Category: Social Media

TRUMP’S DIGITAL CAMPAIGN LEAVES DEMOCRATS IN THE DUST

Although he has been an acute and chronic failure in so many ways, Donald Trump is an accomplished high achiever in the arena that matters most to him: building a base that will deliver votes. 

Leading Democratic strategists scornfully view Trump as a vile malignancy on the body politic, but they are in reverential awe of his ability to use social media as an organizing platform.  David Plouffe ran the 2008 Obama campaign, heralded at the time for its innovations in social media use. In an interview with Politico, Plouffe said that advantage now clearly belongs to Trump. He called the digital imbalance a “DEFCON 1 situation.” Numerous Democratic operatives have recently expressed similar concern over Trump’s ability to digitally out maneuver their party (here, here and here). 

Here’s what they’re talking about:  The fulcrum of Trump’s campaign is a social media engine capable of targeting messages to millions of MAGA types and wannabes. These ads, mostly on Facebook, are far different than conventional political advertising in that they are aimed not just at persuading, but at organizing a movement. With Facebook’s help, they are seen only by those whose online activity has been Trump-friendly. That’s just the starting point. Those ads come with an ask: sign up for a rally, take a survey, make a donation, buy MAGA merchandise.  The responses give the campaign names, zip codes, email, phone numbers, and a ton of demographic data. 

With all of that information – in tandem with Facebook analytics on users who “like” memes and posts about gun rights, undocumented immigrants, and white supremacy, etc. – the campaign’s targeting escalates into microtargeting.  That opens the door on tailoring each social media ad to hyper-specific groups, like 50-something, white male gun owners in the Florida panhandle who own a motorcycle and a dog and attend church infrequently.  This sort of microtargeting is not a Trump exclusive by any means.  His campaign has simply taken it to heights never before seen. In 2016, for example, according to an internal Facebook report, the Clinton campaign placed 66,000 unique ads on the platform, a drop in the bucket compared with Trump’s total of 5.9 million different ads. 

Although Trump and Facebook executives have had their differences, they share one critical value: lying.  The social media platform has been adamant about its policy of running political ads even if they are utterly false.   His campaign, of course, has been only too happy to provide the falsehoods.  Trump’s Facebook ads have spun fairytale story lines about his protection of pre-existing conditions, abating the North Korean nuclear threat, saving America from an imminent Iranian attack, among a plethora of other fantasies. He turned his own impeachment into a fund-raising bonanza, peppered with blatantly false claims about his supposed victimhood and Joe Biden’s imaginary corruption.

As of January 5, Trump’s campaign has spent $35 million to reach 2020 voters through precision-targeted ads on Google and Facebook. The top Democratic candidates have spent a tiny fraction of that amount on digital advertising.  Joe Biden, the purported front-runner, has spent less than $5 million on social media ads. In fact, he recently pulled what little advertising he had on Facebook and moved it to television.  

People spend an estimated one-third to one-half of their lives on their phones and other internet-connected devices. Through microtargeting, Trump is constantly reaching out to, and expanding, his base there.  Meanwhile, Biden and many of his fellow Democratic candidates have slight to no visibility in that digital infrastructure.   While they use more conventional advertising to quibble over Medicare for all versus a public option, Trump is using his online advertising to organize, to fire up his expanding MAGA army through incendiary links to false information about “criminal immigrant invaders” and the “far-left corrupt socialists” who love them.

This Trump advantage gets worse, exponentially worse.  Through artificial intelligence, the campaign is able to have Facebook match target constituencies with what are called “look-alikes”, hundreds of thousands of people who share the same backgrounds and political beliefs as those in the target group.  Once the Trumpers pull new recruits from the look-alikes, that new subset is used to cull more of the same.  Rinse and repeat. Therein lies the growing core of fired-up true believers who Trump hopes will walk through fire on election day to give him a second term.

The campaign has been building this social media organizing machine for more than three years. Trump’s every crazy, insipid, illegal action is put on a digital assembly line where it is completely fictionalized, re-spun, and fed to his fans so that they can be identified and used to reproduce themselves in their own images. For Team Trump, this is the path that will deliver four more years to the only president whose approval ratings never made it to the 50 percent mark.

