Social Media

When you look at social media, or at least when I do, you see a lot of things posted multiple times by different people.  This is because they shared the item.

A recent study showed that certain foreign entities to include Russia, created bogus web sites and targeted certain people who they knew would tend to share stories without verifying them.

In fact the more outrageous the story, the faster it tended to get shared.

These bogus sites would have very American sounding names and while it turns out the more successful ones tended to be far right ones, they also created far left ones.

This study showed that much of the acrimony we see on social media is in fact manufactured by these entities with the general objective of disrupting Americans.

The idea being, I gather, that the more we got entangled in domestic disputes the less likely we were to intervene in things like the Crimea invasion or China's activities in the South China Seas.

They would much prefer we get outraged over gun rights, or abortion, or immigration than over international items.

It was also aimed at discrediting certain politicians who were likely to oppose these actions in favor of ones who wouldn't.

In order words we were played and are still being played.

There was never a sex ring in a DC pizza parlor or never a plan to seize Americans guns.  Our outrage over political correctness was manipulated and there wasn't a tremendous increase in disrespect for our flag.

There were and always will be some isolated events but the concept that there is a concerted conspiracy to erode our values is in fact a foreign agents attempt to do just that.

Don't just share things you see on the Internet, especially the ones that are most outrageous, unless you know they are true.  Most aren't.