Bring on the Facebook Fake Slop!

Did you hear? Joe Biden won’t be helicoptered off to his Rehoboth beach house following his sole term’s expiration. He’ll actually be jetted off to GITMO to serve a life sentence. Also, did you hear this? There’s video evidence of Hillary Clinton drinking the freshly drawn blood of a sweet-faced colleen helplessly strapped into a gurney? Better yet, did you catch wind that Tom Hanks was arrested for sedition and is under court martial aboard one of the U.S. Navy’s dark ships somewhere off the coast of Spain?

Oh, and those wildfires engulfing Los Angeles? They weren’t caused by lax brush clearing, a dearth of hotshots, outdated government policy, and a head-scratchingly scant amount of water to douse the mountainous flames. Nope. The President is mum, but the entire conflagration was caused by particle beams emitted from alien-controlled drones, like the ones that have been stalking the New Jersey sky.

What? Why are you serving me that gimlet eye? Don’t believe me? Well, I actually saw all of that on Facebook, in stories linked from such reputable sites as USAPatriotFirst.org, OwntheLibs.Us, and MyPillow.com. Now that I’m thoroughly convinced that “liberal” is just a byword for “lizard people,” and that the so-called “Collins Elite” are running secret raids on child-trafficking cabals, I’ll spend the rest of my days voting straight-line Republican, convinced white-hat bureaucrats are diligently beavering to écrasez l’infâme The Cathedral.

You see, I was once a sensible thinker, a rational news reader, an upstanding citizen. But then Meta captain Mark Zuckerberg axed his moderation team, which had heretofore kept all the sensationalized, and outright factitious, reporting down a dark, impenetrable hole. Zuckerberg, in all his delusions of imperial grandeur, declared olly olly oxen free on all manner of tabloidish fodder. “Après moi, le fake news déluge!” he decreed. That’s when the epistemological tide wave overwhelmed my mind’s puny breakwaters. Before, the only news that appeared on my Facebook feed was local weather reports, Surgeon General warnings to get my flu shot, local contractor ads offering half off on insulation installation, and strange, fascinating tales about how the incoming president of the United States is simultaneously a bumbling braggart and budding dictator intent on establishing an American theocracy.

You know, standard media fare.

Now, with the floodgates down, and no mediators between my defenseless senses and all that unfiltered misinformation, my connectome nodes have been overwhelmed with MAGA propaganda. All of a sudden, I only wish to make my country great again, buy American, and heave-ho illegal squatters back across the border. Why? Because I read an article on Breitbart with the attention-stealing headline of “Democrats Hate America!” I had no choice but to believe all of it! It was typo-ridden text on a website I don’t normally read, from a writer I’ve never heard of and probably doesn’t exist, that had a picture of an angry, washed out Kamala Harris. How was I to tell every asserted claim wasn’t a crystalline charge of truth?

Zuckerberg obviously prizes coin over civil discourse. Or else he wouldn’t have folded his extensive fact-checking operation that kept irresponsible opinions cloaked from impressionable naifs such as yours truly. President Biden is on the mark when he warned about the corrosive effects of misinformation. He recently pouted to USA Today that given “the nature of the way information is shared now, there are no editors out there to say ‘That’s simply not true.’”

Of course, those probably aren’t a direct quote from Biden. He more likely mumbled something about “goddamn screeners,” that Trump is a “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” and trailed off until requesting a tapioca pudding cup. The upright editors at the airport’s stock fishwrapper thought it best to convey what Biden might have, probably, definitely meant. The New York Times duped the defense of information gatekeeping, printing the headline: “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False” without a whiff of irony or scintilla of shame. An anthropophagist’s essay titled “Nutritionist Says Cannibalism Is Immoral and Unhealthy. Cannibals Rule That False (And Eat the Moralizing Health Nut)” would be more believable.

Is Biden on to something, though, diagnosing the risk of a freewheeling ecosystem of slanted facts, obscured info, scurrilous takes, spurious claims, explosive conjecture, armies of slop bots, unverified splayers of sophistry, a cacophony of unregulated, unmonitored, unapproved sentiments? W. H. Auden urged us to “entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to.” Perhaps Biden, in his overstuffed life experience, replete with both tragedy and triumph, is offering his sagest advice since detailing how to deal with blade-wielding Delaware toughs at the public swimming hole. Don’t believe everything you read on the web, practice discernment, sharpen your judgment—that type of hard-won wisdom.

That’s all true enough. Except from liberal technocrats. The left’s prerogative isn’t to dilute the murky, gaseous waters of online discourse so that what’s true can stand out among the sludge. It’s all narrative control. Zuckerberg recently revealed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Biden apparatchiks harangued his staff to remove founded claims about the Covid vaccine’s side effects. Then there was the zoo full of the left’s pet premises, including, but not limited to, the efficacy of masks in spreading virii transmission, Joe Biden’s cognitive attenuation, Trump’s Russiophilic treason, tween girls needing life-saving access to puberty mitigators, and that climate change is making summers hotter, winters colder, and we all need to hook non-biodegradable Chinese batteries into everything to bring the global temperature down a degree lest we all fry.

So forgive me if I don’t join the moral panic over Facebook dropping its Hays Code and diverting its expurgative snoops to more productive functions. The internet isn’t instantiating idiocracy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, an intriguing notice about a million dollar giveaway just popped into my Facebook feed. And it only requires my credit card information, Social Security number, and my spouse’s safety-deposit box code. There’s no way I can lose! My ship’s finally come in, you sucker readers!