Tag Archives: social media

Sliding into DM’s

Maybe I’m just too skeptical, but I am always suspicious when I connect with someone on social media and they quickly jump into a private message. I immediately think they are there for one of two reasons, to sell me something or scam me.

Yesterday I got a follow on BlueSky. I followed the person back and then received two direct messages:

Hello, David, I’m [Name]. Nice to be friends with you here

I just got here. What do you think of the place?

This was my response:

Haven’t invested enough time here to say. But FYI, I don’t spend time on social media messaging people I don’t know, sorry. Happy to respond to public @ responses, but this will be my last private message with you. Nothing personal, just not how I use social media.

Then I got this long response:

I just arrived here and I am curious about everything here, so I will send you a signal to make friends. After all, making new friends is always good. What social media do you use? I have WhatsApp and Telegram, and I usually communicate with my family and friends there

That’s enough for me to end both the conversation and connection. I’m not interested in playing games. I’m not interested in flirtatious banter. I don’t need to waste my time with someone who sounds inauthentic.

I usually respond to DM’s in some way. I try to assess intentions, I try to be polite. But I also feel like my effort to be nice, to engage, is an invite to waste time with people who do not have good intentions. Blocking may seem harsh, but that’s what I do. This one seemed scam-ish from the start, and the first part of this person’s profile was a vague description, ‘Businesswoman from LA’, so my initial response was colder than usual. I’m more open to an honest response from someone who is an educator.

Fortunately this is quite rare. Most of the people I end up connecting with are indeed educators, and if I get a direct message it’s usually good. But when a stranger just slides into my DM’s just to be friends, my stranger danger alarms start to go off, and I am starting the conversation with caution and skepticism.

So if you are new to connecting to me, by all means do say hello, but no need to slide into DM’s. Just @datruss me publicly. There really isn’t a reason to DM me unless you know me. Am I the only one that looks at DM’s this way?

From bird to sky – a social media switch

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For about a year and a half now I’ve been ‘transmitting’ my blog to not just Twitter, but also to Threads and Blue Sky. I use the term ‘transmit’ because I haven’t engaged much on these platforms, I just post my blog post and leave. However, I have more engagement, and conversations on LinkedIn and my blog’s Facebook page.

But I’m starting to see a move to Blue Sky. For me, it means moving from over 12,000 connections on Twitter to under 100 on Blue Sky, but I’m ok with that. I think the community will grow, and for me Twitter was amazing even at 450 connections. The bigger question is weather I’ll actually go back to spending time there or if I’ll just continue to transmit?

For now, LinkedIn seems to be the place I converse more, engage more, and even learn from more. And my Facebook page following is small, but a wonderful community. As I watch people leave Twitter and move to Blue Sky, I wonder if I’ll get a taste of what old Twitter was like pulling me in to this new(ish) site, or if it’s just one more place I post and ignore? Do I need another place to engage, or is LinkedIn and Facebook more than enough already? I’ll figure it out soon enough, but if you are on Blue Sky, let’s connect.

Not all voices are equal

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I love the Bill Nye analogy about the climate debate. He says that if the debate were authentic, rather than having two talking heads debating, it would be hundreds of scientists on one side versus one climate denier on the other.

I saw a social media clip yesterday where a microbiologist was debunking a self declared holistic practitioner on the consumption of unpasteurized milk. The microbiologist wrote his master’s thesis on bacterial infections in cow’s mammary glands.

The self-declared expert espousing unscientific and incorrect information on social media is not an equal voice to an expert. Do they have a right to share their views? Sure. Do they deserve an audience? No.

I wish that I knew how to make the situation better but I don’t have answers. I’m extremely pro ‘free speech’. I think people are entitled to share their views. However, when I see misinformation and disinformation being shared by people with large audiences, I shudder. I worry about how their messages are consumed, by how many people they lead down a bad path.

In 2024 no one, and I mean NO ONE, should believe the earth is flat and yet the group of flat earth believers is getting larger. Imagine being able to own a telescope and see images from the James Webb telescope and still believing something that societies 5,000+ years ago already knew was wrong.

Not all voices are equal, and some voices deserve a larger voice than others. Who decides? Who polices? I don’t know, but I do know that we are entering (have entered) an era where false information gets shared significantly faster than correct information. Corrected information and updated facts don’t get the same play time on social media. So we are essentially living in an era of disinformation.

This doesn’t feel like progress, and as AI models continue to learn from the inputs we are providing, this scares me. I saw a stat that as much as 80% of the internet could be AI generated by the end of 2026. How much of that generated information will be based on incorrect assumptions and conclusions? How much of it will be intentionally misguided? Who is deciding which voices the AI models listen to?

We can’t continue to let ill-informed people have equal voices to those that have more informed perspectives… But I’m not informed enough to know how to change this.

