Participation in Facebook and Twitter can and will be used against you. You have no right to remain silent after you’ve already spoken. If you need an attorney, good luck with that.

Participation in Facebook and Twitter can and will be used against you. You have no right to remain silent after you’ve already spoken. If you need an attorney, good luck with that.

(The US Supreme Court is dismantling the Bill of Rights, starting with a major opening salvo against your Miranda Rights recently.)

In one recent post, I linked to an archived Nitter mirror showing that a company called FAMA doxxed a man’s Twitter account for “bad language”, “risky likes”, etc, and sent his employer a 350+ page printout.

Pointy Hair Bosses are too dangerous to be allowed access to information like this.

They get snookered by con artists at companies like this in order to fire or refuse to hire people based on what that person’s legitimate beliefs and speech are.

If you can’t find a job, or get laid off, can you say definitively that FAMA wasn’t the reason why? That was rhetorical. You aren’t even supposed to know that they exist.

What starts happening to you when Landlords start using it to see if you are “trouble” without getting to know you?

The answer, of course, is that Twitter, which is already worth nothing, is definitely causing people to become unemployed, and potentially homeless.

I certainly hope you’re hearing about FAMA from me and not after it’s already too late and you’re living in a box under the CTA train.

Nobody should want to live in a world where things like this exist, and the only way to be safe from ambush “reports” like FAMA is to have no “social media” presence on Facebook or Twitter. It’s likely that even if you “go private”, Facebook is selling them data. You can opt out by refusing to participate in your own drumhead.

However, other sinister uses of “Social Media”, primarily centered around Facebook, but also Twitter and some others, involve regulations formulated by the Social Security Administration during the Trump presidency.

The Republicans have been looking for ways to knife Social Security for years, and one of their repeated talking points centers on convincing people that anyone with a severe mental impairment is faking it and should just find a job. Let’s set aside the fact that 20 million Americans who would like to work lost their jobs under Trump in addition to the 18 million who would have liked to have one and couldn’t before him, and most of those jobs haven’t returned. (140,000 jobs short in Illinois alone vs. March 2020), and we’ll focus on what Social Security is doing to try to play gotcha game bullshit under Trump’s regulation created by former Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul (who was locked out of his office and fired by President Biden).

The first prong of Trump’s attack on the mentally ill involves Facebook. It says that the SSA shall look at the Facebook pages for anyone on Disability and comb them over for evidence that contradicts the disability they claim they have.

In other words, did you have a good day and go mow the lawn and end up in Facebook with pictures mowing your lawn and having a beer?

Did you go on vacation for 3 days and smile once while you were at a restaurant and you didn’t want to be the party-pooper so you smiled on command, even though you weren’t actually, you know, in the mood?

Well, all of that is “evidence” against you.

Trump tried to go further than this in a regulation canceled by Biden. The canceled regulation says that Social Security was to start harassing mentally ill claimants every two years, doing a full 11 page Continuing Disability Review, and basically what that is, is where they go digging through your life every few years looking for reasons why you may no longer qualify for Social Security benefits.

Some people get better, enough to work, but most people don’t. 99% of the people pulled for a CDR are found to still be disabled, because being approved for Disability in the first place was a tough row to hoe and so putting people through this is not only barbaric, but it’s a waste of money too.

Congress never gives the SSA enough money to do much more than spot check people with long form reviews 5% of the time, and the rest of the people who get full reviews are “scored” by a computer program based on a number of factors that produces a “statistical likelihood” of medical improvement.

To clear their backlog, they send out “short form reviews” as well, and these ask basic questions designed to probe to see if they will put you through the ringer. If you don’t make any comments, have been seeing your doctor regularly for the condition you were approved for, haven’t worked, and haven’t gone back to school, you’ll very likely be waved through.

I have an Aunt who has Schizophrenia. It’s very bad. On top of this, she has severe Osteoporosis, and a number of other problems. She’s had Social Security for years and would not be able to support herself without it. She’s in her early 60s. What would have happened to her if Trump got a second term?

Many lawyers advise their Social Security clients to either delete Facebook and Twitter, or at least make their profiles “Friends Only”, so the government can’t go combing through them.

