Facebook shows the finger to South African Government

It’s no secret that I despise authority, and they rarely come more contemptible than the SA government.

This week Facebook released the Global Government Requests Report which reveals that although they acceded to data requests from many governments around the world, they flipped the bird to our very own snoop-meisters. Understand that I loathe the act of releasing information on citizens to governments by social media, but in this one instance, I applaud Facebook for telling these bullies to “go fuck themselves.”

Here’s a sampling of figures from the report to give you an idea how we compared with other prominent countries, but you can also view the full report at the link above to see which countries got fucked the most:

From mybroadband

 

 

Have a heart?

You’ve probably seen this image or something similar, on any number of social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis. It is usually accompanied by an appeal to “like” or “share” or “pray” for the person/s pictured.

And it will invariably contain an exhortation such as “This will only be ignored by those who don’t have a heart,” or something to that effect.

DON’T heed the call. It is absolute bullshit!

Sometimes the appeal will state that for every “share” or “like,” some big corporation like Microsoft will donate a $1 or more towards medical care or otherwise for the hapless individual/s.

That’s even more bogus. DON’T believe it!

The particular image I chose above had attracted 1,085,499 “likes” and 85,128 “shares” at the time of posting. It had also garnered 78,254 comments, most of them sympathetic. There were those who expressed skepticism and some who were malicious, although for the life of me, I fail to understand why they even bothered wasting their time on this nonsense.

The reality is that no amount of “shares” or “likes” is going to do anything for the victim/s portrayed in the image. Neither is Microsoft or any other big corporation going to donate one red cent for any medical care or anything else. And you can pray until you’re red in the face, but it won’t change a thing either. All you achieve is to perpetuate irrational nonsense and fill the web with junk.

Some of the claims about the particular disease the individual/s in the image is/are suffering from can be corroborated via resources such as Snopes.com. In many cases, the alleged disease, causing the pitiful image is not mentioned at all, nor is the individual’s name given, so it is not always easy to validate. Those who originate the post, rely on the image to mess with your emotions.

Off course, they may be a few genuine cases of victims afflicted with life threatening illnesses posted on social media, but it is almost impossible to sift out among the cacophony of junk proliferating out there.

For those who are wondering, I do have a heart, but it’s quite preoccupied with pumping blood to my brain and body. That leaves no time for it to think or feel.