But hark, help is on the way.  Under the heading of better late than never, there are two recent encouraging signs that Democrats may get their digital act together. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent $25 million on Google and Facebook advertising. Although he’s a late entrant and a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, his ads are designed to take sharp swipes at Trump, an approach the billionaire says he will continue even if he is not the nominee.

Although Bloomberg’s ad buy is a significant improvement, it will not, by itself, counter the Trump social media onslaught.  Enter “Four is Enough” a unique digital organizing campaign headed by Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, and Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old digital guru who cut her political teeth on the Obama campaign. She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called Acronym that helps progressive groups organize online. They are in the process of raising $75 million to build an online organizing effort, particularly in the swing states that will determine electoral college results.    McGowan told the New York Times that the Four is Enough campaign was the result of “screaming into the abyss” about the Democrats’ weak digital presence, and “finally deciding to take matters into our own hands.”

Let’s hope that it works. As we learned in 2016, being right on the facts doesn’t win elections. Organizing does, and that means using every available digital tool to mobilize disgusted, disgruntled and depressed Americans who know full well that, when it comes to Donald Trump, four years is way more than enough.

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!

IT’S TIME TO CONTROL THE RUNAWAY TRAIN OF SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Like something out of a bad science fiction movie, social media technology has evolved into a grotesque, out-of-control monster that threatens our way of life. The beast’s ferocity has expanded so quickly and mindlessly that nobody is able to tame it, including the now-billionaire geeks who created it. Think that’s a harsh overstatement? Then look at these facts:

• Facebook admitted that it unknowingly accepted payment in Rubles from Russia for disguised pro-Trump propaganda spread to at least 10 million U.S. users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• Twitter is equipped to place anonymous racist ads, ordered online, targeting 14.5 million users identified by Internet usage as responding to the n-word; 26.3 million to the term “wetback” and 18.6 million to Nazi.

• Google offers an online advertising tool in which ads are sold and placed with targeted users on the basis of such concerns as: “black people ruin neighborhoods”, “evil Jew” and “Jewish control of banks”.

To make matters worse, the offending content, placed on these sites by unidentified customers, have none of the visual properties of an online advertisement. They looked like ordinary posts, all part of a user’s daily newsfeed. In the case of the Russian Facebook buy, news-like items linking Hillary Clinton to Black Likes Matter or American Muslims were placed, for a price, on the pages of users who had clicked “like” on similar racist content.

Now, if these vile, misleading blurbs had been handled the way media outlets used to do business, a salesperson would have executed a formal contract for the buy and the advertisers’ name would appear in the copy. But that’s so 1990s. These social media sites rake in their billions over the transom of their medium. It’s all done online. In fact, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, until recently, brushed off reports of clandestine Russian interference on his site as a “pretty crazy idea.” Then he hired 3,000 “content monitors”, and suddenly hundreds of Russian “ads” and fake accounts were found. Same thing happened at Twitter.

Executives from the big three platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Google – steadfastly insist that there was never an intention to allow this kind of nefarious, deceptive activity on their sites. Think about that for a minute. Their defense is that the technology is at fault, that a bad algorithm did it. If they are right, then shame on all of us for allowing artificial intelligence to run roughshod over our democracy, for letting the technology control us, rather than the other way around. It’s time to take that control back.

Based on population, Facebook is larger than any country in the world. Except for Asia, it’s bigger than any continent. And it continues to grow at 17% a year. Zuckerberg, as an idealistic young Harvard student in 2004, created it in his dorm room. He said it would bring the world together through a “free flow of information”. He got the information flow part right, but there is nothing free about it. Facebook is now the largest online advertising company in the world, worth almost half a trillion dollars. As British writer John Lanchester put it, “Facebook was built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers.”

And that was precisely the transaction that Russia was looking for. It gave the Kremlin access to Facebook accounts of racist and anti-Muslim Americans, a ripe audience for pro-Trump messages paid for in Rubbles, but without a hint that they came from a foreign power. CNN reported Thursday that Russia’s Facebook campaign buy on Trump’s behalf was orchestrated so surgically that it hit disproportionately on a large number of targets in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that helped push Trump over the top in electoral votes.