Manufacturing Lies and Dissent

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In “Manufacturing Consent,” Noam Chomsky argues that the mass media in the US serves as a propaganda tool for powerful elites, shaping public perception to maintain the status quo. I think that era has ended and one of the key points of our time is that social media now ‘manufactures dissent’. It permits lies to spread faster than truth, and is driven by the power of outlandish claims to draw attention and clicks, views and advertising dollars.

The irony of what I’m about to share would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Yesterday when I shared my Daily-Ink on Twitter/X, I saw a headline, “Musk’s hurricane of misinformation has finally gone too far”, shared by ‘Independent Voices’, a Twitter account I don’t follow.

I clicked and read the article on the UK’s Independent (independent.co.uk), a media site that I’m unaware of so I was careful to watch for accuracy versus misinformation.

For example, even when the article quoted a tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a person elected to Congress whom I think acts like telling the truth could cause an anaphylactic response, I still followed the link to fact check it…Even though her ridiculous claim was easily within the scope of believability.

The article states,

“Yet despite the clear and evident risk of real harm, people like Greene are making hackneyed comic book villain claims about secret weather machines – and the internet has been rife with misinformation about the upcoming disaster. Accounts on Twitter/X have claimed that state and federal officials are preventing people from accessing hard-hit areas, that the government is basing its provision of aid on political affiliation, and that the entire thing is an elaborate land-grab scheme.

Many such posts have received millions of views, and few if any are being taken down. Why would they, when the site’s owner is in the mix – yes, even Elon Musk has been getting in on the fun, tweeting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has diverted critical funds from hurricane relief to illegal immigrants.”

Later it continues,

“Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “spreading misinformation about a natural disaster that has the potential to kill hundreds – perhaps thousands – of people is reprehensible, and in a sane world would be a criminal offence”, but you would in fact be mistaken. You see, we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a world where being that reckless with other people’s lives isn’t just acceptable – it’s actually a core part of the Republican political strategy.”

But shortly after reading that quote I passed an ad in the article that proves that ‘We live in a world where being reckless with other people’s lives IS acceptable’ and not just by people on the right. The ad, which I refused to click on stated, “Jagmeet Singh Suffers Fatal Accident On Live Television”.

An article that is simultaneously debunking misinformation of a right wing political party, with the author asking, “The thing that really baffles me about all of this, though, is what exactly there is to be gained here.” …Which also shares an ad that blatantly lies about the death of a left wing Canadian political party leader, is painfully ironic.

I then checked The Independent on the Media Bias / Fact Check website which stated that “Overall we rate The Independent Left-Center Biased due to story selection that moderately favors the left. We also rate them Mixed in factual reporting due to several failed fact checks.”

This demonstrates a clear case of the kettle calling the pot black. Bash the right for spreading misinformation on a left leaning site, while advertising using blatant misinformation. I want to call this unacceptable, but it’s the norm.

Propagating lies, evoking anger, selling out for attention, baiting clicks with misinformation, and manufacturing dissent. We can no longer trust social media, and we must question mainstream media too. The truth is unnecessarily elusive, it’s lost in a sea of lies and inaccuracies. The above news article isn’t inaccurate in its conclusions, rather it’s simply encapsulated in the same misinformation propagating media machine it professes to be struggling to understand.

Distraction and Focus

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I spent spent 45 minutes on social media. That wasn’t my intent, I have a to-do list that will take me a fair bit of time, and I haven’t don’t my normal daily routines, like writing here, yet. Now that I’m here, I’m focused. I have my headphones on, and my ‘Writing’ playlist playing softly in my ears. I know that I won’t be distracted, and I won’t get up from my laptop until I hit the ‘Publish’ button. I know how to focus, how to stay on a task until it’s done. The issue isn’t the doing, it’s the getting started. Once I’ve started, it will get done (usually) efficiently and (usually) effectively, (I’m far from perfect).

But the world is full of distractions. My phone is probably the biggest one. But so are things like feeding the cat, doing the dishes, television, and tasks that are easier to do than getting started on something bigger. Social media algorithms are designed to keep me engaged, learning from me, and pointing me to things that will keep me scrolling, liking, sharing, and wanting more. I’m not the only one. I love when my wife has to do report cards, suddenly she finds the time to bake, and I get my fill of things like chocolate chip cookies and banana loaf. As a 30 year teacher, I can tell you that she writes amazing report cards that really show that she has put thought into every report… every kid. But before she spends hours on the task, she bakes, cleans, and finds many reasons not get started.

Distractions can be useful, after all the cat does need to be fed and the dishes won’t clean themselves. But distractions can also be a complete waste of time. They can suck time up like a vacuum. A vacuum only sucks what you point it at, and likewise if you point your distractions towards a time-waster, that’s all it takes in. Part of me knows that I work a bit better when I have a deadline, and today I have one with a family commitment in a few hours that will take up the rest of my day. So, after being distracted for 45 minutes, I’m now wondering if I’ll get everything done that I hope to finish. How much less stress would I have placed on myself if I had used that 45 minutes better? Or would I have done the same amount of tasks but simply spread them out to fill the time?

