Whenever I read about global problems, I note climate change, serious pandemics, wars-military conflicts, poverty and hunger always top the list.

I’d like to add one: social media. Nothing has done more it the last two decades to spread disinformation, misinformation and manipulate the way people think. 

Social media is being used to increase political conflict, promote instability and create atmospheres for violence. Its influence becomes stronger by the day.

An estimated 4.74 billion (billion, not million) people, or almost 60 per cent of the world’s population, are active social media users. Those figures come from DataReportal.com, which collects and distributes data on digital information usage.

Canada has an estimated 35 million social media users, which is roughly 90 per cent of the population.

There are dozens of social media platforms, the most popular being Facebook, YouTube, What’sApp and Instagram, each with more than two billion users. Twitter, which is in a state of chaos, has just under four million users.

Few will deny that social media platforms spread tons of information that is twisted or simply not true. There is talk of better policing, or even of banning social media platforms.

That’s just talk. It will never happen because the most outrageous pieces of bad information get the most attention. Misinformation sells and keeps social media platforms in business. Clicks mean money and money talks.

It’s impossible to police social media posting because there is so much of it. There are said to be hundreds of thousands of comments posted on Facebook worldwide every minute and 300 million new photos every day. Six thousand Tweets are sent every second.

Social media platforms lack professional fact checking. There are no editors ensuring that posts are fair, balanced and done with context that provides meaning and clarity to the message.

Despite that lack, many people are turning to social media for their news, and away from traditional professional news outlets like newspapers, which are suffering big readership and revenue declines.

So a lot of the “news” that social media users are absorbing is misinformation or outright disinformation.

Some of the inaccurate information is unintentional but some is intentional; deliberately put out there to influence thinking, or an event such as an election

Sadly, even some of the people who are supposed to be providing us with good leadership are distributing bad information

Two recent examples: Twitter owner Elon Musk recently posted for his 112 million Twitter followers an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

Musk deleted the Tweet later, but not before it received tens of thousands of retweets and likes.

Then earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau distributed on Twitter false information about mass death sentences in Iran. His Tweet referred to false reports that the Iranian government had sentenced nearly 15,000 people to death.

Trudeau tweeted that Canada “denounces the Iranian regime’s barbaric decision.”

The Tweet was deleted later, with Trudeau’s office explaining that it was based on initial reporting that was incomplete and lacking context. No one explained why the initial reporting was not checked for accuracy before the prime minister made a fool of himself.

Social media can be positive. It allows us to build friendships, keep in touch with family and friends and share helpful information. It also can be an important business tool.

However, bad information distributed on social media creates confusion. When people find a situation confusing they often simply ignore it, leaving it to get worse. For instance, when health authorities say vaccines are important and social media says virus threats are a hoax, people become confused and tend to simply ignore an important health issue.

Without question social media is shaping our world in many different ways, too many of them brutal and vulgar. We need to start recognizing this as a major problem.

Once we recognize it as a serious problem, we can start finding ways of fixing it. We need to lift social media to a higher level – a level in which information posted is important, accurate and capable of building a better world. 

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I’m not one for rewatching a movie, no matter how good it might have been. Especially if it is a remake.

I made an exception recently and ordered up the 2021 remake of West Side Story, the classic tale of gang rivalry and young love in 1957 New York City. I did it because most remakes are bad, and I wanted to see just how bad this one was.

What a surprise! This remake is every bit as good as the original, which starred Natalie Wood, Richard Breymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn. In some ways, it is even better, which is not a surprise because it was directed by Steven Spielberg, who gave us blockbuster successes such as E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s version is more inclusive and more representative of today’s world.

The original West Side Story had a core message: in a world torn by poverty, cultural differences and outright racism there is hope that love can overcome all.

The West Side Story 2021 remake continues that message, adding a couple of its own while putting the classic Romeo and Juliet story into today’s American social context.

One is that today’s road to achieving the American dream is more strewn than ever with hardship and tragedy. Gun violence, racial hatred and decaying urban structure stand in the way of building better lives, especially for immigrants.

However, hope for a better America comes from the performances of two young newcomer actors – Rachel Zegler and Ansel Elgort who were 18 and 25 when the movie was filmed. 

Interestingly, both young people, who star as Maria and Tony, do their own singing. In the original 1961 film, ghost voices sang for stars Natalie Wood and Richard Breymer.

Probably the biggest change in the 2021 movie version is the reappearance of Rita Moreno, who played the vivacious Anita in the original. She returns as the elderly Valentina, widow of Doc, owner of the drugstore where members of the Jets youth gang hang out.

