In case you were wondering: A surfeit of social realities to explain (a bit) about how we got here

Image by Taken from Pixabay

I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for almost 20 years now, but people still pay me to go find things out. I have a habit of finding way more information than the person who hired me wanted, the curse of a curious nature. 

Here's some of the surplus I've accumulated recently from some of that work, all of it related to the multiple layers of social crises we're seeing emerging in virtually every BC community. I drive along 900-block Pandora Street sometimes and am at a loss to grasp just what the hell is happening to us, but when I consider all the snippets of social tragedy below, it makes a very, very sad kind of sense. 

For instance:

We shut down institutions and never really replaced them with much

Riverview Hospital used to be BC’s largest mental institution, housing 4,300 people at its peak in the 1950s. But by the early 1990s, locking up people deemed "mentally disordered" for indefinite periods of time, with or without their consent, had fallen from favour. Riverview had been scaled back to 1,000 beds, and plans to replace institutional care with community care were in their final stages.

But from the start, the political motivations for closing Riverview were as much about cost savings as they were about philosophical shifts in how best to support people with mental illness. Between 1994 and 1998, spending on in-hospital psychiatric units was cut almost in half, and spending on community services for mental health was reduced as well, despite years of political promises to the contrary. 

Riverview was permanently closed in 2012. The long-abandoned promise of community services to replace what Riverview once provided isn't even talked about anymore. We are not going to return to the days of huge institutions, and that's a good thing, but there must be some middle ground between that and the modern-day reality of abandoning people with lifelong psychiatric health issues to figure out a hard life on their own. 

As for BC hospitals' psychiatric units, people pass through them so quickly nowadays that their mental health crisis doesn't even have a chance to stabilize. People used to stay an average 36 days in BC psych units before being discharged, but that fell to 15 days a number of years ago, and 14 days now. Psychiatric admissions between 2005 and 2017 increased 29 per cent, with no increase in beds[3].

People with developmental disabilities used to have to live in large institutions in BC as well back in the day. But deinstitutionalization happened for them around the same time as Riverview was being phased out. 

That population did seem to get better community care for a number of years after institutions like Tranquille, Glendale and Woodlands closed. But over time, the safety net has frayed substantially for them, too. It's not uncommon now to see people with developmental disabilities among the homeless. 

That is such a devastating ending for all the families who fought so hard in the 1960s-70s for the right for their children not to be locked away in institutions. Be careful what you wish for.

We are drowning in poisoned drugs

BC has always had lots and lots of illicit drugs. But what we've got going on in 2023 looks nothing like the relatively straight-forward drug scene of years past. With fentanyl, carfentanil, benzodiazapines and all kinds of other weird additives stirred into the mix now, people are getting sick in entirely new ways, and the death toll from toxic drugs is staggering. 

Since BC declared a public emergency in 2016, there have been 13,000 deaths from toxic drugs in the province, and no end in sight. Annual toxic drug deaths have increased almost ten-fold in the decade from 2012 to 2022, from 270 to 2,342.

For those who overdose on an opiate, prescription drugs like naloxone can save lives when injected immediately after an otherwise-fatal overdose. But people revived after an overdose are at high risk of having incurred a brain injury during the minutes when their brain was not receiving oxygen, and suddenly, a crisis of brain injury among people brought back to life after an overdose is emerging as a new (and almost completely unserved) concern.

Our governments quit building affordable housing

We all know there's a housing crisis going on. The increasing use of housing as an investment is often cited as a primary driver.  But as stats from BC's rental scene make clear, an equally big issue is that nobody has kept up with population growth. 

BC's population grew 34 per cent in the last 30 years. But in that same period, we've added exactly 6,000 more rental units. Our population grew by a third, while the number of rental units increased by a mere five per cent (from 114,129 units to 120,472[4].)

Equally problematic: Rents that are just so far beyond so many people's ability to afford. 

Average rents have increased 250 per cent in the last three decades. But the shelter allowance for those on income assistance was frozen at $375/month for the last 15 years up until this year’s increase to $500 (which still gets you nothing in any urban area). 

Given all of that, it's no surprise that the Lower Mainland's 2023 homeless count noted a 32 per cent rise in homelessness since 2020, with almost 70 per cent homeless for more than a year. We have created a permanent homeless class. 

We do jail differently now, mostly by accident

Even 15 years ago when the social crisis wasn't quite so obvious, people with mental illness or substance use disorders made up the majority of BC inmates, at 61 per cent. But now, it's almost like jail is the new psych hospital. Three-quarters of inmates now have a diagnosis of mental illness, substance use disorder or both. 

They and their fellow inmates churn through the system with unprecedented speed. The median length of stay in a provincial jail these days is 12 days. Almost a third of inmates across Canada are released from jail into homelessness. 

Provincial jail is where you do your time if your sentence is "two years less a day." But the majority of inmates in BC jails don't even have a sentence yet - they're in remand, where a person is held while awaiting trial if bail doesn't work out. People in remand units now account for 67 per cent of inmates in BC jails[7], up 15 per cent from a decade ago and slowly on the rise since the 1980s.

So we have recreated the institution part of Riverview by turning our jails into de facto psych units, but minus the psychiatric services and supports. Things that make you go hmmm.

We're still so far from doing right by Indigenous people

Indigenous people are over-represented in virtually every measure that matters for social wellness, health, safety and well-being. This is particularly true in terms of our jails.

Indigenous people account for six per cent of BC’s population, but make up more than a third of people in custody in the province[8]. In 2020-21, the incarceration rate for Indigenous people in BC was 22 in 100,000, compared to 2.3 for non-Indigenous British Columbians. 

A staggering 90 per cent of Indigenous people in provincial custody have been diagnosed with a mental health or substance use disorder[9]. Grimmer still: A Statistics Canada study released this year found that in the years 2019-21, almost one in 10 Indigenous men in Canada between the ages of 25-34 experienced incarceration[10]. 

We're returning to the days of poverty for some seniors, only this time they're homeless too

More than a fifth of people identified as living homeless in the 2023 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count are ages 55 and up. Nearly half of them became unhoused for the first time after turning 55. People age hard once homeless; those who are chronically homeless have life spans 20 years shorter than the rest of us.

