The London Riots and 7 Other Things Blamed on Social Media

When people get together and cause trouble, it's very easy to blame the medium of communication instead of looking deeper. That's why social networking sites get cited as the cause of so many evils. Why, don't you know that MySpace is "worse than crack"?
Back in 2006, Ron Vietti, Senior Pastor of Valley Bible Fellowship in Bakersfield, CA, made headlines for being a vocal critic of then-popular social networking site MySpace. He argued the site — which he called both “worse than crack, cocaine or meth” and “My Waste of Space Dot Com” — was luring boys into pornography and making young girls targets of sexual predators. As David Burger reported in The Bakersfield Californian, Vietti said the site fostered bisexuality and called the Internet “the devil’s biggest scheme he has ever inserted into our lives.” He urged his congregation to go to places young people hang out (“like bars”) to convince them to delete their MySpace profiles.

I wonder what the telephone was blamed for in the 19th century. Read other stories of social-media-blaming at mental_floss. Link

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Richard Wilkinson (Who wrote: "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger"):

"Great Britain - this is statistically proven - is one of the most unequal countries of the western world. In London the richest 10% have 250 times the wealth of the poorest. Social mobility is very small in this country, the smallest of Europe. Who is born in a backwards community is virtually doomed to also die there. For one thing because proper education costs a fortune, and because companies literally do not even look at the solicitation letters of young people from such neighborhoods. Once poor, always poor. There is no way out of the misery. Does that make it ok to vandalize the shops? No, of course not. But it helps to see things in it's proper context."

It goes on. (And get's worse, but you get the picture.)

Saying the vandals have no morals may be true. But the same - and worse - can be said about all the banking scandals. Some of these guys destabilize whole countries. And they get away with multimillion dollar bonuses.
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The telephone still gets heat. Amish and Mennonite will not allow phones in private homes because that fosters gossip. Public phones are OK.
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