Blog Post #9340

This is a ketchup, Post.

No, no! I dictated that and it came out wrong. Let me type it.

This is a catch-up post. Wow, computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but in some ways they just complicate things.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that Charlie’s friend Sadie is recovering and doing well except that she’s supposed to eat special food and she doesn’t like it. She had surgery to remove bladder stones and had to wear a cone-style collar for four days. She was happy to get that taken off, but she is still restricted from strenuous play so she had to stay on a leash while we visited today. Charlie was still thrilled to go there. 

I don’t know how Sadie got down from the couch with that sweatshirt still wrapped around her, but at least she stayed warm on this cold, windy day.

Meanwhile, I’m trying not to feel totally discouraged about the problems in our country. I’m old enough to remember the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, and this current era has a lot of in common with that one. 

Of course, we didn’t have social media then. I’m still using Facebook, although I gave up on Twitter when it became X. Sometimes I feel like I want to give up on email, but it’s pretty much a necessity. 

Social media has become divisive and it’s not an accident. There are people, and especially foreign governments, that use social media to further an agenda. When I went to school during the Cold War, we learned about propaganda, but it was not as ubiquitous as it is now that we have the Internet.

I have to remind myself that many (often most!) of the horrible comments that I see on the Internet are not sincere and may be posted by bots or trolls. It’s worth knowing more about these since studies have shown that a huge amount of traffic on social media is due to bots.

Since this phenomenon is still fairly new, allow me to share some information from a government website, CISA.

“Social Media Bots are automated programs that stimulate human engagement on social media platforms.”

Bots and trolls not only harass people and scam them, but they can harm our mental health and even our democracy. I’d say this has already happened, but awareness can help as they try to:

Don’t let the bots get you down. Avoid arguing with accounts on the Internet that are not people you know. They may not be people at all.