[Maru]

This is #2 for us. We went through it with the first time with Goforth. My husband works for the Sheriff's Office and is a detention officer doing CIRT for the Mental Health Unit at the jail. I have another close family in the same building as well and we know a bunch that are on the streets.

The gas station where the Goforth shooting occurred is a place our close friend frequented while on patrol and it very easily could've been him. The Goforth's lived down the road and we are in the same district. It affected a lot of people in the community here so there was a huge outpouring of support from the community, which helps. We are still reeling from Goforth. These conversations sadly have become daily for us. There is high turnover right now where my husband is stationed so he is working insane hours. So some days he works 16 hour shifts and he's doing 2-3 of those a week. The turnover was bad before, but it's even worse now. I worry about him pumping gas or walking into a store with his uniform on.

You can understand how so much hate and vitriol is being spread if you listen/read our national mainstream media. Most of you are in the UK, so you don't know about our insanely outrageous media coverage. For example, with our local media Houston floods like crazy and we are no stranger to natural disasters, but as soon as water starts to enter people's homes, there's a helicopter, a crew and a phone call with a local neighbor describing the flowing water situation and a photo from Twitter of the cat floating away on a couch plastered all over the net and TV. Everything is sensationalized and over-hyped. It is embarrassingly excess.

National media is basically tabloids disguised as real news on TV 24/7. It is 95% entertainment, 4.9% headlines, .1% facts. 100% of the coverage is Donald Trump, BLM, evil law enforcement, dead people, mass shootings and constant coverage of celebrity deaths (like Anna Nicole Smith, who cares ). Donald Trump gets more coverage than the superbowl. A racist self-absorbed prick's opinion is more important than delivering the facts around majorly important issues. Ok.

If you listened to national media all day you would think our society has gone insane, but it's a major distortion of life here that people eat it up because it adds color and meaning to their otherwise mundane lives. Disenfranchised people want other people to blame. Businesses want other parties to be responsible for their failures. The public hear that actual effort won't fix the issues, but getting attention and promoting violence will (by suggesting people will arm themselves or go to the streets). The internet is a little better (depends on the station) because people read for content but even lately that's become more filler... thanks to Facebook cutting off the stream of cash flow to smaller outfits and ad-blockers.

Also, there is an high likelihood that the candidates and organizations pay a ton of people to post on websites which further adds to the distortions and vulgar sensationalism. Go on the Daily Mail and see how many people are turning unrelated news into conversations about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in comments section. If you click on some of them, you'll notice some of their posting histories are highly suspect. (also who has the money or time to care about spending all day commenting on news sites about politicians? Seriously.) Why would the media filter out those commentors if they're contributing to click rates? The same reason Facebook will have dead people follow brands, paid sponsorship.

That means for every much needed discussion about racism, you have an overly inciteful commentor writing "coded" messages towards in very particular personas in to distort the public's perception. Mix in a few actual crazies and it looks like the country is going seriously to pot and then legitimately people read these commenters thinking they are real posters and become really angry.

This kind of "sponsorship" is now common on social media. Let's not forget too the online media who have "guest bloggers" posting articles from a very biased POV.

"Are online comments full of paid lies?"
http://www.computerworld.com/article...aid-lies-.html

A thriving industry of paid-for user comments pollutes social networks with fake opinions. Even Samsung does it

"Paid Commenters Hired By Fox News To Spread Right Wing Talking Points Across The Net"
http://addictinginfo.org/2013/10/27/...lood-internet/

Facebook will make your dead friend "like" stuff.

"Why are dead people liking stuff on Facebook"
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-...f-on-facebook/

"FB fans aren’t seeing your posts (and how to fix it)"
http://alwaysupward.com/blog/fb-fans...how-to-fix-it/

It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

In other words, through “Sponsored Stories,” brands, agencies and artists are now charged to reach their own fans—the whole reason for having a page—because those pages have suddenly stopped working.

This is a clear conflict of interest. The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.

Let's not forget the filter bubble by way of Google through way of Personalized Search results... i.e. we generally only see views we agree with

Filter Bubble - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

A filter bubble is a result of a personalized search in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user (such as location, past click behavior and search history[1][2]) and, as a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. Prime examples are Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news stream. The term was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser in his book by the same name; according to Pariser, users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own informational bubble. Pariser related an example in which one user searched Google for "BP" and got investment news about British Petroleum while another searcher got information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that the two search results pages were "strikingly different".[3][4][5][6] The bubble effect may have negative implications for civic discourse, according to Pariser, but there are contrasting views suggesting the effect is minimal[6] and addressable.[7]

So Americans on social media popularize the issues, even though not all social media websites are playing fair in publishing them. The media then dissects this into a persona, neglecting most of the facts and only picking it apart for entertainment/sensation value and then uses a baiting headline to incite reactions and then self-aggrandizing groups or political figuers such as the NRA, NAACP, Tea Party, Donald Trump, etc polarize the issues further to get attention and control perception because who cares about facts when they can push their platform and make $$$. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That last bit is the most important part and has gotten really out of control in the US the past several years. The media is becoming more and more nationalist and comments/retweets on my Twitter are starting to read like obituaries. We're not as dire as the media portrays, but it's the media that gives a platform to much of the vitriol that incites the violence. It started to get really bad after 9/11, we massively over-reacted to it politically and militarily and the media has been riding on a polarized public ever since.

Oh and voter apathy among minorities and moderates does not help. I was shocked to read Brexit voting population percentage was 70%+.... that would be a miracle here. We are lucky to get more than 50% of the population to vote in a general election. Far far less in a primary.