Nov 8, 2021 4 min read

This is an audience participation column. Put the thumb and index finger of one of your hands about a half-inch apart in front of your face. Concentrate on the distance between these digits.

That’s how far I am from shunning social media forever. I have essentially abandoned Twitter, an occurrence made easier when my desktop computer died a month ago. After things were up and running again, I never bothered to reconnect (I had never installed the Twitter app on my cellphone). I can’t say that this decision impacted my life negatively. Facebook may be next into the dumper.

I remember the world before Facebook and Twitter, a world without 24/7 cable “news” and reality shows, without mobile phones. A world where I was not subjected to pictures of the toes of casual acquaintances languishing beside a cocktail or beer on a Caribbean beach. It was a flawed world, to be sure, but – at least in my equally flawed memory – a world not nearly so contentious. I blame politics, festering racism and willfully ignorant people for much of this. But I also blame social media for helping to exacerbate the situation.

There’s been endless talk lately about the leak of Facebook documents which show that, even if its fact-checkers have done a creditable job of identifying misinformation, the social media platform’s algorithms for removing it from newsfeeds are woefully inadequate. Posts tagged as false in a variety of areas – including politics and COVID-19 – were often allowed to remain or be reposted. The problem is worldwide but seems to be most prevalent in the United States.

Political misinformation here has died down in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, but various research agencies have determined that misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines to combat it continues to slip through the tenuous Facebook fact-checking web. As an investigation by Institute for Strategic Dialog (ISD) found:

“Facebook is failing to track down and label all versions of posts that have been deemed false by fact-checkers, despite claiming that they have AI technology that does this with a ‘very high degree of precision.'”

There are roughly 3 billion Facebook users worldwide. The ISD admits: “Disinformation purveyors produce content in such vast quantities that debunking claims or posts one by one presents an almost impossible task for fact-checkers.”

So I give Facebook the benefit of the doubt on this subject. But by “benefit of the doubt,” I mean that I routinely doubt much of what I see posted on Facebook and Twitter. I like to think that I am smart enough to recognize outright lies and misinformation spread through any form of media.

But I can’t reliably assume the same for the aforementioned willfully ignorant.

For example, hundreds of QAnon member and supporters gathered Tuesday at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. They assembled not to mark the anniversary of his death, which occurred on Nov. 22, but to await the arrival of John F. Kennedy Jr., who – in case you didn’t know – was killed in a plane crash in 1999.

Various rumors circulating on social media and various websites claimed that JFK Jr., and possibly his father (both having faked their deaths) would appear in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 p.m., the time of the assassination. Then, depending on which version of the rumor you believed, former president Donald Trump would join them. Believers said Trump would be reinstated as president, with JFK Jr. as his vice-president. But … Trump would then resign, allowing JFK Jr. to assume the presidency.

P.S. None of the principals showed up.

That was OK, some of those gathered told reporters: perhaps both JFKs – and maybe some other supposedly dead celebrities (Robin Williams?) – would appear at the Rolling Stones concert in Dallas later that day.

Yeah … I’m going to evacuate from social media.

Gimme Shelter.