Elon Musk’s zeal for truth reveals the online frauds aiming to divide us

Believe it or not, that is actually Sparky in disguise.

Social media seems real. 

I joined Twitter/X because so many news articles or commentaries feature posts from social media as evidence of their point.

But on Friday Elon Musk, having figured out that a lot of influential X accounts weren’t what they claimed to be, activated an X feature showing where users were actually posting from — and uncovered (at least) a million lies.

A few days ago, I posted about how social media is a danger to individuals, scale that up, and it’s a danger to societies.

It doesn’t seem likely that social media companies can censor sufficiently to make it a good idea for  unaccountable strangers to have a global communications platform.  With that level of censorship, the moderators won’t resist enforcing their own opinions.  Governments can’t let the private sector handle propaganda, so they step in. 

That happened in 2020 under Biden’s administration.

Censorship is fraught with peril, but allowing social media to be a nest of lies is also a threat.

The United States, for all its size and power, is prone to the whims of public opinion — and its communications are largely open to outsiders.

It’s hardly surprising that some of those outsiders will seek to take advantage of our nation’s freedom of expression.

Other countries can’t beat America in an open war, so the trick is to use our freedom against us.

Politicians, commentators and other people take trends seen on social media, and assume there is something to it.  By exposing the location of the social media influencer, it’s obvious that many of them are using fake profiles.  Their content is suspect.

It’s easy to use a VPN to make your computer seem to be somewhere else.  During the Olympics, I route through England, Canada or Germany to access their coverage of the games.  The social media site can’t establish where the person actually is, but can flag the user location is flagged as “location information may not be accurate.”

Elon Musk’s location information is a good step.  At least it reminds people that accounts aren’t necessarily what they seem to be.