Even comparatively comfortable BC seniors are struggling. BC Seniors Advocate Isobel Mackenzie noted in her 2023 "It's Time To Act" report that seniors in privately run, publicly subsidized assisted-living units are having a hard time keeping up with the array of additional costs that housing operators now charge for every little service, not to mention rent increases of up to 15 per cent a year at some facilities. 

And here's a strange trend: Even though BC's senior population is expected to increase to 25 per cent from 19 per cent over the next 15 years, the number of assisted living units per 1,000 population has fallen 15 per cent in the last five years in the province.

Is that because people don't want to live like that and they're finding other options, or because somebody has quit building that type of housing because they can make more money doing other things? Tune in 15 years from now to find out.

***

Ah, feels so much better to get those unused stats off my chest. I should wrap this up with some pithy conclusion, or a ringing call to action to fix this by doing a, b and c. But seriously, is it even possible to wish for a fix anymore? We are so profoundly late to the game. 

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[1] https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/lbrr/archives/cnmcs-plcng/cn28441-eng.pdf

[2] BC Ombudsperson report Committed to Change

[3] BC Schizophrenia Society and BC Psychiatric Association joint report

[4] https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Table?TableId=2.1.31.3&GeographyId=2410&GeographyTypeId=3&DisplayAs=Table&GeograghyName=Vancouver

[5] https://globalnews.ca/news/10030845/vancouver-homeless-seniors/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe're%20already%20in%20crisis,32%20per%20cent%20from%202020

[6] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/prison-mental-health-sfu-study-1.6271915

[7] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/14691-eng.htm

[8] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/justice/criminal-justice/corrections/reducing-reoffending/indigenous#:~:text=Indigenous%20people%20are%20nearly%206,and%2027%25%20in%20the%20community.

[9] https://www.oag.bc.ca/sites/default/files/publications/reports/BCOAG-Mental-Health-Substance-Use-Services-Corrections-Report-February-2023.pdf

[10] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2023001/article/00004-eng.htm

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day...

When I was a kid and got too whiny about some little difficulty in my life, I'd get shaken back to reality by a parent or grandparent with a version of one of those Walked Five Miles to School in a Blizzard stories from their own childhoods. 

The examples varied, perhaps invoking a time when there was nothing but shrivelled potatoes to eat, or comparing my comfy bedroom to the mattress on the floor that they remembered sharing with some ridiculous amount of siblings. 

But the moral was always the same: this parent/grandparent had known deprivation, and I should be so glad and eternally grateful for living in different times.

It struck me the other day that the Boomer generation that I'm part of just might be the first generation in Canada whose own stories will instead be of how good they had it compared to their grandkids. 

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day we had houses for people. We didn't even have a word for homelessness, and you camped for fun, not because it was that or nothing. We burned through natural resources like there was no tomorrow. (Turns out that last part was true.) 

Back in my day, we made real money, and if we hit a bad spell, could fall back on employment insurance that actually covered most of a person's bills. We had doctors. Weather was just weather, not an ominous portent of end of days. 

Sounds a bit like a tall tale at this point, doesn't it? In fairness, not everything has gotten worse in my lifetime. 

Rights have improved significantly, at least on paper. We are woke, more or less, to the cruelties and inequities around race, gender, sexual preference and disability. We appear to be finally getting real about addressing the historic theft of Indigenous lands. 

Crime in Canada is half of what it was at its peak in the early 1990s, and the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has declined by more than a billion people since 1990.

But while rights, personal safety and a little less global poverty are vital components to a good life, so is purchasing power and hope for the future in a world that at times feels dangerously close to losing it.

 And on that front, my generation can only hang its head in shame.

I've told the story of my 17-year-old newlywed self many times, so apologies for dragging it out again for this post. But it's just so perfect for summing up what has happened over my lifetime when it comes to the growing social decay we see around us and the deepening struggle to achieve the basics of a good life.

In the late 1970s in Courtenay, I was a stay-at-home teenage mom teaching a little piano on the side and my then-husband worked at the Campbell River paper mill. He made around $28,000 a year, which the Bank of Canada inflation calculator tells me is equivalent to $105,000 in 2022. Pretty decent pay for a couple of kids starting a life.

We bought a cabin on the water at Royston for $10,000 when we got married in 1974. We had two cars, and regularly holidayed with the kids to the Okanagan and Disneyland. We moved on to a bigger house a couple of years later and had a small, manageable mortgage and no appreciable credit card debt, possibly because it was hellishly hard to get a credit card in those days.

When there was a five-month strike at the mill that really hurt, we caught and ate so much salmon that I couldn't eat it again for years. Because our seas were full of salmon.

Fast forward 50 years and it's an entirely different life for a young couple with kids anywhere on Vancouver Island or the Lower Mainland. 

Not only is the thought of ever being able to buy a home out of reach for many of them, they can't even count on staying put in a rental home if the property owner opts to "renovict." They certainly can't count on easily finding another place to rent at a price they can afford. 

The number of two-income families in Canada has doubled since the 1970s, during which time purchasing power has fallen far below what it once was. Forget the dream of a two-income family able to participate more fully in the economy. What has actually happened is a flat-lining in wages that now requires two people to work just to earn the same amount that one person once earned. 

The average hourly wage in Canada in 1975 was just over $10. Today, it's $20. Meanwhile, inflation has risen almost 470 per cent in the same period - which means that the hourly wage in 2022 ought to be $47 to have maintained the same purchasing power. 

The rich get richer and the not-rich lose ground. Canada's wealthiest 20 per cent of households now hold two-thirds of all assets in the country, while the least wealthy 20 per cent hold just 2.8 per cent. That top 20 per cent is the only quintile to have increased its share of national income over the years; all the others have seen a loss. 

It was my generation that inked the free-trade deals that have tied the world together so tightly for hungry global capitalists and consumers eager for cheap goods that now we're dependent on distant countries for everything. When a relentless drought grips California farms and the rivers get so dry in China that the freighters can't run, it's our store shelves that sit empty.