So there is now a legislative campaign for transparency in digital political ads. Sadly, even that embarrassingly modest proposal is facing strong resistance. And it doesn’t begin to fix the much broader problem. Facebook, Google and Twitter are not just multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. Together, they control the communication infrastructure for most of the free world. Yet, the people who run these companies are not publically held to a single standard of accountability. Barbers and horse trainers are more closely regulated than these gigantic informational monoliths.

This is a long-overdue transformational moment. Technology has enhanced and lengthened our lives in so many ways. But that is no excuse for humanity to abdicate control, to let technology run itself, free from controls that reflect the values that only humans can construct. Yet that is precisely what has happened with these social media companies. No sick, ruthless executive knowingly took Russia’s money to let them tamper with our elections. It just happened because the technology allowed it to. Unrelated to the election, there are tens of millions of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, routinely sending off links to equally fake news sites. Neither company planned for that result; it was just technology doing its thing, unrestricted by human thought.

Folks with a rudimentary knowledge of code writing can create Twitter and Facebook bots, fake accounts, complete with pictures and bio. For all sorts of nefarious purposes, “bot farms” have been created to fire off thousands of phony messages every day. It is estimated, for example, that 43% of President Trump’s 38.6 million Twitter followers are fake accounts. In a recent high point of absurdity, Trump retweeted a follower’s post that blasted “fake news”. Turns out it had been created by a fake account.

This can’t continue. These companies can’t be allowed to simply sit back and bank their billions while their algorithms wreak havoc on the things that really matter to us, like truth and our democratic process. Whether through legislation or regulatory control, these corporate executives have to be sent back to their laboratories. They need to be forced to retool their technological monstrosities so that they comport with our values, not destroy them.

FROM NIXON TO TRUMP: A PASSAGE FROM TAPES TO TWEETS

The Donald’s sly hint of a White House taping system a few weeks back was enough to cast a nostalgic aura of excitement over the nation’s capital. Those of us in the political junkie geezerhood delight in finding Watergate imagery in the growing muck of Trump’s folderol. Our blissfully aging crowd, after all, remembers only too well how Tricky Dick hoisted himself on the petard of his own surreptitious recording system, an electronic treasure trove of every syllable uttered in the Oval Office, some slurred beyond recognition.

Nixon’s own tapes brought him down, but more importantly, they were a gift that kept on giving. For decades to come, transcripts and MP3 files of virtually every private presidential conversation in the Nixon White House were periodically released. The final installment – 340 hours of tape – was made public in 2013. As a result, we were treated to the horrifying-but-compelling opportunity to see the unvarnished version of the 37th president, long after his death. It was not pretty.

For example, this Nixon gem from a 1971 Oval Office diatribe: “The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life.” (As opposed to the “Negros,” Nixon went on to postulate, “who shun conventional family life.”) Now, that’s obviously not the public persona any sane political operative would want to advance, thus the beauty of the Nixon tapes. They let us eavesdrop on the private utterances of a president, it turned out, we barely knew. So when Trump teased that the FBI director he had just fired better hope there were no tapes of their conversations, many of us lit up over the prospect of a whole new batch of presidential recordings.

Alas, another dream shattered. Trump later said he had no such tapes, although he left the door slightly ajar, saying that someone else might have wiretapped his office. Obama, maybe. Then again, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need a hidden tape recorder to know the real Donald Trump. All you have to do is follow him on Twitter or listen to his rally speeches. This is a man who captured the presidency by shouting and tweeting the kind of crude, profane, hateful stuff other politicians wouldn’t whisper to a trusted aide. Nixon had been dead for 20 years before the world heard his less-than-generous thoughts about Mexicans. We knew where Trump stood on that issue way before he became president. Here’s what he tweeted in June of 2015: “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border.”

