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The Evils of Facebook in the War Against Reason

Facebook is one of the greatest frauds whereby thoughtless friends share or tacitly embrace ideas which, in doing so, adds personal, relatable flair to messages being distributed from largely unknown reporters. 

In effect, these friends then subject a wider community to the thought that since their friends are supportive of such ideas, then they ought to carry some merit or authenticity. 

Facebook commits a great disservice to communication, serving primarily to subject meaningful dialogue to inherently-binary measures of laudability or contemptibility. 

Whereas scientific evaluation serves to extract emotion, Facebook serves to embolden the fallacy-ridden supposition that fact follows fanfare, that truth trails trendiness, and that democratic participation (by way of “likes” or “shares”) can reliably support truth or sustainably produce virtue.

What's more, Facebook and other social media sites tend also to further the fallacy that the last breath, or more precisely the final keystroke, wins the argument. 

Indeed, nothing could possibly be further from the truth, and nothing today commits a greater disservice to logical discourse.

Of course, most Facebook friends haven’t conducted even a shred of due diligence to ascertain the validity of either the story or the reporter, so the message travels more than halfway around the world, or dozens of times across it, before the truth comes out. 



Meanwhile, the average Facebook user begins to (either actively or passively) endorse the original message as truth, rushing to judgment and prescriptions as he or she becomes immune to that eventual emergence of the actual truth. 

By this time, it is far too late, as Facebook busybodies have already launched GoFundMe pages and other campaigns to remedy the problem as it had originally been reported, while any conflicting news is relegated to the rank of fringe theory, at best, or that of nonsense, which is far more common. 

Ironically, the average reader reliably elevates himself beyond those later stories only on the knowledge first acquired, rendering himself immune to subsequent reports as a means to protect himself from being wrong

All the while, he is merely seduced by the persuasive powers of prima facie evidence over objective reality, the latter of which is left to fight an arduous uphill battle against an army fueled by fancifully-contrived fairy tales which fit the ongoing narrative being produced by still others who know what’s going on, while the unwitting public is all too happy to oblige.

This, then, manifests into one of the great social confusions of the day, which appears everywhere to spawn from the coalescence of logic and agreement, certainty and consensus. 

Where one often casually and so frequently encounters the latter, he is often too quick to conclude the backing of the former. 

His judgment, as so often appears to be the case, lazily gleans and manufactures ersatz facts from feelings and fabrications, the latter two of which prove far more familiar and far simpler to digest, yet they draw us no nearer to truth.

Their digestibility, however, scarcely succumbs to the tenacity of truth, as the ranks of the latter are limited to the few patient and enduring minds who have acknowledged the futility of the fight against inertial illogic.  

Thus, we are left with the budding trend in modern America, where logical discourse is popularly dismissed in favor of entertaining chatter, which has become so cheaply distributable and widely accessible, where the average person refuses to read or heed anything which is less than mainstream, while readily consuming mainstream media which is nothing short of propaganda.

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