Someone Who Has 3 Million Followers on Facebook Explains The Ways Social Media Is Making Us All Dumber

by John Hawkins | October 22, 2016 2:48 pm

My latest Townhall column is called, Someone Who Has 3 Million Followers on Facebook Explains The Ways Social Media Is Making Us All Dumber[1]. Here’s an excerpt.

[2]

Despite the fact that I own a 3.3 million follower page[3], I can tell you that I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. Because of Facebook, I’ve been able to get a conservative viewpoint in front of tens of millions of people I couldn’t have reached any other way. On the other hand, Facebook is a cruel mistress. Every page owner dreads the next “algorithm change” that may send his traffic plunging off a cliff for indecipherable reasons. You can have “penalties” that dramatically impact the traffic of your page for whatever reason Facebook decides, without even having a way of knowing what you did wrong. If there’s any kind of technical problem or you get a FALSE “community standards” violation that knocks you off Facebook (This is not uncommon), it’s nearly impossible to reach them through normal channels available to the general public.

Yet and still, nearly 40% of Americans get news off Facebook[4] and another 22% receive news through other social media sources. Just to give you an idea of how big that number is, only 38% of Americans read a newspaper daily[5] and that percentage seems to drop every year.

Once again, you can read it all here[6].