Music Friday! (And a bomb threat update related to social media. Hooray!)
If you visit this space, you know I’ve written twice recently about bomb threats at my children’s school this week. The police department today released a statement, stating their belief that the threats originated from outside the country. Why? According to the statement, it’s because enough social media posts brought the controversy to the attention of…an actual person who likes to disrupt things in the U.S.? A trained bot? We know that external disinformation and election disruption threats are real, so we can now add bomb threats to the list. Well, I guess this answers my question about “Once you leave social media, should you ever go back?” It’s all just dandy, imagining bots trained to recognize arguments and generate bomb-threat emails.
And I learned something valuable—most people (including me) suspected an actual person, likely a parent. It seems we were wrong. What’s interesting to me is that the issue here is not the actual issue at hand at the school, but that there was simply an issue or controversy, with “sides,” to exploit. Divide and conquer.
But, it’s music Friday! Because I was totally wrong about the bomb-threat culprit, let’s have a remix about how the mighty have fallen. Thus, I give you PB Shelley’s “Ozymandias” in music form. Behold!