We learned in 2001 that Nixon, 30 years earlier, had made it clear to his staff that he did not want women in important jobs. Here’s his private remark: “I’m not for women, frankly, in any job. I don’t want them around. Thank God we don’t have any in the Cabinet.” Trump, on the other hand, came to the White House with an exceedingly transparent position on women. In addition to boasting about his proclivity for grabbing them by their lady parts, there is this analytical tweet from 2013: “The Miss Universe Women totally blow away the Victoria’s Secret Women.” Trump hasn’t placed many women in his cabinet, but he sure packed his swim suit competition with them.

Presidents, of course, serve as the country’s military commander in chief, and have to make many tough decisions with respect to warcraft. Rarely, however, do they speak about the loss of life and limb in crude “locker room” fashion. So, there was shock when the Nixon tapes relayed the president’s reaction to a report that a million pounds of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam: “A million pounds of bombs! Goddamn, that must have been a good strike. I tell you the thing to do is pour it in there every place we can…just bomb the hell out of them.” No need to wait for the posthumous release of secret Trump tapes to hear the Donald’s lack of elegance in describing military strategy. He spent most of the campaign boasting about his desire to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”

And then there are the courts, a not infrequent nemesis for the executive branch. Yet, out of respect for the founders’ notion of separation of powers, presidents typically refrain from publicly attacking the judicial branch. Thanks to the Nixon tapes, however, we eventually learned of his reaction to a Supreme Court decision denying the government’s request to stop the New York Times from publishing the “Pentagon Papers”, classified documents detailing serious military mistakes in the Vietnam War. Said Nixon at the time: “. . . I was so damn mad when the Supreme Court had to come down. Unbelievable, wasn’t it? You know, those clowns we got on there, I tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards.” Trump, of course, has never hidden his disdain for judges, particularly those who rule against him. During the campaign, he called a judge assigned to a suit involving Trump University a “hater” and a “Mexican”. As president, he tweeted this about one of the judges who ruled against him on his travel ban: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

This Nixon-Trump story of then and now has two morals. One is that, in this great country of ours, every child has the opportunity to become president when they grow up, no matter how uncouth, obstinate or unbalanced they may be. Secondly, we have finally evolved to the point that we can observe our president’s abhorrent behavior in real time. No need to wait for 30-year-old tapes to find out he was nuts.

NO WINNERS IN WHITE HOUSE VERSION OF CELEBRITY APPRENTICE

So, it has come to this. In our toxically polarized world, the battle for moral superiority between left and right rests on a surrogate matchup of Kathy Griffin and Ted Nugent, with an undercard starring Bill Maher and Tila Tequila.
In one ring, battling to the death for bragging rights as the most offensive and despicable, is Griffin, clutching a simulation of Donald Trump’s severed skull, and Nugent, with thoughts of an assassinated Obama dancing in his head. In the racist ring is Trump supporter and reality star Tequila, flashing her finest anti-black-and-brown Nazi salute, facing off against TV host Maher and his it’s-only-a-joke N-word banter. Que Michael Buffer: “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
Sadly, the rumbling never stops. Like tinnitus’s constant ringing, this high-pitched, acrimonious roar shows no sign of abating any time soon. It’s enough to make you long for simpler times when a celebrity saying stupid stuff was . . . well, just a celebrity saying stupid stuff. As opposed to an escalation of our endless ideological war.
The latest battleground surfaced last week when, for some inexplicable reason, Griffin, a comedian, released a picture of herself holding a faux bloody Trump head. There was no context, no lead-up, no punchline and, as far as anyone can tell, no laughter. As the excrement hit the fan, Griffin offered the standard comedic defense that she was only trying to be funny, that crossing the line of appropriateness is the heart of humor. Yeah but, there still has to be a hook to make the inappropriateness funny. Years ago, Joan Rivers used this line in her stand-up: “Boy George is all England needs – another queen who can’t dress.” Inappropriate? Sure, but it had a hook, a context that got a laugh – even from Boy George. All Griffin had was a bloody head.

