Topic Index

BLOG

C’mon Facebook. Live by your standards.

The First Amendment is a tricky one. It protects my right to practice my religion but also, to a certain extent, protects those speaking badly about it, except when that speech turns into anti-religious hate speech.

BLOG

Reader Beware: Fake News Is Cheap and Easy

The data is fascinating and rather unnerving at the same time. In about an hour’s time, Mr. King created a fake news website, put together a fake news story by re-using a popular one he had seen, created a fake news page on Facebook, created a fake ad promoting the fake news from his fake page, targeted the ad to the groups most likely to salivate over it, specified his budget of about $50.00 and then clicked “place order.”

BLOG

Facebook—Corporate Versus Personal Responsibility

I’ve been following with interest the story of how Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are responding to the recent public and congressional outcry regarding just what the company does with the intimate details of our lives we choose to give away so publicly and so freely.

BLOG

Groping for Clarity in This High-Speed, High-Stakes World

With trending, “hashtaggy” topics now an easy way to measure public mood, product sponsors, employers and others hyper-sensitive to public reactions can pull the plug on a service, product, program or career faster than, well, than a house of cards can fall.

BLOG

Have the Trolls Really Won the Internet? — A Story of Good vs. Evil

A handful of people covertly create an illusion of “millions.” Their aim is to create a snowball of negativity that takes on a life of its own, destroying the individuals or groups in its path.

BLOG

Love In the Age of Granfalloons

My Facebook brothers and sisters have become tribes, or more precisely, granfalloons. A granfalloon, as defined by the coiner of the term, Kurt Vonnegut, in his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, is “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.”

BLOG

Our Outraged Society

We are supposed to be living in an enlightened age, but instead we seem to be devolving into a society of bullies who, ironically, pride themselves on being “tolerant”— but only of what they deem fit to tolerate.

NEWS

STAND Supports German Law Curbing Digital Hate Speech

Scientologists Taking Action Against Discrimination (STAND) appreciates that the German federal government has taken upon itself to more forcefully curtail hate speech on digital platforms, as reported in the New York Times.