It's my generation that's sitting fat and happy on our investment portfolios, rooting for growth to continue unfettered every quarter so we can live in grand comfort. Those who come after us will live with the fallout - crashed pension plans, climate change, unattainable dreams of a home to call your own, weakening social benefits. "Populist" governments to come will worsen every crisis with their self-serving agendas, even while their meaningless rhetoric acts as a siren's call to the disaffected and disappointed.

Let me tell ya, kid, that is all so very wrong. Wish I could tell you that we're working on it, but I don't think we are. Think of it this way: You'll have some great stories of deprivation to tell your own grandkids.

Drugs don't kill people, poisoned drugs do

BC's crisis of poisoned street drugs is hitting men in the prime of their working years the hardest. Three-quarters of the 10,000 deaths in BC from poisoned illicit drugs since 2015 have been men ages 30-59.

As this fact-filled story in The Tyee today highlights, one in five of them was working in the trades or transportation when they died. But while this information matters, it's not where we're going to find solutions for BC's poisoned street drugs. 

There are many reasons for why tradespeople are dying from using drugs, as the piece explains. The manly-man culture of the trades, the chronic pain of injury, crazy shifts, intense working conditions, long stints isolated in work camps, reluctance to reach out for help and risk looking "weak."

But BC is a resource province, and we've had manly men working in pain, isolation and wild working conditions throughout our history. They have used drugs to numb all that - or as a reward at the end of a hard day -  for as long as rough jobs have existed. Those of us who grew up with our eyes open in any BC resource town can attest to that.

Admittedly, such men have probably been dying at a much higher rate than the rest of for all this time; we just didn't think to measure those deaths in relation to the type of work the dead man was doing at the time. But they weren't dying like they're dying now.

So what's different this time? The drugs. They're poisoned. How and why they have ended up poisoned is a story I'm still waiting to read, but it seems pretty obvious that we won't slow this crisis until we figure it out. 

The standard how-why responses for illicit drugs having become so toxic tend to focus on suppliers using cheaper substances to increase profits. Street drugs are being cut with fentanyl, benzodiazipines and other weird and deadly stuff because it allows a much greater profit for the supplier and seller.

But cutting drugs with weird stuff to increase profits is also a time-honoured tradition in BC. The crisis in toxic drug deaths that we're seeing now is very specific to the last 10 years, and strangely specific to BC. 

The United States has its own drug crisis going on with opioid overdoses, now killing more than 1,500 Americans every week. But an overdose is not the same as poisoned drugs. The people who are dying in BC aren't dying because they used more drugs than were safe, they're dying because the drug supply is toxic.

This is an important distinction. You can't set about fixing a problem until you fully understand it, and it's important for us to let go of this wrong idea that people are dying just because they used drugs (a belief that lets us fall back on moralizing and dismiss this crisis as something that "good people" don't have to worry about). 

Were you ever a kid who gulped down street drugs without a second thought? Because I was. Happily, I grew up in the 1970s, when the drugs that a kid could access mostly weren't going to do anything worse than send you into a gas station bathroom to barf your guts out, or get you in trouble with your parents. 

Had I been a teen in today's world, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead. 

The Tyee's story notes that the employers of tradespeople have a lot to answer to, from inhumane shifts and their own culture of denying anything is wrong in their industry. But understanding why tradespeople need drugs to hang in at their jobs, while important, will not solve the toxic drug crisis. That won't be solved until we no longer have a poisoned drug supply.

The judgment we feel about the use of any drug other than alcohol so quickly sends us off into pointless and meaningless conversations about why people use drugs. (We use drugs because they make us feel better.) But addressing this toxic-drug crisis has to focus on the poisoned drugs, not the users. 

Imagine for a moment that more and more infant formula coming into Canada was turning out to be poisoned, and babies were dying. 

We would not address that with a public awareness campaign about breastfeeding, would we? We would not call it a solution to distribute pharmaceuticals to new moms so they could inject their babies and stall off the effects of the poison long enough to get to the hospital. We'd just dig in to figure out why the formula was poisoned, and how we could ensure a safe supply.

Where are the big drug importers in this conversation, and what could they tell us about how those imports, or their own practices, have changed? Where are the policy makers who can put aside political qualms and posturing to act bravely in the name of saving lives? 

We are stuck, and so many people are dying. This is so wrong. 

Falling B grades signal community decline

Few things visualize the impact of the pandemic and the sad slide of social wellness in Greater Victoria quite so pointedly as the 2022 Vital Signs survey results.

Take a look at these charts highlighting findings from the Victoria Foundation report. 

What caught my eye was the one that compared 10 years of survey data where participants grade a dozen "key areas" that together make up a healthy community - things like belonging, arts and culture, the economy, health and wellness, standard of living, etc.

Straight As are a lot to ask for, but a B grade ought to be achievable for a Canadian city of privilege and wealth in 2022. Respondents are asked to give a B grade if they think a particular key area is good but could use some improvement. In years past, a majority of Greater Victorians responding to the survey ranked most of the key areas at B or higher.

But that was before. Vital Signs 2022 compared B grades across 10 years' worth of surveys, and what is revealed is a community that fell hard in the pandemic and has yet to find its way back out. Scores for every one of the 12 indicators fell significantly in 2020, and most are still falling. 

Sure, we're talking a global pandemic. Excuse us if we're not back to normal yet. But take a moment to mull over that decade of numbers and you'll notice how little improvement we were seeing in any of them since well before the pandemic got us. We've been "good but needs improvement" for years on key measures of community wellness, and now we're not even achieving that. 

If you've lived in Greater Victoria for any length of time, your own eyes have probably been telling you that for some time now. Mine certainly have. It's disturbing to see that housing has consistently scored poorly at least back to 2013, and yet each new year comes and goes in worsening crisis.

So yeah, could be it's the pandemic messing with our community wellness and things will be good again soon. Or not.

I pulled out five key areas to highlight in this graph below. They've seen the most dramatic decline, and yet are such necessary components of a healthy community. Belonging, getting started in the community, health and wellness, housing, safety - those are the foundations of a good life. These falling indicators are telling us that all is decidedly not well. 

