We can have democracy or we can have Facebook

Would you rather play basketball with Shaquille O'Neal or Neil deGrasse Tyson on your team? They're both humans. They're also both "black", so what's your point?

Well, how do you know that 5G doesn't cause Coronavirus when it's February and no one knows anything about the virus? We now know that both subjects are unrelated, but I followed this virus from early January and it took the general population 2 WHOLE MONTHS to pick up on it. Those 2 months were filled with conspiracy theorists, and actually a huge number of them turned out to be right, like the very existence and seriousness of the virus itself.

Similarly, at the time masks widely agreed upon to be ineffective. Anyone seen with a mask outside was looked at weirdly, anyone buying masks or telling people to buy masks was called a conspiracy theorist. Reasonable people at the time were lied to by their own government into believing that masks weren't important, because the government didn't want to compete with their own population since they were running short on supply. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...

The point is, out of your reasonable examples of things that are obviously false, I can already take issue with one of them because it depends on when you would apply the censorship. If it's February and you're applying censorship to "5G causes Coronavirus", you're also probably applying it to "buy N95 masks", and you're also probably applying it to "don't let Chinese people into our airports, avoid Chinese people altogether" because it's racist, even though that's the correct thing that should have been done, instead of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNMdg4morQs.

My point is, facts and truth are fluid, especially in new situations that we don't know anything about. And especially when politics are involved. By June everyone understood that lockdowns and social distancing were good and necessary, except that the entirety of media, academia, and elite society in general decided to give up on this for the George Floyd protests. If truth can bend this easily once it's convenient, why should I take it seriously at all?

So I reaffirm my point that I will absolutely not change my mind on this, and without giving it any pause. Truth doesn't exist when we're talking about politics, and trying to pretend that it does is naive. You're naive for believing that it exists. It's all about power and what's convenient for people in power (the media, academia and elite society), it's absolutely not about truth, and this year of all years should have woken you up to this fact.

Its good you are to trying to help but forcing other people who don't want to wear mask againts their interest is not helping, its selfish.

>See math above for my thoughts on this.

The number of death is still very low

I’ll go and enjoy my truth in a country with no outbreak.

The problems you speak of are US problems. Good luck on the way down, there is a long way to fall for you guys.

Some fun points for you to not change your mind on:

- China mandated masks in January (as did Taiwan). No conspiracy or confusion, that was a US thing...

- Radio waves causing a virus... there is zero evidence of that ever happening. So why would anyone believe it now... or ever

- actually none of the conspiracy theories were ever correct. Not one of them. Nor were they plausible to anyone outside of the lower educated half of the US.

It’s funny you turned out to be an example of why these things need to be fixed. Read some world news. Go look at New Zealand and Australia, or Taiwan or Korea if you want to see what countries that follow facts and truth rather than ... whatever fluid-truth mess you are trying to articulate.

Belated reply, sorry. I'm just a simple bear.

Thank you. Three (of your many points) stand out to me and are not receiving enough attention (criticism).

1. People are seeing more ads.

I'd love to see this quantified. Attention theft is another form of pollution, right? Just like we're starting to quantify the impact of noise and light pollution on both our physical health and mental well being.

(I live a mostly ad-free existence. It's always quite jarring when I step outside of my personal filter bubble. Like doing eldercare for my mom, airports, shopping, dining. TVs blaring every where. It's surreal.)

2. advertisers are spending more

I don't doubt that advertisers are spending more online. I would like to know (confirm) if overall ad spending has much changed.

Or perhaps the population of advertisers has changed. So some types of businesses are now advertising less, and others have embraced digital ads, and therefore make up the difference.

Personal anecdote: A sibling opened a neighborhood retail knickknacks (aka "shit you don't need") store. The performance of Facebook and instagram ads is surprisingly good. So I'm now certain that targeted ads are fantastic for at least some advertisers.

Or perhaps what's considered advertising has changed. With the decline of brand based campaigns and rise of ad blocking, there is more product placement and payola (influencers).

I have no idea how non advertising marketing dollars are accounted for; probably something like surveying CMOs. I've skim read reports that marketing budgets as percentage of revenue has been stable thru the shift to digital.

3. ad performance is going down

This is very interesting.

I've long assumed that a huge fraction of digital advertising is fraudulent. Examples abound of Facebook lying, belatedly revising metrics downward, remarkable coincidences that errors always favor the aggregator, etc.

But maybe the bigger scandal is declining performance. I would totally believe this; diminishing returns and all that. We (society) are completely saturated, so excess advertising may even be detrimental. Worse example I can think of is political advertising.

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Thanks again. I wish critics would better address all the points you touch on.