Colorado Rejects Fracking: The Money's Not Talking; Social Media Is

[ibx 2]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardlevick/2013/11/07/colorado-rejects-fracking-the-moneys-not-talking-social-media-is/

I don't want to discuss if fracking is safe but the potential power of social media and Internet opinion manipulation.
On one hand it could be a positive form of direct democracy on other hand exactly the same social media tactics are used to speak out against vaccines....

Is this good or bad?

[shropshire 0]

This is good ... the 'people' have spoken.

The issue of vaccines is somewhat different .. this (fracking) is an issue that effects a lot of people all at the same time.. whereas if you do or do not vaccinate only effects (in the short term) the individual involved.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[ibx 2]

Quote

The issue of vaccines is somewhat different .. this (fracking) is an issue that effects a lot of people all at the same time.. whereas if you do or do not vaccinate only effects (in the short term) the individual involved.

Only in the very short term.... Herd immunity only works when the herd is immune. See the outbreak of Polio in Syria for example.

[sfzombie13 310]

the controversy about vaccines is mainly the amount of them being given now and at the much earlier ages. while i agree that polio and some of the others are extremely valuable, what is the sense of having a baby of around a year old vaccinated against hep a, b, or c? my daughter made me aware of the situation, and after reading up on it, i agree with her. sorry for the drift.

social media is the wave of the future, whoever is better at manipulating it will rule. there are just too many ignorant people in the country, and also too many too lazy to research. one is just as bad as the other. if politicians had their collective heads removed from their anuses, we wouldn't have to worry too much about this. but you all know how easy that will be.

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Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

[kelpdiver 2]

ibx

I don't want to discuss if fracking is safe but the potential power of social media and Internet opinion manipulation.
On one hand it could be a positive form of direct democracy on other hand exactly the same social media tactics are used to speak out against vaccines....

Is this good or bad?

for civil libertarians and the freedom of speech, too much speech is always preferable to not enough speech. And the empowering aspect to online speech is that there are not the same barriers that existed in the age of newspapers where a few people owned most of the press, and individuals could only get their voice as far as they could travel. Wikipedia lets anyone edit, and reedit if people put in BS, so its end result is better than a benchmark encyclopedia.

There are new downsides - with anonymity comes the ability to deceive via guerilla marketing techniques. Whether it's Fox or Coke (and many more) paying people to post in online forums all day, or comedians releasing a nameless funny video on youtube, you can create the false sense of consensus. The ability to spread hoaxes exploded with email and only increased since, though it also gave us fact checker websites for those who actually choose to investigate.

But in the whole, when you see uprisings in places like Egypt or Iraq using twitter to organize against an oppressive regime, I think we stay well on the good side of the column.

[JerryBaumchen 1,080]

Hi ibx,

Quote

power of social media and Internet opinion manipulation

As Bob Dylan wrote, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

A long, long time ago it was the newspaper because that was the only social media.

Then along came radio.

Then along came tv.

Ole Bob was right,

JerryBaumchen