Abandon4093 said:
Spitfire said:
Abandon4093 said:
When people stop face palming and head smacking. There probably actually is something to what they're saying.
A lot of mass murderers generally have a misanthropic outlook on life. Viewing human life with contempt, does a person like that sound like they're going to have a facebook account? Doubtful.
A person like that wouldn't socialize on the internet to begin with, so whether or not they would have registered an account on a very specific social networking site, is arbitrary and completely irrelevant in this context.
If you'd read the article and not just the title. They were talking about a social networking presence in total. They noted that Brevik had an old Myspace and that the other one was on a dating website. But in the last few years they hadn't kept up any form of social networking that is pretty much vital in this day and age for good networking.
I fail to see how that's in disagreement with what I said.
Whether you like it or not, having a presence (even a small one) on something such as facebook allows you to keep your network of real life friends in good health. Organising nights out with friends you don't have the opportunity to converse with in your day to day life etc.
Except that we're not debating the uses of social networks here; we're debating the consequences of not using Facebook specifically. There's a world of difference between the two.
The Forbes article quotes a person as saying "You should be suspicious of someone who is not making your relationship known publicly on a site like Facebook. " There are employers who ask for the Facebook details of applicants, and now we're presented with the notion that anyone who may not have an interest in this particular social network, or who may have chosen not to create an account there, is a potential mass murderer.
No matter how you look at it, that argument is lunacy, and it is objectively, and provably, wrong.
To quote the ActivePolitic article on this, "There seems to be an insanity bubble around older people which has arrived after the initial facebook boom that brought in the youth, where they see facebook as a necessary utility; instead of a trendy website that will have passed in a few years. "
If you're not using Facebook, that fact alone is in no way indicative of your mental state, or your social status; it just means that you're not using Facebook. I know that some find this shocking, but there are
a lot of people out there, who have absolutely no inclination to use that particular site. In fact, to put that further in perspective, there are statistics that show that in Europe, for instance, less than 50% of the internet-using population, use Facebook [http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm]. To suggest that something must be wrong with all those people, and indeed to compare them to known murderers, in the way that the supposed German "expert" did, is not only grossly ignorant, it is downright insulting.