As a result, her world began to crumble. Despite her apology, CNN fired Griffin from her standing New Year’s Eve gig with Anderson Cooper, who independently blasted her for the prank. Most of her summer tour venues have canceled on her. At a tearful press conference Friday, the comedian said Trump was out to get her, insisting, with a level of self-absorption rivaling the president’s, that the White House is “using me as the shiny object so that nobody is talking about his (Trump’s) FBI investigation.” Obviously, it would take much more than a bully comic holding another bully’s head to divert attention from this FBI investigation.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook exploded into a fully involved proxy war. The president’s fans, predictably, expressed wildly indignant outrage over Griffin’s severed Trump head bit, many proposing acts of retribution outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. Then came a quick liberal chorus of “nana nana nana” with posts about Nugent, a 60s rocker who made a sharp right turn, and recently dined with Trump at the White House. Where was the conservative consternation, these posts asked, when Nugent called Obama a “mongrel” and invited him to “suck on my machine gun”? Then came a retrospective of various Obama-in-a-noose memes offered up by his many passionate detractors, raising this bizarre dialectic of moral equivalency: images depicting the lynching of our first black president versus a beheading of his successor. If the founding fathers had envisioned social media, the First Amendment would likely have come with an exclusionary clause.

With no ceasefire in sight, the war opened a new front Friday night when sharp-tongued comedian and Trump critic Maher used the N-word on his HBO show, “Real Time”. A guest, Republican Senator Ben Sasse, jokingly invited Maher to Nebraska to “work the fields.” The host’s response: “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house n***r.” Maher’s subsequent apology did little to subdue the Twitter rants. Conservatives, still bristling from their loss of Fox News idol Bill O’Reilly, demanded that HBO fire Maher. It was, of course, a tough case for them to make in 140 characters, given their party’s dismal track record on matters of race. So the tweets were mostly a gotcha thing, as in: “Fire him! You know that’s what Democrats would say if Sean Hannity used the word.” That provoked a liberal response about Tila Tequila, a fallen reality TV star and Trump supporter who has said vile things about blacks and Latinos and led a white nationalist audience in a “Heil Trump” salute last fall.

Yet, it was refreshing to see a number of messages from the left, many from black leaders, that unequivocally condemned a white comedian for using a racial epithet that has no business even residing in his vocabulary. It is, indeed, possible to abhor the deeply divisive and Draconian policies of the Trump administration while, at the same time, castigating entertainers of our political stripe when they jettison every line of decency.

Unfortunately, social media lulls us into the illusion of tribalism, complete with its us-versus-them modality. We lob our verbal grenades at anyone who seems to be part of the other side, slicing and dicing with an angry indignation that never stops. When one of our own is attacked, it’s time to re-powder, circle the wagons and fire away again, or so we think. These are, without a doubt, the most emotionally strained and troubled political times many of us have gone through. Our country is as torn and divided as it has been since the Civil War. There is so much at stake. To suggest, for even a moment, that Kathy Griffin is a victim worthy of our attention diminishes and denigrates the real Trump victims, like the 23 million people who would lose medical insurance under his plan, displaced workers denied job retraining benefits under his budget, families split and devastated by the cruelty of his deportations.

So let’s take some deep breaths and try to avoid the peripheral skirmishes that really don’t matter. That will make it easier to focus on the real challenge – reversing the course this country has been on since January 20.

AND NOW THE LATEST IN SPORTS: TWEETS THAT ROAR

Sports in general, and motorsport racing in particular, have never occupied much of my cranial real estate. Yet, I spent a good hunk of Memorial Day weekend thinking about both. It all started when Denver Post sports columnist Terry Frei fired off a thoughtless tweet saying he was “very uncomfortable” with a Japanese driver, Takuma Sato, winning the Indy 500.

As the Twittersphere erupted, complete with Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima references, Frei launched what has become the normal protocol for this kind of social media foot-in-mouth disorder: a series of inelegant apologies, one of which included a plug for his latest book. Then, as this formulaic minuet played out, front office honchos from the Denver Post went into full somber-and-righteous mode to declare the offending tweet “disrespectful and unacceptable”. “(It) doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for,” so sayeth the corporate executives in a prepared statement. They also fired Frei, a move that is not always part of this post tweet-gone-bad ritual.

