Fern Creek In honor of National Bubblegum Day, a FactSlap column (Bazooka Joe remix):
Children in North America spend approximately half a billion dollars on bubblegum every year.
The largest piece of gum ever was equivalent to 10,000 pieces of chewing gum.
100,000 tons of bubblegum is chewed every year all around the world.
Sixty to 70 percent of bubble gum is sugar.
One of the most famous, but false facts, is that swallowed gum will remain in your gastrointestinal tract for seven years. It is not so. Swallowed bubble gum will not get stuck to your intestines, but will pass through your system, because gum base cannot be digested, as it has fiber that is indigestible.
Scientists found a 9,000-year- old wad of chewing gum in Sweden.
The average American chews around 300 sticks of gum in one year.
The first bubble gum ever marketed was done so under the name “Blibber-Blubber”.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest bubble ever blown measured 23 inches in diameter.
In the literal and metaphorical sense, J.D. is being a little bitch. She’s chewed through a tried-and-true pair of sandals that cradled my feet like Jesus. She will not see the benefits of outdoor plumbing. And now she’s leapt up, nipping my right index finger and drawing blood.
As an added curtsy, she’s barking her head off in an ever-deepening-yet-still-shrill voice for reasons I can’t dechipher. Maybe she’s bored. Maybe shes tired. Maybe she sees what a fraud of a parent I am.
I used to fancy myself adroit at dog raising. I’ve lived with them all my life, and still retain shards of dog training tips that seem to work.
Or used to. Clearly, I am not the Obi Wan to dogs that Teddy was. He raised the smartest animal I ever saw, Esme. He potty trained her, taught her to sit, even showed her how to fetch, even though he did not know how.
Feel the fuzzy Force, Esme.
I could use his advice now. Or at least his thick fur, which he was happy to let Esme chew on during her teething phase.
So I let his advice flow over me. Let her bark; she’s learning her first words.Let her chew; she doesn’t yet know the loving nibble. Let her be; she just turned 3 months old (!) today.
And he reminds me from the cloud circuit that I am the one who needs training, not her. Enjoy the newness of the life she brings, he tells me in every photo of the duo I see: One day soon, those hairs will gray, those nips will become naps, and I will remember how, as a puppy, she would sit at the foot of my shower, waiting for me to finish. How, when she’s tired, she preferred to slumber in my lap. How, when I take too long to bathe (which is all the time), she would drag my sweatpants into the living room and sleep on them.
How, when I sit to write at the computer, she curled at my feet, unwilling and uninterested in curling anywhere else.
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
— Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Shhh, did you hear that?
Me either.
Isn’t it beautiful?
That wonderful audio void comes courtesy of Big Tech, which fulfilled its moral obligation on January 8 by removing the megaphone from the lips of Donald Trump and other unhinged conspiracy theorists — the first time that’s happened since Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf created the internet to share government research data in the 1960’s.
Vint Cerf, left, and Bob Kahn
A few decades after the internet’s creation came its impenetrable armor: Section 230. The legislation holds that internet platforms like Twitter and Facebook cannot be held legally responsible for defamatory content. While the 26 words of Section 230 have been credited with creating the internet, that’s not true. Cat videos created the internet.
But Section 230 did create fake news.
And removing it would largely solve the problem.
It is that simple. While nothing can prevent a writer from concocting fiction, holding an outlet liable for libel mandates an additional level of caution before publishing. Newspapers have grappled with it for decades: They can’t publish a libelous letter to the editor and skirt prosection. It’s time big tech — Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft — faced the same scrutiny. They can afford the lawyers.
Twitter must have sensed it was on the hook when it de-platformed Trump and nixed the accounts of more than 100,000 “Stop the Steal” cultists two days after they stormed and graffitied the U.S. Capitol. Since then, Big Tech has also squelched websites like Parler — and thousands of its imbalanced patrons. That’s why your uncle is forwarding less shit.
On Thursday, Politico called the Trump Twitter ban a “priceless gift” to Democrats, and said the move “realigned the political universe and shielded the new president from what surely would have been rabid attacks from his predecessor.”
It begs the question: What took Twitter so long? While Trump and his slackwits surely aren’t done braying conspiracy theories and white male grievances, the radio silence is a blissful respite from four years of MAGA programming. In irony no Republican will catch, conservatives were bitten by the rabid pit bull they raised; namely, private enterprise. Twitter is an American success story that would have been a sentinel for Republicans in another era. In this era, it’s just playing the boss in Celebrity Apprentice.
Speaking of which: The great thing about American capitalism is that it demands that anyone, including angry white men, have the same right to a social media platform as anyone else. So launch your Facebook, announce your new party, hold press conferences about your plans to secede. At least it would be honest and would no doubt draw millions. Best of luck, sincerely, because every vote should count.
The beauty of repealing 230 is that Washington won’t need to bother coming up with a system of implementation. Just name the revision Liable for Libel, and the courts will do the rest. They decide what’s defamatory and libelous, anyway. Simply add Big Tech among the susceptible. When lawsuit money is at stake — Big Tech Lawsuit Money — does anyone doubt that Silicon Valley will discover a system to check accuracy?
For as much as FOX News bellows that conservatives are being censored, the truth is that conservatives simply are not being coddled as they were for four years. After all, the angriest tweeter in America also happened to run the Justice Department and the FCC. Who was going to crack down on him — or his chamber maids?
Big Tech still needs to face a reckoning (and maybe cellular dissolution). Even Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz can agree on that. But at least, for the first time in a half-decade, we can share a common reality as a starting point.
And the reality is this: If you’re on social media, you’re a reporter. If you have an email address, a Facebook login, a Twitter handle, an Instagram account, a cultural following, you’re in the mainstream media.
Time to act like it — or face the consequence of shirking that responsibility.
