friend or foe?

     I tend to harbor an inherent form of skepticism towards any political insight that I come across on the plethora of mass media channels. In the past, I have found myself being more open to new ideas exposed to me through social media outlets. The logic is sound: since the information that I am presented is determined by people whom I know and trust, the information must be valid. Over the past few months, however, certain events occurred that have made me question this newly emerging paradigm.
     Can we trust the information presented to us through social media as being a truly objective collection of articles, videos, blogs and posts that have been filtered by our actual friends? I hope that the average person would immediately shout "No!", but fear that is not the case. We have developed a level of confidence with our social media entities. After all, we tell these websites our deepest and darkest secrets, and in most cases the information is held proprietary-so that only who we want to see it, does. It's easy to forget that it is not in fact your friends who decide what you see on your timeline, rather Facebooks infinitely complex algorithms. This was all brought to the center of my attention one day when I came across an interesting video that one of my friends had shared on Facebook. It was a collection of recent UFO sightings. While UFO's and ancient alien theories are nothing new, for some reason this video stood out to me. There was a particular shot of what was presumably a UFO descending over Jarusalem and it was particularly captivating. The interesting thing is that when I tried to pull the video up on my friend's page who had posted it, to share with another friend, the video was no longer there. Now, I never contacted my friend to see if this truly was the case, but my theory is as follows: What if Facebook or other social sites are taking advantage of this level of confidence we have developed with them? Any of these sites could easily take information given to them by *outside organizations with alternate interests* and pass it off as being shared with you by your friends. The implications of this are massive.
     Then came the KONY2012 campaign. This event had no precedent in terms of the amount of support generated from a single video campaign on Facebook. Just the fact that more than 50% of my news feed was dedicated to a single topic was enough to raise the alarm for me. I didn't buy into it. Apparently, the majority of my Facebook friends did not feel the same. I won't go into my own personal views of the situation in and around Uganda. If you're interested, you can read this article which pretty much parallels my beliefs as far as what the KONY campaign is really about. I simply aim to point out the pitfalls in putting full trust in the fact that our friends decide what we see on our timelines, twitter feeds, or blog reels.
     There has been a paradigm shift and if the powers that be intend to remain in control of the masses, they will have to change their tactics accordingly.