So, besides the fact that Sato can drive really fast, what do we know so far? Number 1: Frei’s tweet was an outrageous thought that should never have left his brain, outside the confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Number 2: the Denver Post’s reaction was the epitome of disingenuousness. The newspaper is owned by a hedge fund that “stands” for only one thing: sucking as much money as it can out of its properties. This company has financially benefited from Frei’s verbal edginess as a four-time winner of the Colorado sportswriter of the year award. If the Indy 500 tweet was linked to his role as a Post columnist, then his editors had every right, if not an obligation, to see it before it went out, just as they read and edited his columns prior to publication. In practice, however, most newspapers encourage or require their writers to tweet and use other social media platforms as a way of plugging the brand and drawing eyeballs to their content. The owners waive their right of advance approval to take full advantage of the spontaneity that is social media. To encourage controversial writing that attracts readers makes sense. Firing the guy when his controversy crosses a line that was never drawn for him does not.

But there is something bigger going on here, namely an epidemic of sportswriters stumbling into the Twitter penalty box. A former football writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer incurred the wrath of his employer when he tweeted that the owner of the Browns is a “pathetic figure”. An ESPN sportscaster was disciplined for a tweet that described his competitors at a Boston television station as “2 washed-up athletes and a 60-yr-old fat guy with no neck.” An Associated Press sportswriter who tweeted about horrible refereeing in an NBA game got into trouble with his employer after the referee filed a law suit. A Chicago Sun Times sports reporter had to delete his Twitter account after his lifetime collection of sexist tweets went viral. A New York Post sportswriter was fired for an inauguration day tweet that said simply: “9.11.2001. 1.20.2017”, apparently an assertion that the Trump presidency was as much a threat to this country as the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings.

Before social media, sports reporters rarely encountered disciplinary action. As a union rep in this industry, the only sports discipline case I had was a hockey writer who, while at work, bet (and lost) $500 on whether the groundhog would see its shadow on February 2. (The poor chump swore he thought the no-gambling rule was limited to games he covered.) For the most part, sportswriters were in their own little world, far below management’s radar. The other huge difference between then and now is that many sports journalists of old distinguished themselves as top notch writers. Not limited to whatever unfinished and unvarnished thought might be floating in their heads, these literary giants were able to convert a mundane soccer match into compelling prose. I had never read a sports story before taking my first journalism class. I turned in a tepid, mechanical account of a student government meeting and my professor handed me a volume of selected sports articles. I told him I had no interest in sports. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “These are master story tellers. A good story is more than a recitation of facts.” For example:

• Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times) covering a 1960s Rose Bowl game involving an Iowa team: “There were thousands of people in calico and John Deer caps in their Winnebagos with their pacemakers and potato salad, looking for Bob Hope.”
• Shirley Povich (Washington Post) reporting on a New York Yankees pitcher tossing a perfect game in the 1956 World Series: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larson today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”
• Red Smith (New York Times) describing an unlikely home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Yes, those were the days, my friends. It was a calmer time, before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, a time when journalists faced only two tasks: getting it right and writing it well. In our brave, new, real time world, they are now expected to let loose with every embryotic half-baked thought that enters their heads. And pray that it doesn’t offend the suits who sign their paychecks. That leaves them with only one recourse, and I hope they take it: THINK – long and hard – before you tweet!

A MURDER ON FACEBOOK CASTS LIGHT ON TECHNOLOGY’S DARK SIDE

“Facebook Murder” blared from the headlines a few days back. I took it as an extreme approach to unfriending and was all set to delete my sarcastic political memes. Figured my life depended on it. Turns out this was far more serious than un-liking a post. A guy in Cleveland actually filmed himself murdering a man, a random victim, and quickly uploaded the video to Facebook. The murderer killed himself a few days later, apparently off camera.

Although we seem to be building an immunity to shock and dismay, the reaction to this murder broadcast was close to apoplectic. “No More Snuff Videos on Facebook,” demanded the Boston Globe. “Facebook Helps Violence Go Viral,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “What Could be Worse than Murder on Facebook?” asked Inc.com. Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist, said this of the episode: “Facebook’s existential crisis arrived with a vengeance this week.”

