The internet is a wonderful
place. Here you can voice your opinions on blogs and social media, and truly
experience freedom of speech. But what happens when that speech is simply
mimicking the bias of the MSM, repeating lies, conspiracy theories, and citing
opinions as fact? You could call it distorted reality, but its impact reaches
much farther than that.
Take the “‘war on terror,” for example. The only reason anyone knows about
what’s happening on the other side of the planet is because the MSM and people
on the internet never stop talking about it. That, in turn, leads to speculation
as to the cause of terrorism. Governments around the world increase mass
surveillance, changing all sorts of laws along the way, to ‘protect’ us from
co-called freedom-hating bad guys. They claim just about everything, including
privacy, is worth sacrificing in order to save lives.
The logic (and math) just doesn’t add up here, but more about that later.
Next comes the MSM-driven propaganda machine promoting military intervention.
Bombs are dropped, weapons are bought and sold, and drones kill suspected
terrorists, along with any innocents who happen to be around them. Bloggers and
pundits take to the web with angry words. All that death is justified, some
believe, because the ones being killed are ‘bad’ and the ones doing the killing
are ‘good.’ That’s the same line the public has been sold to ever war
since the dawn of time. And it’s always been bullshit.
However, the damage it doesn’t stop there. Some propose solutions like, banning
all Muslims from entering the United States. Hatred and discrimination become
‘acceptable’ in some circles, because the sheep have been ‘told’ to focus their
anger on very specific groups of people, based on how they look or what religion
they practice.
Once ignorance and hate becomes acceptable on any public level, it spreads to
things like anti-LGBT bathroom laws, rewriting school text books that deny
established science, and attempt to replace well-established facts with
religious tales, folklore, and ancient stories based on superstition.
The vicious cycle of ignorance and hate picks up steam by angering millions of
people along the way. The road it travels is the internet. Tweets and Facebook
posts suddenly become a source of news, even if those tweets and posts are based
on nothing but a single experience or one person’s opinion.
Protecting the right of people to piss and moan on the internet is essential in
a free society. But there also has to be room for the truth, and people need to
think before they rant.
Consider the fact that although nearly 3,000 people were kill in the 9/11
attacks on the World Trade Center, (the event that officially kicked-off
America’s anti-terrorist agenda), millions more lives have been lost in the ‘war
on terror’ that followed.