What can be done? A lot. But how it will get done is the burning question. On housing, I hear the same conversations now that were going on 15 years ago. They are getting us nowhere, even while the tents and the chaos and the poisoned people and the abandoned grocery carts keep piling up along Pandora Avenue.

We are paralyzed by political cycles, shifting priorities, clashes in opinion and perspective, and a general feeling that "somebody ought to do something about that" without anyone actually thinking it's them. 

These are the crises of our times. If we are unable to figure out how to take action collectively across long-term, difficult issues that are really going to hurt to fix, our problems can only deepen. How many bad things in your own life have ever gotten better because you ignored them?

Yes, our region is a beautiful place and life is pretty good for most of us. But it's quite awful for others of us, and it's getting worse. We either get on that for real or it gets worse for everyone.

Deniers, Hoarders, Invincibles, Worriers - the many faces of our COVID-19 tribes

Sixteen faces of COVID-19 “personalities” are emerging around the world as people react to unprecedented weirdness in very different ways.

In work published at Nature.com last month, Norwegian researcher Mimi Lam identifies 16 COVID-19 personality types that are in evidence across the globe as the pandemic grinds on.

She argues that countries need to understand these "viral identities" and strive to educate people in ways that unite people rather than drive them farther apart, and to use the personality types to improve modelling of how the virus will spread in a specific region or country. "The global COVID-19 pandemic unites us with a common virus, but divides us with emergent viral identities," she notes.

“These emergent viral identities are influencing individual behavioural and government policy responses to the heightened uncertainty posed by COVID-19. Individuals often respond to policies by protecting their values and identities, so for some, COVID-19 has reinforced social and political identities,” writes Lam.

“Social identities foster a sense of belonging via attachment to social groups and their behaviours. Salient identities contribute to common views on policies and shape behaviours to benefit in-groups These salient viral identities have heightened inter-group differentiation and explain the rampant racism against the Chinese, as well as initial policy responses of border closures oriented to protect ‘Us’ against ‘Them.’ “

Here are the 16 personality types:

• Deniers, who downplay the viral threat
• Spreaders, who want the virus to spread, herd immunity to develop, and normality to return
• Harmers, who may spit or cough at others or dub COVID-19 “Boomer Remover”
• Realists, who recognise the reality of its harm and adjust their behaviours
• Worriers, who stay informed and safe to manage their uncertainty and viral-induced fear
• Contemplators, who isolate and reflect on life and the world
• Hoarders, who panic-buy food, toilet paper, and other products to quell their insecurity
• Invincibles, often youth, who believe themselves to be immune and flock to beaches and parties
• Rebels, who defiantly flout social rules restricting their individual freedoms
• Blamers, who vent their fears and frustrations onto others, discriminating against racial groups or health-care workers
• Exploiters, who exploit the situation for power or brutality
• Innovators, who design or repurpose resources, for example, for face masks, ventilators, and other medical
• Supporters, who show their solidarity in support of others through, for example, claps, songs, and rainbows
• Altruists, who help the vulnerable, elderly, and isolated
• Warriors, like the front-line health-care workers who combat its grim reality
• Veterans, who experienced SARS or MERS and willingly comply with COVID-19 restrictions

Lam notes that using these personality types to refine forecasts of COVID transmission and impact could be an important tool in managing the virus. To forecast viral transmission, for instance, these behaviours can be “clustered by their projected compliance” into the modelling, and will reveal the benefits of not just flattening the viral curve but shifting behaviours.

Deniers, Harmers, Invincibles and Rebels are “non-compliers.” Spreaders, Blamers and Exploiters are “partial compliers.” Realists, Worriers, Contemplators, Hoarders, Innovators, Supporters, Altruists, Warriors and Veterans are “compliers.” What works to shift the behaviours of one group can inflame the mood among another. 

Lam cites the different way that countries reacted to social-distancing measures as exemplifying the need for approaches that recognize the 16 types of COVID personalities and identify strategies and modelling that take into account their very different behaviours during a pandemic.

“UK and US models assumed a uniform 85–90 per cent reduction in social contacts, as reported by Chinese citizens. However, unlike authoritarian regimes, liberal democracies cannot compel their populace to follow state-imposed restrictions. Variance in individual responses and willingness to comply with COVID-19 policy interventions can be captured if epidemiological models group individuals by their salient viral identities, informed by demographic variables.”

The Great Hack: Watch It

I've been alarmed anew by the Cambridge Analytica horror story after watching the documentary "The Great Hack" last night on Netflix.

We're all rightly offended by the massive invasion of privacy that occurred in that scandalous period. But what's far more frightening for me after the film is the monumental scope of global democratic disruption.

What Cambridge Analytica did with Facebook's happy help was psychological warfare funded by wealthy people. Carried out on behalf of political parties that the wealthy people resonate with, it targeted carefully selected "persuadibles" chosen for their fear-based, authoritarian-leaning personalities. Everything they needed to know was mined out of Facebook and other social media, via a "fun" little personality quiz developed by an American researcher working at Cambridge University.

And the rest is history, as they say. Brexit. Trump. But so much more, because Cambridge was active all over the world. When authoritarian interests came calling, Cambridge was there.

One of the most unsettling revelations for me was the film's evidence that Cambridge ran a campaign aiming to increase voter apathy among young black adults in the 2010 Trinidad and Tobago election. Cambridge's secret Facebook campaign targeted those who were naturally prone to checking out and showing a low interest in their world with a campaign that encouraged them not to vote.

Parties are known to attract distinct race-based support in that country, so the goal of Cambridge's clients was to see the Indian-based party win by increasing voter apathy among those who supported other parties. The Do So campaign targeted young black adults with a song-and-dance, fun-loving barrage of videos encouraging them not to vote as a symbol of protest.

That is pure evil at work, don't you think?

Hope you'll watch it. Those of us with ethical character can't even imagine the scenarios that those motivated solely by money and power get up to, but it feels important to get a big reminder every now and then, something that gets you reading deep or watching some revelatory documentary that shakes you to the core.

