If You Use Twitter
I don’t like Twitter. I make no niceties about it. I think it’s a waste of time. I tried to use it once and just got bored. So I’m on Facebook instead. But here’s my problem. Facebook likes to get filled with posts about people who also want you to “follow” them on Twitter.
Facebook, an alleged place for friends, has many rules and restrictions, some of which include not being able to send requests to connect to friends for reasons never clearly explained. Aside from this, Facebook also seems to go out of their way to avoid pornography and good for them because it makes up about 98% of the internet already. What I’m trying to say is that rather than be concerned with someone seeing a woman’s bare breasts (Which is bound to happen sooner or later anyway), Facebook should be working to eliminate their real enemy—Twitter—even if only for my personal gain. Recently, I uploaded a number of pictures from movie posters and Facebook had the facial recognition software to know that there were people in the pictures who I could possibly tag. If Grace Kelly were still alive, on Facebook and was my friend so I could tag her, believe me I would do just that, but that is where Facebook shows their somewhat overzealous take on something which isn’t even really that big of a deal. What Facebook really needs to do is stop people from posting things trying to engage others in joining them on Twitter. That’s the single thing that offends me the most.
Let’s say you’re eating in your favorite restaurant and in walks some people who mention to you- and anyone else who will listen- that there is a great place across the street to eat at. It’s not that I feel like there isn’t enough room in this world for more than one restaurant because there definitely is. But when I’m sitting down to enjoy a meal at a place of my choosing and you interrupt me to tell me about another place I could be eating at, well, that’s just plain rude. So when I’m going on Facebook to see what my friends are up to, the last thing I want to see is someone trying to lure me over to Twitter, another social networking site. We all know that the only ones offended by pictures of naked women are gay men, but hey, word of advice to y’all, become friends with Player Uno. I get more unintentional male nudity in my news feed on Facebook from that guy than… Well, I don’t really have a good way to end that joke. But seriously, he gets hacked like his password is “password”. So gay guys, relax. There is enough nudity for everyone. And really, what’s the difference between sharing a picture of your car and sharing a picture of your breast implants? I don’t know, but that’s another debate to be held with those who oppose nudity for whatever reason.
The biggest problem I have with Twitter actually brought me to a huge realization. I was on Twitter briefly during the Kevin Smith airplane incident and let me say that reading through his thousands of “tweets” to get the entire story was just tiresome. Restricting someone to have to express themselves in 140 characters or less is just annoying. Granted, Facebook has their limits as well, but they’re not as high. Anyway, Twitter really started bothering me because it seemed like people would just constantly state what they were doing- from waking to going to bed at night. And I just wondered who had the time to keep up with it, yet also found some interest in it? I mean, even the one person you love most in this world (Say, a celebrity) you wouldn’t care to read things like, “Off to buy new shoes!”. And then it hit me like a ton of cardboard bricks. The only ones who would care that much about what you are doing is the government. This is exactly like the Big Brother that George Orwell predicted but instead of having cameras and listening devices, you’re telling the government tweet by tweet what you’re doing and when you’re doing it.
Let’s say hypothetically there was a woman who was prone to fits of rage and violence. Let’s say that on Tuesday at 8:25 pm, her ex-boyfriend was found dead in his home, a possible murder victim. Sure, the ex would be a suspect based on the mere fact that she knew him. But imagine that at 7:58 pm that night she tweeted: “Off to work things out with the ex ;)” Now imagine that it took her ten minutes to get to his house from her house, a fact that any good police officer would be able to deduce. That gives her plenty of time to get into the house, hold a small conversation, turn red and stab him to death with a kitchen knife. So of course you’re asking me the one question you should be: “Who would be stupid enough to tweet about a crime they about to go off and commit?” While I see your point, the masterminds of this world- in a criminal sense- are long gone. Criminals are, for the most part, generally stupid especially when emotions are involved. Remember those kids who videotaped their vandalism? Yeah… Plus just think of it this way. Maybe at the time when she went to go over to her ex-boyfriend’s house (and she tweeted it) she didn’t actually plan on killing him, but maybe she just got caught up in the moment. Now is that tweet going to put her away for a crime she committed? I hope so. But hey, that’s just Big Brother in action. Except you’re your own brother now.
So what we’ve learned today is if you want to keep the government happy and hold true to the Patriot Act, feel free to stay on Twitter. If you’ve ever checked The Anarchist Cookbook out the library or made a joke about threatening a world leader on a message board then one of your “followers” is probably Homeland Security waiting for you to slip up. And yes, Facebook has enabled it where you can constantly let people know where you are (I call it the Stalker App), and that’s not doing anyone any favors either. So keep being watched and “followed” because no one needs to know my every movement and hand gesture.
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