I’ll never get rid of all the distractions I have, but I do think often about how to reduce the ones where I don’t use my time well. I battle with the joy I get from death scrolling on social media, and the thoughts I have about how much better I can use that time. What if I used that time for more writing? What if I spent that time with family and friends? What if I actually started doing archery again? Those are not things I would consider distractions. Those are things I’d like to focus on. Will they give me the same dopamine kick social media gives me? Probably not, but the dopamine spike doesn’t seem like something I should focus on. That just seems like an empty distraction.

Information is free, Truth takes effort

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We live in an era where:

Lies spread faster than the truth

There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

Science, 9 Mar 2018, p. 1146-1151

Media, and even more-so social media, can’t be trusted. And in fact, if it is eye-catching and click-bait worthy it will be sensationalized and potentially untrue. We live in an era of unlimited information and much of it is not factual, and not easily verifiable.

What can we do? I’ve said before that ‘Web Domains Matter’, and they do, but we still need to recognize that even new sites considered reputable have biases.

So we are required to take new information in as skeptics. Meanwhile we have to balance our scepticism with a dose of common sense or we could easily fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole. This is the new normal, this is being information savvy. This does not mean we will get to the Truth. Because it’s not just the information coming in that has bias, we have our own biases too.

We all have work to do, to understand some sort of relevant small ‘t’ truth that is in fact closely related to the capital ’T’ Truth. To find our way amidst an endless stream of information that favours misinformation, fake news, and half-truths. The rabbit hole runs deep, and we are all on a journey down it… with Artificial Intelligence creating a whole new level of generating convincing fakes that are easily believed, and algorithmically shared way more than anything truthful.

Start with the source, where is the information coming from? Apply a sliding scale of scepticism depending on the reliability of the source. Then be savvy in deciding what to believe and what to dismiss.

Source, scepticism, and savviness… the new path to information literacy.

AI and the collapse of a shared reality

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TikTok has introduced me to some very interesting content creators. One such person is Morten Rand-Hendriksen, who goes by the username @mor10web.

He shared this insight recently:

@mor10web
#AI image generation, the destruction of our shared perception of reality, and the inevitable collapse of democracy. Inspired by posts on the same topic from @Paige | AI Ethicist
♬ original sound – The Mor10 of the Web

After discussing the fact that people stuck in an echo chamber of like-minded people start to call a real photograph an AI generated fake… he says,

“Here’s what keeps me up at night: We’re converging on a point where it is easier to claim that real images are fake than it is to prove that images are generated using AI, or manipulated using AI. And that means we have no reasonable expectation of any image or any video or any audio being real. And we don’t have the tools or the media literacy to really do this analysis.

…and we are in the situation we’re in now where people can choose their own reality and live in a reality dysfunction. And AI provides the tools and capabilities to make that reality disfunction into our lived reality.”

Indeed, our shared reality has collapsed. AI generated fakes spread like wildfire through echo chambers of like-minded groups, and even when discovered to be fake, there is no effort to make corrections if the fake fits the group’s narrative… and any real media that doesn’t fit that same reality is easily dismissed as a fake.

Maya Angelou said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we unalike.” I would agree with that when we had a common shared reality, but I question it now in a world filled with AI generated fakes, and a lack of media savviness to determine what really is real. The collapse of a shared reality is a threat to our world, whether the split is socioeconomic, political, or religious. We are increasingly growing unalike.

Manufacturing Beliefs

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“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.”

~ Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988

Embrace yourself. We are in for a whirlwind of propaganda directed to both sway and embolden our beliefs. We will need to question the sources of our information. We will need to understand where the bias of the message is coming from. We will need to fact check for reliability, accuracy, and exaggeration.

We will be entertained. We will be angered. We will be emboldened. We will be ridiculed by those who disagree with us. And we will be the ones ridiculing others who hold different beliefs than us. Systematic propaganda will slowly lead us to more polarized views.

This is not a test of your emergency broadcasting system. This is also not an emergency. No, it is the emergence of political propaganda in a post Truth era. Find your own truth, fabricate your own truth. Because the media outlets you believed you believed in are not the ones in existence today… and they do not transmit Truth.

Marshall McLuhan was correct, ‘the medium is the message’, and the medium is designed not to inform but to entertain; to excite; to anger; to draw attention, clicks, and eyes on advertising. No, not to inform, to trick you. Sway your opinion, and lie to you.

Are your beliefs your own or have they been manufactured, manipulated, and swayed by the media you watch? Will you be able to answer that question as convincingly a year from now? Will your beliefs be yours or will they be governed by the propaganda you choose to watch and believe in? Be warned, the answer to that question might not be the answer you currently believe.

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Lies spread faster than the truth

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