Fer Crissakes, Google? Seriously?
Stop taking his BS seriously, people!
We all know those people who probably should have their Internet privileges revoked, right? The ones who share obviously false stories or who repeatedly fall for hype and nonsense and then insist on perpetuating it and ensuring that, like the plot of Idiocracy, the stupidity on the web is reproducing at a rate far higher than that of the reasonable and factual information to be found.
And seemingly at the helm of this ship of ridiculousness stands our Embarrassment in Chief.
We can’t necessarily give him all the blame. He is right in the middle of the demographic categories that tend to exhibit this behavior. But it doesn’t change the fact that Trump frequently promotes information that is questionable at best and obviously false at worse.
What do you do with the people in your life who abuse the internet? Do you actively try to correct their behavior? Do you just ignore them? Or do you jump right in there with them and like, subscribe, and share all of the baloney that they spew?
Reasonable people would pick one of the first two options. However, it would seem that where Trump is concerned, either the rules are different, or Trump is just one of many people in Washington who deserve to have their WiFi password changed and their Ethernet cables cut.
Three days ago, Trump tweeted this:
Day before yesterday, he tweeted this:
So Trump did what a lot of us do, he Googled himself. I am sure he expected to find all kinds of stories praising him and talking about what a good job he is doing. Because he lives in a carefully guarded bubble. Instead, he found all kinds of negative information, and immediately he did what he does and called it biased and fake.
Then he shared a video which is full of lies and half truths. You can see the breakdown here:
All of this seems pretty much par for the course for our current President. It fails to get me very worked up anymore because we should expect him to show this kind of behavior by now.
What does upset me is this:
Because of Trump’s nonsense, the Senate is now focusing on them as part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation of the Russian election meddling. Granted, the Senate is still backing the wrong horse, so I should probably have expected them to give his nonsense more credence.
Then we have the news media themselves jumping on the bandwagon:
Forbes reports that media companies are mad because Google won’t tell them how their algorithm works. Well of course Google isn’t going to tell them how they do what they do, or then others would do the same thing and they would lose business.
And yes, Forbes is just doing what they do, reporting on what people are interested in to sell more “papers.”
But come on, people, any parent, boss, teacher, or other in a position of oversight can tell you that continuing to reward this behavior with attention is going to reinforce it and make it even more likely that President Dumpster Fire will share nonsense on the internet.
And yes, I know I am a huge hypocrite because I am in this very article doing the thing that I say we should stop doing. And I am doing it for the same reason a lot of us continue to talk about all of his nonsense and how stupid it is that so many people are playing along. We’re hoping we are not the only ones who find it so frustrating and annoying.
Misery loves company, right?