, and when we open the app or log onto the network’s Web site, our eyes dart toward the spot (the upper righthand corner, in Facebook’s case) where our notifications appear as a number, vermilion bright.

After the 2016 election, USA Today sifted through over 3,500 Russian Facebook posts that were designed to create chaos in our system. The narrative on the news is that the Russians were trying to get Trump elected. While that may be partially true, what they were really trying to do was sow division. And, boy, did they find a way to do it. It wasn’t about trashing one candidate over the other. Only one hundred of the ads even mentioned Clinton or Trump.

Facebook is trying to define truth. There was a character in a movie a few years back who said, “The truth is what I say it is!” That’s what Facebook is trying to do. They’re making the rules and changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules and His Word is truth. Actually, Facebook is censoring free speech. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA. Since Facebook took down the 2016 post last week, I’ll copy it here so you can read it for yourself. Do you see any hate speech here?

Your mother loves you." "I know that. But she still thinks it's forty years ago, back when epilepsy was some nasty little secret you weren't supposed to talk about." "Yes," Aunt Zee said. "And now we have progressed to the point where people post pictures of their colonoscopies on Facebook." Sandy choked on his coffee, and Aunt Zee patted his hand until he got over it. He went back to eating, but with a little smile at the corner of his mouth. "It's better to be open about things, even if some people go too far," Lori said.

Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of surveillance capitalism compel the production of two “electronic texts,” not just one. When it comes to the first text, we are its authors and readers. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universe of information and connection it brings to our fingertips. Google Search codifies the informational content of the world wide web. Facebook’s News Feed binds the network. Much of this public-facing text is composed of what we inscribe on its pages: our posts, blogs, videos, photos, conversations, music, stories, observations, “likes,” tweets, and all the great massing hubbub of our lives captured and communicated.

When Smashing magazine published my article and took my ideas global, everything started to change. All of a sudden, people were asking about this content, they were commenting on it, they wanted to hire me to talk with them about it. I started giving a lot of talks about this particular topic in a variety of different places, and to maintain the momentum, I used all the channels available to me: I tweeted, I published on LinkedIn, I started a newsletter, I posted on Facebook and Quora and Medium. I went fishing where the fish were. You could try to create your own blog, and I have one now. But when you’re just starting out, it’s not easy to get people to come to your platform. It’s easier and far more effective to bring your content to the platforms that already have readers.

Their campaign was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood,” the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in October 2019. The IRA reached tens of millions of voters. It connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook, 20 million people on Instagram, and 1.4 million on Twitter. This generated 76 million interactions on Facebook and 187 million engagements on Instagram; its Twitter accounts were retweeted by Trump, his sons, and his closest aides, among countless others, including some forty American journalists. The IRA’s posts and ripostes to support Trump—2,563 on Facebook, 13,106 on Instagram, 430,185 on Twitter—far exceeded its messages against his rivals. It uploaded more than a thousand videos to YouTube. It spent roughly $15 million all told, and it paid about one hundred Americans who organized forty different political protests across the United States.

The post is also trending on Instagram and Facebook in ways that appear to be similarly manipulated. Within two or three days, this rumor will have been put in front of nearly every set of eyeballs in America.

Tips on Web Design and Site Marketing Web content is king, which is why we have devoted an entire chapter to it later in this book. It is what draws visitors and ultimately what converts them to customers. So, try to make your web content as engaging as possible. Make sure the content is interactive, unique and educational. Ensure that visitors have the option of plugins while encouraging them to visit as many pages on your site as possible if they want to obtain vital information. The images you use on your website should be both enticing and descriptive in nature. In today’s world, social media is all pervasive. In order to encourage visitors to share your web content, you can include icons of social media platforms on your website. In some select cases, consider integrating social media feeds, like Facebook or Instagram, onto your website so that they can automatically show the latest postings. A "Call-to-Action" can help convert visitors to your site into customers. Always try using a very clear and concise "Call-to-Action" language. Understand what type of conversion you are looking for, and try to provide multiple levels of conversion. For example, a plastic surgeon may provide Schedule an Appointment as a call to action, which will attract only the segment of web visitors who have reached their decision stage. By adding conversion points for visitors who are at earlier stages of their decision making, like signing up for a webcast or your newsletter can help you widen your conversion points and provide inputs to your email marketing. To raise the average amount of time a visitor spends on your website and to minimize the bounce rate, ensure that your website offers a user-friendly and attractive design. This way you will increase the number of links you have on your website and boost its SEO ranking (Tip: While Google’s algorithm is not public, our iterative testing shows that sites with good usability analytics metrics like time on site and bounce rate play favorably in Google’s algorithm, other things remaining constant). Ensure you observe due diligence when designing a website that will enable visitors to navigate in different languages. For example, you may need a lot more space for your menu, as there are languages that use up more space than the English language.

In 2020, Instagram’s Well-Being team had run a study of massive scope, surveying 100,000 users in nine countries about negative social comparison on Instagram. The researchers then paired the answers with individualized data on how each user who took the survey had behaved on Instagram, including how and what they posted. They found that, for a sizable minority of users, especially those in Western countries, Instagram was a rough place. Ten percent reported that they “often or always” felt worse about themselves after using the platform, and a quarter believed Instagram made negative comparison worse.

Their findings were incredibly granular. They found that fashion and beauty content produced negative feelings in ways that adjacent content like fitness did not. They found that “people feel worse when they see more celebrities in feed,” and that Kylie Jenner seemed to be unusually triggering, while Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was no trouble at all. They found that people judged themselves far more harshly against friends than celebrities. A movie star’s post needed 10,000 likes before it caused social comparison, whereas, for a peer, the number was ten.

Back in 2018, the CEO had gone so far as to say the platform shouldn’t take down content that denied the Holocaust because not everyone who posted Holocaust denialism “intended” to. (He later clarified to say he found Holocaust denial “deeply offensive,” and the way he handled the issue angered Sheryl Sandberg, a fellow Jew, who eventually succeeded in persuading him to reverse himself.)

The Israeli social media strategy aimed to involve both domestic and global supporters of its military missions. By doing so, and asking backers to post their own supporting tweets, Face-book posts, or Instagram images, the IDF created a collective mission that other nations could easily mimic by stirring up nationalist fervor online. During Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF encouraged supporters of Israel to both proudly share when “terrorists” were killed while at the same time reminding a global audience that the Jewish state was a victim. It was a form of mass conscription to the cause through the weaponization of social media.12 This was war as spectacle, and the IDF was spending big to make it happen. The IDF media budget allowed at least 70 officers and 2,000 soldiers to design, process, and disseminate official Israeli propaganda, and almost every social media platform was flooded with IDF content. Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.

Many of the issues were foundational. Facebook never bothered to translate its community standards into languages spoken by tens of millions. It often used contractors to review content in other languages, and would route posts in Syrian and Iraqi Arabic to contractors in Morocco, for whom they were incomprehensible. An internal review referred to that as a failure to meet the “rock-bottom minimum” standard that contract moderators understand the language of the content they reviewed.