Hi friends,
Just a quick note to say that I have a book due to my publisher in nine weeks, so itâll be written-only until I can get back to recording audio versions in April. (But donât worry, youâll still receive three high-quality, well-researched, thought-provoking pieces per week from now until my deadline.)
I will never forget where I was when 9/11 happened.
First-period history class, tenth grade.
The phone on the classroom wall rang.
My teacher answered and immediately burst into tears. I whispered to my seatmate, âDo you think her son died or her husband got in a car accident?â
She hung up the phone, white as a ghost, and turned to face the class.
âWeâre heading down to the auditorium. Today you will watch history in the making.â
2,977 American souls lost their lives on September 11th, 2001.
Some got hit by planes.
Some burned alive in jet fuel.
Some were crushed beneath millions of pounds of concrete and steel.
An estimated 1,355 died of smoke inhalation, choking to death on black poison.
Rather than roasting alive in 1,000-degree flames, more than two hundred brave souls took their life into their own hands and jumped.
TheyÂ
jumpedÂ
fromÂ
nearlyÂ
aÂ
quarter-mileÂ
inÂ
height,Â
reachingÂ
speedsÂ
ofÂ
almostÂ
150
miles
per
hour.
Ten.
terrifying.
seconds.
Before smashing into the pavement, their bodies shattering and splattering beyond all recognition.
The Catholic Church declared these were not suicides, but forced homicides.
Thatâs how many American corpses will be added to cemeteries by Easter thanks to COVID-19.
335 World Trade Center attacks.
One 9/11, three times a week, for nearly two years, with no end in sight.
Except instead of choking on black smoke, these American bodies die while gasping for clean air, with lungs that feel full of mud, or on fire, or filled with a thousand stinging bees.
One million sets of American lungs, heaving for one more breath of air that will never come.
All thanks to a preventable disease.
All thanks to a preventable disease for which we have an immune-system-training vaccine thatâs proven to radically decrease our chances of death.
But tens of millions of people refuse to take it.
Because they have Facebook.
I have a friend who caught Covid early on in the pandemic.
Long Covid.
Couldâve died.
Months later, he still couldnât walk up a single flight of stairs.
Fast-forward a year.
His whole family now believes Covid is a hoax.
That vaccines contain trackers.
That masks will injure their nose.
That standing near someone whoâs had a booster will get them sick.
This, despite the fact that vaccines drastically drop our chances of dying from Covid and even Donald Trump is trying to get the word out.
Instead, while sitting in lockdown, my friendâs family did what tens of millions of others didâââthey let the wormhole Internet devour their time and turn their brains to mush.
They were radicalized by an algorithm.
Facebook is fully aware that they profit from addiction, fraud, lies, and death.
Itâs their entire business model:
Addict users â sell ads to the highest bidder â push ads to addicts.
They allowed anti-vaccine groups to balloon to hundreds of thousands of followers.
They profited from anti-vaccine ads that compared vaccines to the Holocaust.
They made money from anti-vaccine ads selling 24-pound bags of Vitamin C for $432.
They turned a profit from ads falsely suggesting vaccines cause autism, that they contain microchips, and that masking doesnât help prevent Covid.
They accepted anti-vaccine ads with budgets up to $499 and routinely spread them to as many as 50,000 people at a time.
They allowed 430 anti-vaccine pages with more than 450 million followers to set up shops to sell their productsâââeven though Facebook had promised to kill the lie-filled infodemic a year earlier.
Russia, Ch!na, Q-Anoners, quack doctors, self-published authors, Ivermectin hawkers, vitamin and mineral pill-pushers, and alt-right doomsday bloggers are all too happy to spend heavily on anti-vaccine advertising and content marketing.
Sowing chaos and confusion in American minds is a highly profitable enterprise, as it keeps dupes clicking and sharing and buying into misinformation, disinformation, downright lies, and utter nonsense, all of which leads to a fracturing of society, a compromised nation, and heaps of American corpses.
And thatâs just Covid.
Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow shareholders have made hundreds of billions of dollars from ads promoting everything from human trafficking, spreading religious hatred, climate change denial, democratic destruction, societal breakdown, Russian propaganda, IP theft, targeting children, Asian bots, third-world violence, 5G fears, white supremacy and Nazism leading to literal murder, and an untold number of other cons and scams and crimes we have yet to uncover.
And if you read through the leaked Facebook Files, it quickly becomes clear that this is a decade-long pattern of behavior that will not stop until it is stopped.
As Frances Haugen (the whistleblower and former product manager in the Facebook Civic Integrity Department) said:
âFacebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.â
Call me old-fashioned, but if someone knowingly profits from lies that lead to death, they should be held criminally responsible.
Congressional calls to action
There is much to be done in this world and much of it is an undoing.
The reality is that much of my own family is still unvaccinatedâââincluding two nurses; one whose daughter was hospitalized. You donât even have to have Facebook to become infected by its misinformation, because it steeps so far into culture via unthinking evangelists. (Stupidity, after all, is the ultimate viral pathogen.)
How many more people have to die before democracy does the right thing and shuts off the lie machine that is rotting peopleâs brains for dollars?
Congress needs to do four things immediately:
Open a deep-dive investigation into Facebookâs systems, algorithms, advertising platform, and addiction mechanisms.
Get rid of all addictive features, ban all political and health ads, eliminate the share button, and install a watchdog to enforce the deletion and prosecution of those who purposefully spread health misinformation.
Get forensic accountants to compile an inventory of all the thousands of Facebook users who were verifiably radicalized by the platform and later died of Covid.
Put Mark Zuckerberg on trial for consistently putting profit above people, and in doing so, causing significantly more deaths than the jihadi pilots on 9/11 or literally anyone else in American history.
Make no mistake, my friends, we still have plenty of terrorists in America.
One of them runs the worldâs biggest social media site.
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