Sure, let's focus on the positive, too. But we wouldn't want to get complacent thinking everything's pretty much OK. The Great Hack reminds us that it most definitely isn't.

Message I was left with: Wake up! Wake up! It's so much bigger than somebody having access to everything on your Facebook account. We're talking an act of war.

Governments are complicit because they want to win. Cambridge Analytica-type firms are complicit because they not only want to grow rich, but get a rush from being disruptors without ethics. Facebook and other social media are complicit because there is so damn much money to be had.

(In her powerful TED talk on this issue, Guardian journalist Carol Cadwalladr asks social-media executives if this is how they want history to remember them, as "handmaidens to authoritarianism.")

Question I was left with: Where the heck was the academic, Alexandr Kogan, who created the infamous personality test that Cambridge used to identify "persuadibles"? He barely got a mention in the film.

He took his field of research and used it commercially to deliberately subvert democracy. He made this whole thing possible. So many people behaving badly, but I definitely have him on my list.

Journalism 101: Winning awards is one thing, consistent and solid local coverage is something else

Advice to Phillip Crawley, or any other boss poised to cut $10 million in salaries, none of which involves their own job: Don't try to dress that up as a positive thing.

 Yes, the Globe and Mail's reporting staff of 250 does seem unbelievably luxurious in the eyes of any other slashed-to-bits Canadian newsroom. And yes, I'm sure those who remain after this latest round of cuts announced this week will still do their best to maintain quality journalism.

But Crawley - G&M publisher - came across as tone-deaf, insensitive and pretty damn unaware of newsroom realities in the J-Source story about the coming cuts at Canada's national newspaper. Defending the cuts, he chose to cite the recent National Newspaper Awards win of the St. Catherines Standard with a skeletal staff of five reporters (down from 49 after years of cuts) as an example of how quality reporting doesn't require quantity.

Here's the thing: Sure, a newsroom with almost nobody left to do reporting might still be able to win a National Newspaper Award once in a while. But can it cover the non-award-worthy daily grind of local news that readers actually care about? Not a chance.

I only have to reflect back on my own time as managing editor of the Victoria Times Colonist in the mid-1990s, presiding over a newsroom staff still large enough that we were able to cover all the regular council meetings of Greater Victoria's 13 municipalities, and even keep an eye on the three school boards in the region. Oh, those were the days.

Nobody wins national awards for the quotidian coverage of council and school board. But those kinds of stories are the lifeblood of a good local newspaper. Those are the stories that keep councils mindful of their actions, citizens aware of what their municipalities are up to, and maintain a general sense of news coverage that stays on top of the local scene.

What is being lost in the ongoing cuts to mainstream media is average "beat" reporting. It's the kind of reporting that keeps politicians on track and citizens in the loop. It's the unremarkable yet critically important foundation to democracy. And nobody has been able to figure out how to make it happen in the new age of digital media that no one wants to pay for.

What to do? Worry, I'd say. Subscribe to the daily newspapers that matter to you, though subscription costs seem very much out of whack with the sad-looking products that pass for daily newspapers these days. And I'm sure you'll have noticed already that local news coverage is a shadow of its former self compared to what it was back in what I now think of as the golden era (though cuts were already happening even 20 years ago), because it's the coverage that costs the most.

Do send donations to the digital news sources that you rely on, because quality journalism simply can't exist without somebody paying. The Tyee online newspaper fundraises to hire reporters for specific local issues - better than nothing for sure, but not able to sustain a fleet of reporters grinding it out on the unsexy but essential coverage of daily life in our communities.

So ignore guys like Crawley when they tell you that a $10 million cut in newsroom staffing isn't going to hurt the quality of journalism. He's wrong.

Open procurement and social care: Why that should scare you

Find me here in the Vancouver Sun writing on the scintillating issue of open procurement, and other strange happenings bombarding the community-based social services sector.

While you may think that whole sentence is unbelievably dull and referring to things you have zero interest in, I urge you to read my piece anyway. People, this stuff really matters.

For those who can't or won't click, I'm just going to paste the article right here as well. That's how easy I want it to be for you to read it. Also, I wrote this as the executive director for the Board Voice Society of BC, work I do two days a week, but I am such a believer in this issue that I would have written it even if it wasn't my job.

***

Editorial pages of Vancouver Sun
March 22, 2019
By Jody Paterson

Open procurement policies put community social-services groups at risk

I work in the non-profit community social-services sector. If your eyes glazed over when you read that, that nicely demonstrates the kind of PR problems besetting the sector now.

We’re in all your lives, though you likely don’t know us by that “community social-services” tag. We’re your daycares, your home care, your crisis line, your social housing. We’re treatment services, counselling, mom-and-tot groups, immigrant settlement, supports for people with special needs. We’re the soup-to-nuts helpful array of thousands of local services around B.C., every one of our organizations born out of the dream of passionate people who saw a need for social care and stepped up to address it.

That sounds so warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? Everyone loves us. Virtually everyone has a story about an amazing community non-profit they have known, and an expression of heartfelt respect for the vital work of the sector. “Good people,” as one B.C. politician summed it up in a recent meeting with me.

But it doesn’t feel like love is in the air right now from inside the sector.

The work is challenging at the best of times, what with it mostly funded project-by-project and for short periods, with the tightest of margins for operating. Right now, however, there are so many layers of other unexpected and negative developments adding to the mix that there’s a real life-and-death feeling to the moment.

Here’s where the PR problem comes in for our sector: Very few people even understand what we do, let alone appreciate that we’re the best ones to do it.

We were born to do it, literally. Every community non-profit’s birth story begins with motivated citizens identifying a need, then building a non-profit to address it. Every one of us is required to have an elected volunteer community board overseeing everything we do, and to reinvest every penny of profit back into our communities (that’s why they call us non-profits).

I mean, what’s not to like about that perfect community model?

And yet we’re losing ground. Two multinational corporations took 22 per cent of the money in the recent awarding of Work B.C. employment-training contracts. Last week, we woke up to news in the media that home-support services are moving back to health authorities next year — news that has left shell-shocked non-profit providers scrambling to figure out whether they can still keep the doors open once they lose those contracts.

