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YouTube Age-Restricts the News

After yesterday’s Boles.tv live stream I received a curious email from YouTube informing me I had violated some sort of community guideline, and they were “Age-Restricting” my entire VOD upload. That meant no viewers under the age of 18, and my video would not be shown to anyone not logged into YouTube. I wasn’t sure if they were dinging my previous live stream, and video podcast episode, about William Hurt Raping Marlee Matlin or not, but I quickly learned discussing rape is okay for kids, but showing the aftermath of a blood stain on a train platform from the New York City subway shooting yesterday is verboten. I wondered aloud if YouTube ever really checks the strange, and awful, videos that appear on their service that include nudity, and violence, and are not restricted.

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Autopsy of a Viral Tweet

On December 4, 2015, my Social Media world got tossed as I innocently, but rightly, Tweeted the astonishing fact that MSNBC had doxed someone — revealing identifying information about a living person — on live television during an impromptu terror tour of a suspect’s home. The person in question was Rafia Farook — mother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook. Rafia lived in the same townhouse as her son, his terrorist wife, Tashfeen Malik, and the couple’s six-month-old baby girl. Here’s an image of the Tweet I sent after my photographic capture of the MSNBC live feed:

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What We Have Become and What Cannot be Undone

We live in a selfish world where Social Media has become the public square replacing the private confessional and the anonymous donation box. We click a LIKE button and we feel better. We promote our private good deeds in an open airing and our righteousness quintuples in the amount of retweets we earn. This is all wrong and misguided. We shouldn’t do good things just to be rewarded. We must not aspire to be the hero of our own invention just because that’s the immature nattering standard of the day.

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Beware of Social Proofing for Verified Accounts on Facebook and Twitter

If you’re an author, or a publisher, or if you work in the entertainment field, getting your social media accounts Verified — or “socially proofed” for a condescending spin on a ridiculous social media marketing term — is important because Verification gives you status on the social networks and it provides you private avenues of access that regular accounts do not accord.

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Into the Insovereign: 2015 Invades 2016

2015 is coming to a close with a bang and a whimper. The bang of violence across the world beckons and the whimper of those right people who prefer to do the moral thing to make the world better, threatens. However, neither bang nor whimper now has a clear path to an endgame that can not only just win a moment, but change the world.

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Paris and the Superficial Memes of Selfieness Tragedy

Any tragic world event is an opportunity to convey meaning for profit — personally, politically, fiscally or morally — and the instant rise of the “Peace for Paris” logo designed by Jean Jullien “one minute” after the tragedy, and then immediately posting the image to Facebook and Twitter, begs a larger human question of “selfieness” and cynicism: Is an Artist trying to give hope against trafficking in evil, or is it all a rather cunning ploy to “make the meme” for a tragedy by propagating self-interest-as-a-logo over the perils of human interest?

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