Social Items

TPQ
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
The Detail ✒ The police monitor and produce internal reports on the social media activity of the Northern Ireland public – including our politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens.

THE DETAIL

By Luke Butterly, Rory Winters, 
05-February-2021

A spokesperson for the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) also admitted that if people were to know the police were treating their social media activity in this way, it could negatively affect their mental and physical health.

In October 2020, using Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation, The Detail sought all social media monitoring reports that the PSNI's Strategic Communication and Engagement Department produced in a one-year-period.

We were provided with hundreds of pages of heavily redacted material, with many pages entirely blacked out. In addition, over 165 pages were not released at all.

The PSNI redacted all posts, made by members of the public on social media, from the documentation released to The Detail.

The only posts shown in the material were made by official PSNI social media accounts and occasionally by established media outlets or public bodies.

We were, however, provided with the police’s internal comments on both the redacted and unredacted social media posts – though many of these comments were also redacted, to varying degrees.

Continue reading @ The Detail.

PSNI Monitor And Report On Public’s Social Media Activity

Geraldine Green on the downside of social media. 

There’s not a day goes by now that I don’t consider disengaging from social media and either deactivating or completely deleting my account. I’ve tried keeping it on and taking breaks but it’s too easy to return and look at when I wake up in the morning and grab my phone or when I’m waiting somewhere or any freakin time. 

Social media is perniciously addicting and I’m really struggling with all the toxicity on here right now, all the mean snark and nastiness, all the uncharitable weaponized political posts and comments carpet bombing everyone.

And I’m not seeking any sympathy here or asking for anyone to say they’d miss me if I left, no, I’m not looking for any of that. I’m merely expressing what I’ve been feeling for so long.

Sometimes it makes my stomach turn to see people I love be so rude and disrespectful and hateful on here. That stuff has caused me to think differently about them, and I’m certain my old fashioned, traditional American values have undoubtedly caused the same in them, they think differently about me now because I don’t condemn who they condemn.

I support law enforcement, and I don’t call for riots and revolution. So be it. They have their reasons and I have mine but right now I don’t support what I’ve been seeing from some people I thought were friends. I can’t stomach their tone. They’re losing their humanity and compassion and they’ve stopped caring about who they’re hurting. They seem to think their war on America is justified and that we all deserve what’s been going on online and in our streets and whatever is coming. I do not stand among them and I will not read or participate in their war on everything and everyone. It’s toxic poison. And this is exactly why there’s not a day goes by that I don’t consider deactivating or deleting.

Geraldine Green is a Tolerance Advocate

Social Media Is Perniciously Addicting

Geraldine Green identifies some of the problems with social media backed perspectives.

The biggest problem I’ve noticed online is the escalating proliferation of nonsense that many proclaim as facts. The real fact is that anyone anywhere can write anything online at any time and boldly proclaim that what they’ve written is the truth. They then provide endless links to bolster their claims, while claiming the links to also be the truth and therefore prove their point(s), when those links are actually just to others who also hold no real credentials but who have bigger followings than the first writer who added the link to them. The first writer conflates the link author’s large number of followers with factual credence when nothing could be further from the truth. 

A large number of followers does not equal credence with any authority! And yet to many keyboard warriors the large numbers of followers lend credibility to someone who is actually quite undeserving. Hence all the noisy quacks online spouting misinformation all the time. There is no scholarship involved, no value placed in regular book reading by real scholars, no offline education that demonstrates any real credibility, but rather shows only the loads of dubious Googling and shouting about debunking and then discrediting those who actually do the real work, the real work of book study and scholarship that provide actual credible and credentialed citations by other scholars. 

Anyone anywhere at any time can write anything online and call it anything and people will buy it and think it’s the truth just because they read it online. So few look further than online. They do not look for the books written by the reputable scholars on the topics they’re interested in. They don’t seem to think it’s necessary because they seem to think they have everything they need online. And that is the crux of the problem. So many of them have never subjected themselves to a scholarly discipline. They don’t know what it means to follow through on a particular field of study and how disciplined one must be to meet its completion. 

It takes a great deal of time and humility and commitment, none of it is instant like Google, it is rather a long and arduous process of realization, a realization acquired through deep book study and scholarly discussion with qualified mentors, the deepest realization that no true scholarship exists in a vacuum. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And so, obviously, many opinions stated as truth online have no real or truthful foundation


Geraldine Green runs in the age of Covid!


Escalating Proliferation Of Nonsense

In a piece that passed us by Pauline Mellon had some interesting observations to make about council politics in Derry.

He Is No Seamus Heaney!

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)