Quote of the Week...from Apple CEO Tim Cook

 A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.      ---Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Apple Corporation CEO Tim Cook made the above quote during a January 29th address at the International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Collection in which he indirectly lambasted social media companies like Facebook and Twitter for their algorithms that divide users according to their perceived political and social leanings, algorithms that tend to provide reinforcing feedback loops which create a false impression of general consensus for often false and extreme ideas and information.  With the use of "social dilemma" he made direct reference to the recent documentary film that exposed this ominous phenomenon...click here to read my review of it last September.  But for me it's not just social media, or even search engines that have been designed to skew people's search results based on the company's analysis of their preferences based on their online activities.  Long before the Internet became such an ingrained part of people's everyday lives, we had highly opinionated political talk radio and TV opinion shows that listeners and viewers could selectively use to surround themselves with only the viewpoints that resonated with their own prejudices, amplifying them and providing them with the means to verbally express themselves as well as connect up with others feeling as they do.  Not that I am against the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment which guarantees free speech, but what's going on now is the distorting of information and truth to obtain engagement and profit...and we're consequently getting lawmakers and presidents actually elected on the basis of lies and conspiracy theories while hostile foreign intelligence agencies seem to have no trouble inserting their own divisive messages disguised as homegrown opinions and "facts".  I stopped posting links to this blog on Facebook starting the beginning of this year because I noticed this trend toward wacky belief systems in some of my Facebook friends and felt that the company's algorithms were manipulating them...and that they were trying the same with me.  I still check in on it (with a wary attitude) from time to time as well as Twitter, but nowhere nearly as often as I used to.  Thank you, Tim Cook...but this warning bears much repeating, and from many different other sources as well...