I may have had problems over the last period of time, but I have watched the growing divide in our country with increasing worry. Some of it comes because of the presidential election this year. Some of it comes from foreign influence. However, I think the biggest problem comes from what has happened technically in the country. We used to have hometown newspapers, but the Internet has pretty much put them all out of business. There used to be television and radio news. Again, the Internet has pretty much put those sources of information out of business. Where are the majority of us getting our information about the world and our country? It appears to be social media. It can range from Facebook to Tiktok. If we are reading a posting on Facebook by our uncle fruitcake saying that we should all wear aluminum foil hats to protect ourselves from strange radiation, we know uncle fruitcake is a little weird but likable, so we can safely ignore what he has to say.
Recently there was a posting of President Biden seemingly absentmindedly walking away from the group at the recent European talks, but if you didn’t know that someone else had posted a video of the same scene shot from a different angle that showed he was going to go congratulate a couple of skydivers who had put on a show, you might believe he was absentmindedly or worse losing it. Or recently, I saw another video of President Trump addressing a crowd. He didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense. It seemed to be about car batteries and sharks. I suspect it was an AI generated video to make him look bad. Oh, it was on social media.
Before the demise of newspapers and other reliable sources of news, someone would have written events and described what really happened. But we’ve lost that source of reliable information. Anyone can post anything on social media and someone out there will believe it. We have too many bad actors trying to use social media to deepen the divide in our country. There was an old expression I heard growing up, “believe nothing you read and only 10% of what you see.” That’s a very good suggestion with all the bad actors out there using AI.