Really? So this is where we draw the line? This is where Facebook turns evil, when a guy kills somebody in cold blood and turns it into social media content? Death and violence are no strangers to Facebook. Earlier this year, a two-year-old boy’s death was streamed live there. He’d been riding in a car with his aunt and her boyfriend when a driver cut them off, left his vehicle and started shooting. The aunt filmed it for Facebook Live. Four teenagers filmed themselves on the same platform while torturing a mentally disabled man. Just last month, several men live streamed their sexual assault of a teenage girl while dozens watched on Facebook.

None of those cases provoked the wrath that followed Steve Stephens’ Easter Sunday murder of Robert Goodwin Sr., his handpicked snuff film victim. Rape, torture and a dead child fly under the radar, but this first made-for-Facebook murder was apparently a step too far over the line of outrage. Facebook is sympathetic and insists it moves as quickly as it can to delete offending content when users complain, but that the process can take hours. Amazingly, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a plan. It is called Artificial Intelligence. He says it will take many years to fully develop, but he envisions software sophisticated enough to distinguish between acceptable and deplorable content. Imagine that: an AI program to tell the difference between right and wrong, between a cute kitty video and a murder in progress.

Remember the days when technology was cool because it gave us more control over our lives? Think of that first time you sat smugly on the couch and changed the channel with the push of a remote button. If you weren’t up for a long diatribe on the wonders of supply side economics from your Republican brother-in-law, you could let the answering machine deal with him. And if you didn’t have the slightest idea what supply side economics was all about, along came Google. The technology was there to serve us. It was, in a sense, an extension of ourselves. We retained control.

That’s no longer the case. We now have social media networks so large and complicated that the only way they can be stopped from publishing vile, offensive content is to create a whole new layer of technology through Artificial Intelligence. When was it, exactly, that we, as a people, ceded control to technology? More importantly, how do we get it back?

This is about a lot more than one deranged man staging a murder on Facebook. A huge fact of our new technological life is that people are being constantly hurt and traumatized over social media with seemingly no remedy in sight, save a promise of AI and not-yet-invented software. Hundreds of kids kill themselves every year after being bombarded with cyber messages telling them they are too fat, or ugly, or dumb, or worthless. Over and over.

A sidebar of the Facebook killer story, one that got very little attention because it represented business as usual, involved the killer’s former girlfriend. Before Stephens pulled the trigger, he demanded, at gunpoint, that his victim pronounce the woman’s name for the video production. It was Joy Lane. Although she had nothing to do with this murder, Lane was quickly persecuted by the tapping of angry fingers on thousands of keypads. The messages: “Moral: don’t date Joy Lane.” “Joy Lane deserves to feel horrible.” “He killed people because of a fat bitch.”

Twitter hashtags emerged quickly. One was #JoyLane Massacre. “No disrespect but if somebody had to die it should’ve been Joy Lane,” read one of the tweets. Over on YouTube, there was an “Original Song About Stephens Ex-Girlfriend”. Lyrics: “Hell yeah I’m sick, psychotic deranged/And it’s all over a bitch named Joy Lane.”

This kind of stuff happens all the time. It breaks people and destroys lives. It has become the new normal. Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter last year after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti unplugged from all social media after receiving a rape threat against her five-year-old daughter. Until Reddit finally banned it, there was a discussion group with 150,000 subscribers called “Fat People Hate”. Users would find pictures of overweight people, mostly women, attach mean captions and post them on the target’s Facebook Page.

Other than a complete social media withdrawal, there is no quick and easy answer to this problem. For starters we need to think seriously about our relationship with technology. It has given us so much, but it is quickly evolving beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to shape it in ways that will enhance, rather than denigrate, the quality of our lives. How we and future generations respond to this dilemma will determine whether technology is an instrument that adds value to our civilization, or one that manages to suck all the humanity out of it. If we don’t find a way to control technology, it will end up controlling us. That’s one horror film that should never be made.

AN IMPORTANT LESSON LURKING AMONG THE RUBBLE ON FACEBOOK

I found something pretty incredible on Facebook the other day. It was hidden in the clutter of proclamations, declarations and protestations that dot our daily dose of social media cognition. It was unaccompanied by bold headlines and offered no sharp-edged sarcastic graphics. In plain, quiet 12-point type, the words almost seem to whisper. This is what they said:

“Just a thought but today, once again, I was reminded to use caution (when) speaking with family, friends and relatives. Those words might be the last thing that you ever have a chance to say to them. If you truly care, be careful. Sometimes hurt feelings become anger. Choose wisely.”

