INTERNET ACCESS
WONDERS AND DANGERS of the INTERNET and SOCIAL MEDIA
By Peter Solomon
The clock is ticking…
YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE TODAY
- 1. When you see a lie posted, post your own warning, to alert others.
- 2. Contact your social media companies and demand they monitor content for truth and civility.
- 3. Switch from sites that don’t do this to sites that do monitor.
The Internet and social media are technologies that offer wonderful benefits and dangerous threats to human civilization. These technologies give us immediate access to all the world’s information and provide the platforms for communication and posting ideas. But they also provide a platform for spreading lies, organizing terrorists, and creating groups that live in isolated reality bubbles.
Bill Gates: “The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google: The Internet “…is the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
THE INTERNET’S WONDERS: SEARCH ENGINES provide information summaries on queried topics and links to relevant websites. AI programs have impressive capabilities in generating text, translating languages, writing creative content, and answering questions in an informative way. COMMUNICATION is facilitated through email and group meetings. Businesses offer ONLINE SHOPPING. SOCIAL MEDIA allows for sharing ideas, memories, photos, business, and more. STREAMING SERVICES provide entertainment.
THE INTERNET’S DOWNSIDE: Addiction. Misinformation. Privacy Breaches. Gambling Addiction. Cyberbullying. Mental Health Impact. Conspiracy theory websites that spread dangerous lies. The Internet supports closed-off interest bubbles that have their own news sources and can incubate conspiracy theories. Terrorist organizations communicate, organize, and recruit through the Internet. Inappropriate content is available to children.
Another danger of the internet is user engagement algorithms employed by social media companies. AI algorithms for social media are designed to maximize user engagement. The algorithms have discovered that mayhem and chaos are much more engaging to users and get delivered at the expense of peace and positivity. Facebook’s AI helped to fuel the Rohingya humanitarian crisis in Myanmar in 2017.
FALLACY VIRUSES: The lies that are spread in our modern online media are some of the most dangerous influences of the internet that can make our civilization sick. They enter our information system and get duplicated and spread through news media, social media, retweets, reposts, forwarded messages, podcasts, websites, books, and schools. It’s like the COVID-19 virus that enters, duplicates and spreads in our respiratory system, to make us sick. Unfortunately, these FALLACY VIRUSES are exciting and spread more quickly than mundane facts. Democracy is threatened by the FALLACY VIRUS. The Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election is one of the most dangerous examples.
To combat the FALLACY VIRUSES, media companies must be required to put warning labels on assertions deemed by an independent reputable panel to be false. This is like the warning required on cigarettes and alcohol, and the side effects listings on drugs.”
In 2017, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned that humans would be extinct on Earth in 100 Years. The clock is ticking.
Please visit and follow https://www.instagram.com/100yearstoextinction/ and https://www.100yearstoextinction.com/ for more information on threats to human existence and to information and links to organizations fighting these threats.
