Plumbing the Depths of Ignorance on Social Media

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Lately, I have been involved with an ongoing issue with one of the major social networking websites. One of my blogs, Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, has been entirely banned. In fact, this post would not be able to be posted if I included a link to the title of my banned blog. In addition, to add insult to injury, someone has hijacked by personal social network account and is out there promoting a scam by sending out invitations to add my existing "friends" to a "new" account using my name. Of course, the "new" account does not show up when I search on the website. You may notice that I am not using the name of the social networking website but you can likely guess which one I am referring to. Rather than abandon the social networking website, I decided to implement two-stage login so if someone has gotten my password they will not be able to log on to my account.

I have supplied the social networking website with several reasons why they should tell me how and why I was banned but nothing I send is either acknowledged or responded to.

Now, that brings me to the subject of this post. Because I have been fussing with this social networking website, I have been looking at the posts more than usual. Frankly, I am more than appalled at the lack of common sense and logic displayed by those who most commonly post online. I cannot imagine what I wrote on my blog that could have come close to the depths of ignorance and bad taste displayed daily. I thought about giving a few examples but that would require me to re-post some of the blatantly inaccurate memes and comments. By the way, I am not referring to political opinions but merely those comments that assert facts that are entirely indefensible and untrue.

There has been a lot of discussions online about the subject of "fake news." From what I see online, there are few people who could tell a fake news story from anything more factual. With some of the more obvious fake assertions, I can verify the actual information in a matter of seconds. In those rare occasions that I respond, the reactions of the posting party or parties are usually disbelief of my "facts" and a continued defense of the fake news.

Now I could just abandon social networking altogether and also quit writing blog posts. That would certainly free up a lot of my time for other pursuits but would not really solve anything. You could stop reading the social networking posts and then it wouldn't matter if I was writing or not. We could also start thinking about the reality of what we read and see on social networking websites and not re-post blatantly false and misleading information but perhaps that is expecting too much. Maybe I could just confine my writing to something totally uncontroversial such as genealogy. Oh! Wait a minute. That was the blog that got banned.