Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I'm writing to you with a concern of critical national importance. I hope that you will read what I've written and consider it carefully. I believe that Facebook has a moral duty to act.

I've spent the last 18 months or so participating in our political process on Facebook. I've joined Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump groups. I've attempted to argue my position with my neighbors and fellow citizens, trying to explain to them why I think Donald Trump's proposals, policies, and distortion of truth are bad for the country. But that's not what I'm writing to you about today.

I'm writing to share the depravity I witnessed and participated in – a torrent of personal attacks, of name-calling, of ad hominem, of attacking the individual instead of the argument. I was called a "fag", a "pussy" and a "libtard". I watched people who shared my position call others "baggers", "stupid fucks", "bigots", "inbred", and "fuckwits". I did it. I am ashamed. These insults don't demean a position, or idea, or way of thinking. Those can easily be discarded by people. They can be shed. They're not an identity, no matter how much identity politics wants us to believe that. I participated in it. I am culpable. You are culpable. We are culpable.

I'll refrain from discussing James Comey's misconduct or RNC obstruction. That's all been well documented. Hillary Clinton called 25% of the country "a basket of deplorables". Not their positions, not their conduct, not their statements – them. That has an impact. It causes social pain. This is a well-documented thing in human health. It exists.

Trevor Noah of the Daily Show, America's least-appreciated successor to Jon Stewart, made a critically important point in my opinion: the basket is actually the most offensive part of this. It conjures images of a portion of the nation about to be thrown away economically, a portion that has been or will be left behind, a portion of the country that – true or not – fears they have no place in human progress. That is toxic. It cannot stand in a free and open society.

I watched my fellow citizens literally hunt down pictures of peoples' children, photoshop text on to them (sorry Adobe), and use them as political ammunition in blind rage. I've watched people use Facebook's comically understaffed and unsophisticated reporting system as a means of retaliation, to get accounts pulled, to remove peoples' ability to participate at all instead of attempt to address their arguments. This is sick. This is depravity. This cannot stand.

Facebook must add tools for fact-checking positions. It must add tools to redirect people away from personal attacks, from tracking down peoples' employers, from mining through the personal lives of others in retaliation for expressing a dissenting opinion, no matter how misguided. It must stop the spread of fake news from Veles, Macedonia designed to channel our collective outrage at things that aren't even true into Google AdSense payments. It needs to stop placing news from domains like USANEWSPOLITIC24.COM on equal visual footing with the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Oregonian. Facebook owes it to the world, it owes it to the country, and it owes it to its shareholders, who would like to see this grand experiment in social participation actually survive long term.

Mark, you have a duty to act. Your silence is disconcerting. Please. America can learn a powerful lesson from this tragedy of an election. The whole world is watching.

Please publish this letter anonymously. Please withhold and protect my identity for a minimum of one year. I genuinely fear reprisal and retaliation. I fear for my country and I fear for my life.

https://github.com/livefreeord...

...of L. Ron Hubbard and claim it as his holy book. Oh. Wait.

Their ignorance is the oppressive arm of government. The political elite in the US are profoundly detached from reality, and Americans are suffering as a result of it.

If you're starting from the implicit premise that it's okay to insult your employees, then we don't have the same definition of "professional, mature discourse".

They're petitioning a private corporation. That private corporation is free to offer the products it wants. Its customers are free to shop at Amazon or choose not to, for any reason they want. If Amazon believes it will profit more by choosing not to carry Trump's products, they may make that choice. They're allowed to make that choice. This isn't fascism, it's free-market capitalism.

No, he hasn't urged "caution". He has proposed a religious test for admission to the United States and for consideration thereof. This proposal should be abhorrent to anyone who understands the history and founding principles of the United States.

What kind of frat-house development shop are you running? These are the people who are going to help make you successful, not some new pledges to haze. Grow. The. Fuck. Up.

Ah yes, real life: having "fuck fuck nigger fuck nigger fuck shit piss fuck" screamed in peoples' faces at 8am on BART by the mentally ill who have no meaningful access to health care. I've seen this first-hand, multiple times. The police not even bothering to remove the person from the train when it's reported. People not even reacting, because it's the third time that week it happened. City-block sized homeless camps. Stepping over shoeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. Eventually you get out of the habit of stopping for a couple seconds to make sure you can still see respiratory activity. Human feces in the street. The rich blaming the poor instead of their own pathetic greed, or the lack of any functional social services for the sick.

You've set up a false dichotomy. The choices are not this or Disney Land. Enjoy your "real life"; I'll be enjoying mine somewhere where people give a shit about the health of their community and the wellbeing of others.

Prior to Obamacare, getting individual coverage was not a problem

As someone who was denied multiple individual policies from multiple companies over multiple years for... wait for it... a history of tension headaches (their words, printed on the denial letter) – you couldn't be more wrong. I even have a letter that basically says "We're pleased to offer your wife a policy, but just not you". Getting individual coverage before the ACA was an fucking nightmare that put six-figure income households on public assistance "high risk" pools.

The anti-depressant response to endurance exercise may be genotype-dependent. Read up on the OPRM1 A118G SNP (a genetic mutation of the mu opioid receptor); it's fascinating: http://www.nature.com/npp/jour....

Oh, I forgot the most egregious violation: just because you got the information about Americans from Canada/UK/NZ or any other of the "five eyes" nations, doesn't mean the law no longer applies. You're still spying on your own citizens without any meaningful judicial oversight.

The government and its agencies should not have the ability to spy on Americans without a warrant – one that specifically describing the person(s) being targeted and the types of communications to be intercepted, issued by a judge in open non-secret court. This is the process the 4th amendment outlines, and this is at the core of peoples' objections to the NSA. Continually violating the law does not make it okay.

I shouldn't have who I call and my call durations logged by the government, any more than I should have to tell the government when I visit a friend. I shouldn't have my calls automatically recorded when I talk to my American relatives who happen to be visiting Canada or the Bahamas, without meaningful, publicly-inspectable, pre-intercept judicial oversight. I shouldn't have my internet traffic archived forever for later inspection, just because it happens to be temporarily routed outside of the borders of the continental 48 states, or sent to a company that also does international business. The fact that the NSA has done all of these things is evidence of their power and their ability/willingness to abuse it. It's an insane intrusion in to highly personal affairs, with high potential for abuse, retained indefinitely, and held by an organization that has proven it isn't even able to secure its own "top secret" documents.

Want to spy on foreign governments? Go for it. Want to spy on your own allies and their citizens, as politically suicidal as that is? Go for it. But unless you want to repeal the 4th amendment, leave US citizens out of it.

The real idiots are the ones who think it's okay just because everyone's doing it.

As in https://www.gandi.net/. They have data centers in the US and Luxembourg in addition to France. They started out as a domain registrar in Paris, and now do quite a bit of Xen hosting business.

I would love to see the IRS enforce the rules they already have.