The message was written by a guy I barely know, someone I went to high school with 50 years ago. I can’t precisely place him, although I have a vague recollection of the two of us shooting spitballs in study hall. Now I am marveling at the wisdom and well-timed relevancy of his advice.

We’ve all been locked into this bizarre, and seemingly endless, political passion play for the last 18 months. Who among us has never chosen unwisely, never treaded or trampled on the feelings of those who don’t share our world view? The instantaneousness of social media is not always compatible with audience analysis and wise choices. Much has been written about how the presidential campaign, and its ongoing aftermath, have strained and destroyed close personal relationships (here, here and here). The New York Times just released a compelling video involving three parent-adult child dyads grappling with the Trump-Anti Trump dichotomy and the toll it took on their relationships. We’ve all gotten so caught up in preaching the righteousness of our beliefs that we needlessly and unintentionally hurt those who see the world differently.

I was so taken with my classmate’s advice, that I went to his homepage to see what other pearls of wisdom David had to offer. I am using only his first name here out of respect for his privacy, since he didn’t sign up to share his comments with my 300,000 blog readers. (Readership estimates calculated by Sean Spicer and Associates.) David heaped praise on the Republican/conservative control of all three branches of government and was critical of former President Obama for “forcing his extreme far-left agenda on an unwilling country by executive orders, left wing judges, and obsequious bureaucrats.”

As a far-left true believer, I disagreed with the content of virtually all of David’s political writings. Yet, there was something refreshingly nostalgic in the tone of his messages. He stuck to the subject matter, to the issue at hand, and never threw daggers or venom-laced sarcasm at those who might hold contrary views. I found it utterly refreshing. It was a throwback to our high school days.

I was on the debate team then. We learned how to argue both sides of an issue, a process that instilled a tremendous respect for differences of opinion. I covered the Minnesota Legislature in the 1970s, back when politicians treated each other with respect and civility, fighting over ideas without assassinating each other’s character. All of that now seems as outdated as rotary telephones and Smith Corona typewriters. We seem to have lost the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

I live in a 55-and-up community where we all smile and wave at each other. The friendliness, however, morphs into cut-throat vindictiveness as soon as the neighborhood list serve detects a whiff of political thought. This week’s “nana na nana” exchange was over who was more obnoxious, Madonna or Donald Trump? The monitor had to shut it down and remind us to avoid political discussions. Here we are, a bunch of geezers in the twilight of our lives, and we can’t carry on a political discussion without sounding like professional wrestlers.

Remember the old “Saturday Night Live” riff on Point/Counterpoint? Dan Akroyd always started his counter to Jane Curtin’s opening argument with, “Jane, you ignorant slut!” It was a funny exaggeration back then. Now it’s standard procedure. I finally went cold turkey on the nightly cable news talk shows because I couldn’t take the shouting, the interruptions and the caustic sarcasm. Then come those daily email solicitations from political groups, all using what Andrés Martinez, an Arizona State University professor, calls “dystopian depictions” of the opposition. Martinez astutely notes that people are more inclined to push a button and donate $20 if they think they are helping to fight evil incarnate, as opposed to a reasonable person with whom we disagree.

Polarization clearly wins for cable programming and internet fundraising. But it also seeps into our psyche where it does absolutely nothing for our humanity. One of David’s political posts defended Trump’s bankruptcy filings on the basis that they were nothing more than a successful business strategy. From the left, there are obviously a number of rational and legitimate retorts that could have been offered. Instead, an alleged liberal, posted this rebuttal: “So a success? Fuck no, and it takes a brainwashed piece of shit idiot to even pretend it’s so. Know what’s good though? You’re old, and will be dead soon. And the world will be better off.”

The angry, young author of that comment deserves to be hit with a speeding spitball. The truth is that the world will be better off when there are more people like David in it, people who stand up for their beliefs without denigrating those who believe something else.