The problem with the “Friends Only” advice is that the government is the government, and if Facebook or Twitter have information on you, the government is going to get it. It’s only a matter of time.

So the only way to be safer from “Social Control Media”, which the police also find very handy if you read the news even badly, is to stay off of it. The government isn’t the only threat, but it is a big one.

The other threats can be psycho exes that stalk you or creepy in-laws like mine, who are members of a cult that arranges to have people assassinated. My sister-in-law tried to blackmail/extort us for money. When I refused, she tried to take reprisals. Then she took out a million dollar life insurance policy on her brother, which I shut down.

She forged his signature to obtain it, and I have no idea what she planned to do.

Was she going to arrange a hit, or just try to wait it out and hope he died?

I set his profile to “Friends Only”. I’ve encouraged him to ditch Facebook because she’s crazy and the police did nothing when I went to them. Absolutely nothing.

The best I could do was report the fraud, shut down the policy, get him on an insurance company blacklist, and then get a FOID card.

We don’t live in the safest neighborhood.

One day when I looked out my peephole, there was a scary looking man just standing there staring at my door, like he was waiting for someone to open it and come out.

Did she send him? I don’t know. He eventually left after staring at my door without any possible good reason to be doing that, for over 20 minutes. I felt helpless, I felt scared. I firmly believe that everyone should use their Second Amendment rights to never have to be a victim of violent crime, property crime, or rape.

If people can’t obey the law and stay out of your stuff and home, then they should expect what’s coming to them. Some leftists can’t agree with that publicly, but the fact that Illinois is now the #1 state in America for legal gun sales and background checks tells us that people vote one way, and then when it comes to their own safety, they act in another one.

Biden isn’t the one panicking people into buying guns. It was the rioters, the looters, the carjackers, the rape gangs, that the police and judges in Illinois either can’t control or aren’t interested in punishing and imprisoning.

There have been a lot of home invasions in my city. Even if she doesn’t send someone to pull a hit, there are people who pretend they’re with the city and get you to open the door. Or say they’re with the water or gas or electric company and they just need you to come to the door for a minute.

I’m not coming to the door, and if they insist on breaking in, they won’t like what’s on the other side of it.

All you can do, really, since the police are useless, is arm yourself and make breaking into your home to hurt you and your loved ones the last mistake the criminal will ever make.

But back to Social Media. It’s not that every Social Media platform is disgusting and terrible.

There are some open ones that could be called a social platform, including IRC chat. They go way back, many of the old ones have never needed a “Code of Conduct”. If you don’t like what’s going on there, leave.

The governments have been trying to push people off of things like IRC, because it’s much easier to plant spies and censors (often automated) into centralized “servers” like Discord, Facebook, and Twitter.

Some platforms, such as Mastodon, may be too small for companies that make fake background checks for your Pointy Haired Boss to bother trying to monitor. They may rely on your PHB only ever hearing about Twitter or Facebook. But you still need to watch what you say, and use a pseudonym.

Element (formerly Riot) has alternative servers other than the official ones. If the room and private chats use End to End encryption, that’s a lot better than nothing.

The safest thing to do is go dark, but if you won’t go dark, run silent and run deep. Use an anonymizing VPN or Tor Browser. (Although spyware in Microsoft Windows makes these worthless! Use GNU/Linux.)

Use open source and decentralized services, and E2E encryption, never use your real name, and never trust that anyone is really who they appear to be.

I feel that people shouldn’t have to hear this, but you hear how people get busted and convicted of crimes every day for shit they posted on Facebook or Twitter, or told someone in an app (which can also never be unsaid), without which the police would have otherwise had zero evidence to show the court.

Considering that such “services” are essentially useless wastes of time where, at best, you’ll show off, or show what an asshole you really are to the world, or post pictures of your vacation that literally nobody else cares about, except maybe as evidence, can you really afford all of the potential consequences of “using them” (they use you), both foreseeable and unforeseen?

If that answer is no, or you can’t decide, then odds are you should not be on these vile platforms.

Out, out, damned Facebook! Out, out, damned Twitter!