An emerging issue is open procurement. In a nutshell, that involves government procuring more and more of its services through open bids that treats companies and not-for-profits exactly the same.

That might sound “fair.” But if you don’t build in points in the bidding process for the extras that non-profits bring to social care — community connection, services built on passion rather than profit, reinvestment back into community — the whole raison d’etre of the non-profit model counts for nothing. When you create larger service regions managed by far fewer suppliers, you create major financial risk that few community non-profits are prepared to take on.

And eventually, the global corporations moving into social care all around the world end up owning social care in B.C. as well.

Just last week, our sector learned that open procurement will be used to secure the next round of contracts for B.C.’s child-care resource and referral centres, established in 38 communities around the province to support families and child-care providers. Unless the scoring for that procurement includes points for the unique values that community-based non-profits bring to this work, these services as well could end up the work of multinationals.

Governments in Canada do have to manage procurement in accordance with international free-trade agreements. But do we actually want to view the social health of our communities as a commodity on the open market? Do we have any proof that open procurement is the best way to go about selecting who provides vital social-care services to our citizens?

There are fundamental issues at stake here. And what worries me most is that we aren’t talking about them. Change is just happening, looking a lot like surprise one-offs until you start keeping a list and realize just how many unsettling and unexpected developments are going on for B.C.’s community non-profit sector.

Some of them won’t survive — and not because their services were inferior, unnecessary or unvalued. Simply because somebody somewhere changed things up without thinking about unintended consequences on community services that really matter.

Am I whining? Is this “self-interest”? Our sector always seems to get that term thrown at us when we raise issues. Sure, we’re self-interested — who isn’t? I’ve got a big two-day-a-week job without benefits at stake here.

But just because we work in the sector doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to us. Good and important services delivered by caring people who really know their stuff are at-risk as never before. A wonderful community model for delivering social care is under serious threat, and all without a word of public consultation.

Social care should be as sustainably funded, prioritized and planned for as health and education in B.C. That’s how we achieve economic prosperity. It’s how we strengthen our communities and engage people to live their best lives. We’re as committed to the government’s dream of reducing poverty, improving child care and responding more effectively to mental health and addiction as they are.

But every day is a fight to stay alive in this sector. The new threats looming on so many fronts are a painful reminder that people still don’t grasp that our work is the foundation of community social care in B.C. Our non-profit model was created for the task. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Jody Paterson is executive director of the Board Voice Society of B.C., representing volunteer boards and senior staff of B.C. community non-profits serving the social determinants of health. The irony isn’t lost on her that March is Community Social Services Awareness Month.

Opioid crisis: Those who manufactured it should pay their share

I like a good analogy for figuring out complex problems with moral overtones. I got to thinking about which one might work for understanding the opioid crisis after I saw the comments from my Facebook post today linking to the BC government’s announcement of a class action law suit against the opioid manufacturing industry.

How’s this: Reimagining the issue as if it were the use of pesticides.

Like the opioid manufacturing industry, the pesticide industry is both a help and a harm. It makes no sense to just demand the elimination of pesticides, or to expect that people who really want pesticides aren't going to find their way to them whatever you do. Besides, if there’s money to be made selling pesticides to desperate farmers, there are going to be companies selling it.

But at the same time, you can’t just leave the industry without responsibility for the harms it causes. Corporations don’t innately have morals (you HAVE seen “The Corporation,” right?). Unregulated, unfettered industry will always go for the biggest profit. It’s what they’re born to do.

OK, let’s picture Farming Community Z (FCZ), which for all kinds of reasons is struggling to keep things going. They’ve had drought, floods, bad soil and not enough food on the table for a long time, and all of a sudden a plague of aphids has hit. Pesticides aren’t the long-term answer, but they sure look good in the short term.

Sad days in FCZ, but the sorrows and struggles going on there in fact affect many other neighbouring farming communities. The impact of pesticides is felt far beyond the farms where it’s being used. Making things considerably worse, the people in FCZ are dying like crazy, because they are the ones living right in the midst of all that pesticide, and the grief from those who loved them, helped them, or tried fruitlessly to get them to quit using pesticides is reaching unbearable proportion.

Who’s to blame? It’s complicated. Personally, I wouldn’t waste a lot of time looking for who to blame, because there are an awful lot of factors years in the making that have laid the groundwork for what’s going on in FCZ. Maybe laying blame could be an exercise for another day, when people aren’t dying.

So…if you were a bright and progressive society like Canada, what would you do?

First, you’d acknowledge that whatever you’re doing now really isn’t working. The evidence is pretty much insurmountable at this point. So maybe you would take one of those political walks in the snow to reflect on all those reports, royal commissions, analyses, studies, and research done on pesticide use over the years, and wonder how it is you’ve still never acted on their remarkably consistent recommendations.

You’d get to work pulling apart all the pieces of the puzzle and you’d identify that:

•  The people of FCZ need help that starts all the way back to fixing that damaged soil, and accepting that some are never going to be able to manage without pesticides; 
• Every level of government and all kinds of people are being harmed, drained of money, and otherwise suffering because of the situation in FCZ, regardless of whether they live there; 
• Pesticides have been around for a really long time, but something has clearly changed in their availability and lethal quality for this level of harm to be occurring; 
• The only notable exception amid misery in all directions is the pesticide industry, which is profiting from the crisis; 
• It’s way past time to follow the money. 

Analogies aside, here’s the one absolute truth of the opioid crisis: The pharmaceutical industry is profiting mightily from it. Everyone else is being harmed, but that industry is making money.

There is a direct line from opiate-induced misery to the pharmaceutical companies that make those drugs, and the clever bastards are pocketing even more now that we’ve been convinced that the solution to the damage caused by their increased opiate sales is to arm the population with anti-overdose drugs, which they also sell.

I think the government’s class action suit against the industry is brilliant. If we all must suffer, then certainly the corporations making these drugs ought to suffer along with us. They make their money from sorrow. The least they can do is pay their share.