At 90, Moreno sings the powerful Somewhere!, which dreams of a time and place in which people with differences live and love together in peace.

Moreno’s reappearance 60 years after the first movie was filmed is a lesson for all: Don’t toss anything aside just because it is old. Old things and old people still have much to offer.

Valentina’s Somewhere! offers hope for change, while knowing she will not live to see it. She is near the end of her life but sings of hope for the young people who are struggling to make good lives for themselves.

Someone has been singing Somewhere! on stage, in film or in a recording studio for 60-plus years. The lyrics of the tune are haunting, but hopeful:

“There’s a place for us
Somewhere a place for us
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us somewhere

“Someday
Somewhere
We’ll find a new way of living
We’ll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere!”

Sadly, despite all the passing years and all the singing, we still haven’t found that “somewhere.” Hatred, racism and violence remain a big part of our lives. North American gun violence is totally out of control. There have been roughly 500 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.

We Canadians consider ourselves much purer than the Americans. However, Statistics Canada has reported that police-reported crimes motivated by race or ethnic hatred increased 80 per cent between 2019 and 2020. Black, Asian and Indigenous people were the main targets of the 1,594 Canadian hate crimes during that period. 

Instead of finding a new way of living, we are well into a new time in which sane centre-based politics is being taken over by insane extremism, on both the right and the left. Fact-based information and intelligent discussion are being replaced by misinformation and disinformation. 

West Side Story is a sad story that ends tragically without the “somewhere” being found.

However, like the two young lovers and the elderly widow Valentina, we can’t stop hoping that it’s out there and one day our crippled societies will find it.

 I have confirmed that COVID-19 is not a respiratory disease. It is a mental disease that makes some people more stupid than they already are.

I confirmed this during yet another call to our federal government, which increasingly is badly operated by empty pumpkin heads.

I called Canada Post because when I went to gather my daily mail, I found our two neighbourhood mail boxes replaced with two newer looking ones. The old ones looked and worked fine, but the feds always are looking for ways to waste our money, so I just shrugged.

I shrugged until I went to use the new mail box. The mail space assigned to me was so small that there was barely enough room to get my hand in to retrieve my mail.

Well, we all are being asked to live with less these days so I closed the slot and proceeded to mail four letters. I scoured the new mail boxes but could not find an outgoing mail slot. That’s when I called Canada Post. 

To be accurate, I asked my wife to make the call. I hadn’t taken my morning blood pressure medication, and having The Big One during a conversation with a federal bureaucrat would be the ultimate indignity. 

The Canada Post help guy told my wife there is no outgoing mail slot because they no longer are picking up outgoing mail in our area.

“No one advised us that,” said my wife.

“They don’t have to tell you, ma’am,” he replied.

Why are you stopping outgoing mail pickup, she asked. The reply: The trucks are not large enough to handle both delivery and pickup.

When she asked where we are supposed to mail our letters, he said he would happily look up the addresses of nearby outgoing mail boxes. Most of those he supplied were in far-off places, an hour or more drive away.

My wife’s cell phone was on speaker so I shouted: “What about Dorset? It’s six miles down the highway and has an actual post office.” 

He said he had no record of that place and added that he was stationed in southern Ontario, and didn’t know much about the north. Although, he had attended a Boy Scout camp in the Haliburton area.

He asked for our actual address, then said Canada Post had no record that the address existed. That despite the fact that it has been delivering our mail here for the last three years. 

At that point I had to race home to take a double dose of blood pressure pills. This was my second encounter this year with a numbingly dense federal bureaucracy.

Late last year I filed my writing business HST report to Revenue Canada. In March, I received a reply that they had mailed me a refund of $450, but to my old address in Barrie. We had moved a few months earlier to our cottage near Dorset. 

That would not be a problem, however, because I had paid Canada Post $108 to forward my Barrie address mail to my new address.

It was a problem. The cheque, like a bunch of other expected mail, did not arrive. 

I called Revenue Canada where I learned the cheque appeared to be lost and they would send me a pile of paperwork to fill out for a new cheque to be issued, if the old one was not found within six months. 

The Revenue Canada help guy asked for the new address. I gave it to him, noting he already had it because I had sent a change of address form to Revenue Canada months earlier.

He said he could not find the address, and in fact the road on which I live did not exist. I protested and he said he would check Canada Post. When he came back on the line, he said Canada Post informed him that there is not such address anywhere in Canada. 

“But Canada Post delivers mail, including mail from Revenue Canada, to this address,” I said.

“Well, Canada Post has no record of that address,” he replied.

I slammed down the phone and went looking for my blood pressure medication. 

Maybe it’s Covid. Maybe not. But we live in a world gone mad 

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