Homelessness is still a problem. Gee, go figure

Ten years ago now, I was part of a major initiative to address homelessness in Victoria. The Mayor's Task Force on Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness brought together some of the most informed, passionate people in the country to look into the issue of people living on our streets and what needed to be done about it. 

In four intense months, the task force put together a comprehensive report, packed with thoughtful, meaningful research, strategies and findings. What lands people into homelessness in these modern times turned out to be quite a complex series of things, starting with people's own personal crises, health issues and inability (for all kinds of reasons) to manage the major problems and stressors of their lives, and then deepening into shifting priorities at all levels of government, systemic failures, flawed decision-making, disconnects and deep funding cuts across the existing system of support, and a general failure by our society to grasp how much effort and investment is needed over a very long time to try to address an entrenched social problem.

The key message repeated over and over again in that report was that while we do indeed need much more housing and social supports, we will always have homelessness unless we address the root causes of it. Without that, you are simply housing those who are homeless right now, even while new people fall into homelessness behind them.

A decade on, we have built some more housing. We have added more outreach. We have shifted thinking in the judicial system to the point that judges now routinely make much more humane decisions when confronted with cases that so clearly come down to homelessness and poverty rather than criminal intent.

We have also talked and talked about the root causes of homelessness, so much so that I'd like to think that virtually everyone now understands much more that homelessness happens not because someone is too lazy to work or reluctant to "pull up their bootstraps," but because of things like mental illness, poverty, disability, catastrophic injury, substance issues, a lifetime of disadvantage, and the lack of any kind of personal support system to fall back.

But while public awareness may have improved, the strategies that might staunch the flow of people into homelessness have never come about. That explains why we are still talking about homelessness like nothing has changed, and why there were a thousand or so people living homeless in Victoria when the task force got underway in 2007 and still is. And why there still will be 10 years from now if we keep doing things in the same ineffective, reactive way.

A new report was released last week confirming that the majority of homeless youth in our country are survivors of the foster system. Children from families investigated through Canada's child-welfare system are almost 200 times more likely to end up homeless at some point in their lifetime compared to children with no involvement in the system.

Shocking. But we knew that already 10 years ago. We've heard about it repeatedly in the intervening years from former BC Children and Youth representative Mary Ellen Turpel Lafond, who penned report after report pointing out this tragic statistic. Yet here we are, still being shocked. Still doing nothing effective in response.

We also knew 10 years ago that discharging people from our provincial jails with no plan also fed into homelessness, not to mention led some of them to instantly commit another crime to get themselves out of their dire economic situation. We knew that discharging people with chronic mental illness from hospital without a solid plan did the same. As did relentlessly wearing down social supports to the point that people on the edge began to fall into the cracks.

So yeah, it's a bummer to still be talking about homelessness all these years later. But until we get serious about why we can't seem to get on top of it, it will remain a heartbreaking example of societal failure and wasted human potential.

May we be bent but not broken by the grief and despair of a post-Trump world

    

    Ever since the election of Donald Trump three months ago, it's like I can't get my feet underneath me. I’m not even sure what I mean by that – just that it’s like having firm ground that you’ve always stood on suddenly rocking beneath you, shaking up everything you thought you knew.

    On top of that, my mother died Jan. 7. The impact was something the same. Both things amounted to the painful destruction of fundamental beliefs that I built my life on.

    In the case of Trump, I realized with his election that contrary to what I’d thought, we weren’t getting better as a society - that all the positive social and cultural changes I’ve seen in my lifetime in North American society aren’t real changes at all, because a frightening percentage of the public is just aching to hate somebody as a stand-in for all the things that haven’t gone right in their own lives.

    In the case of my mother, I lost the one person who could always be counted on to show up for me my entire life. Between her and Trump, it ended up being a one-two combination that has really knocked me off my game.

    I think it’s a type of broken heart, this feeling. I feel it like a psychic illness, making me huddle into myself and minimize contact with the outside world. All the things I cared about passionately just three short months ago now feel pointless, because the solid ground that I thought we were building on for social change turned out to be shifting sand.

    I’m aware that I have to get through this slump. Otherwise, I risk becoming one of those people who end up bitter and chronically sad. I don’t yet know what “getting well” will entail, but figure I’ll know it when I feel it. I’m counting on spring.

    I was bound to enter a period of mourning after Mom died, but I’m pretty sure the Trump election has actually been the bigger blow to my psyche. My mother’s death was sad but inevitable, after all, while the ascendancy of Trump is a horrifying development of global magnitude.

    It would be handy at times like this to be able to disconnect from the world and just shut the door on all the bits of news and “alternate facts” contributing to this paralyzing state of low-level despair. Could I just turn away from it all and live in happy ignorance?

    Alas, not only would my inner journalist never tolerate such a thing, I am a mother and grandmother, with an extended family of people I care about. If nothing else, I must find hope again so I can continue the fight and not just crumple to the ground under the weight of all the ugliness. I did not have children so that they could live on a planet in which a man like Donald Trump runs a major civilized nation.

    One of the things I liked best about living and working in Central America is the feeling of being in countries that were on their way up. They’re not there yet, but they’re working on it. There was always such a sense of possibility.

    In the U.S., and at times in Canada, it feels to me like we’ve peaked and are on our way down. Our laws and fancy declarations still make us appear like we’re committed, but a lot of times it feels like we’re devolving. And while people like me have been thinking that the goal was to build an ever more inclusive, tolerant and equal society, it’s clear now that there are a whole lot of people who aren’t like me.

    This is particularly true in the United States, though not exclusively. (We will not soon forget the former Harper government’s promise of a “Barbaric Cultural Practices” hotline.) I do understand the righteous rage that fuelled the U.S. election upset, if not the dangerous clown that the populace wrongly thought would be their saviour. There has been a big price to pay for these last 30 or so years of political drift toward global markets, fewer taxes, and increasingly self-interested governments that aren’t concerned with growing inequality because they’re always the ones on top no matter what.

    Anyway. I have nothing but words at the moment, and we all know now that all the words in the world don’t count for much in the grand scheme of things. These days I feel like I have nothing more to say, and that I’d be better off to just go bird-watching or for long walks with somebody’s dog or small child, talking about nothing more than the seaweed at the shoreline or the snow in the trees. But I think that’s probably just a part of this grief.

    I know there are many other people out there who are as affected by Trump’s election as I am. I feel sure our energies are going to find each other one day soon and lift us out of this ennui. I think I need a good old-fashioned protest – a sign in my hand, a whole lot of people in the street to remind me that yes, we stand up for ourselves when challenged.

    Two things I know: I won’t always be sad; and I am a hopeless optimist, a genetic characteristic that can’t be beaten out of me even by the likes of Trump. This too shall pass.

Is the lure of authoritarianism what got Trump elected?

I'm feeling rattled by Facebook, no longer sure if there's any point in sharing serious things there. It was the Trump election that did me in - things just got too weird. But then I see a story like this and I want to share it with people, because it's so damn interesting, so what can I do? When I want to be able to find something that I think is important enough that I'll probably want to track it down later when it's all coming true, I post it here.

The March 2016 piece in Vox  posits the theory that the U.S. is experiencing a rise in authoritarianism among its citizens, and that a guy like Donald Trump was pretty much the dream candidate for a period in time when this authoritarian tendency happens to be in full bloom.

"Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force,"notes the article. 

"They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms. A candidate like Donald Trump."

As you'll see in the piece, the people trying to figure out how to measure degrees of authoritarianism went with parenting questions. I've got no clue whether that's a valid comparison, but at the very least it does sort respondents into categories of people who think one way or the other. They're quite profound questions when you get to thinking about how you might answer them yourself as a parent.

Read the piece and weep, I guess. Personally, I'd hoped human rights, mutual respect and informed decision-making would get a longer run at being important issues, but things are not looking good for that line of thinking. I'm still struggling to know what to do about any of this, other than to talk about it with literally every person I've come in contact with since Trump got elected. I'm desperate to find pieces that help me understand at least a little more about how this can be happening, and this Vox piece was one of them. 

Information dumps as a tool to smother dissent

    This feels like an important piece. It's a New York Times commentary from Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science who writes for the Times on occasion.

    Her point is that massive information dumps like the ones WikiLeaks is known for, one of which is currently making life miserable for U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, only look like strikes for freedom. In fact, they are tools for smothering dissent, says Tufekci. 

    "This method is so common in Russia and the former Soviet states that it has a name: kompromat, releasing compromising material against political opponents," she writes.

    "Emails of dissidents are hacked, their houses bugged, the activities in their bedrooms videotaped, and the material made public to embarrass and intimidate people whose politics displeases the powerful. Kompromat does not have to go after every single dissident to work: If you know that getting near politics means that your personal privacy may be destroyed, you will understandably stay away."

     Tufecki also notes the vast amount of collateral damage that a massive information dump causes. It's not just Hillary Clinton who is suffering. "Demanding transparency from the powerful is not a right to see every single private email anyone in a position of power ever sent or received. WikiLeaks, for example, gleefully tweeted to its millions of followers that a Clinton Foundation employee had attempted suicide; news outlets repeated the report."

     So yes, we live in an age where information is "free" in unprecedented ways. But what information? Made public by who, and for what purpose? Say what you will about mainstream media, but they did used to pay attention to such things. The wild and woolly world of wide-open public journalism has no such ethical base. 

The highs and lows of social media, as experienced through the issue I care most about

 
Social media is an interesting beast, most particularly for how each form appeals and responds to users in entirely different ways. This is fascinating stuff for us communications types.
     I’ve found kindred spirits on all three of the platforms I like best – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But they’re not the same kindred spirits. The people I want to know and connect with on one platform are not the same ones I want to connect with on others. The feel of each platform and the reasons for using them are so very different.
    Facebook, for instance, is the place where I’m most likely to connect with my real friends and family. It’s where I share photos of my grandkids, keep up-to-date on which of my acquaintances or cousins or whoever has gone travelling in Italy, had an injury, lost somebody close to them, taken their dog walking someplace cool, and so on – kind of like a virtual coffee shop for catching up with pals across time and distance on a personal level.
    What it’s significantly less good for, however, is for engaging people on the issue I care most about. I can draw 200 or more “likes” for a particularly charming photo of a dog we’re looking after or a new profile picture, but my posts about sex workers’ rights – the issue I feel most passionately about these days – routinely fare very poorly. I have a few Facebook friends who share my passion and can be counted on to like and share my sex-work-related posts, but essentially I’m preaching to the choir.
    A very small choir.
    I’m guessing my inability to connect around sex work on Facebook is because on that medium, I mostly interact with people I actually know, or we at least move in similar social circles. But while we may know each other in real life, that clearly doesn't mean that we share the same philosophies or passions. So do I give up trying to get the people I know on Facebook to care about sex workers' rights, or stubbornly keep posting in the hopes that eventually some will? The big question.
    I resisted Twitter for a long time, unconvinced that I needed a whole lot of 140-character thoughts from random people cluttering up my day. Oh, how wrong I was. Twitter is now a favourite of mine.
From a staying-current perspective, it’s much like having hundreds of people out scouring the planet on your behalf for interesting news and developments (presuming you’re following the right people and organizations). The hashtag system also means you can easily find the latest tweets pertinent to the issues you care about.
    Few of the people I’m friends with on Facebook appear to be active on Twitter, so I’ve found a whole other community there - one that stretches around the world, loves a good debate over tough issues, and interacts with other members of their “community” based on the issues they tweet about rather than any personal connection.
    Because the Twitter connection is around issues rather than friendship, I decided from the start that I would concentrate on tweeting about sex workers’ rights. I jump in on other issues every now and again, but I’d say that 90 per cent of my Twitter use is related to sex workers’ rights. Twitter has turned out to be totally amazing for connecting to like-minded souls on that issue.
    Yes, it does pose that preaching-to-the-choir problem. But on the upside, being among an entire world of people who think like me on this one keeps me hopeful and engaged on those dark days when you think, good grief, why can’t people get this? My fellow tweeters also keep me so clued-in on everything that’s happening around the world for sex workers’ rights that it makes me a much better informed activist and advocate for the rare times when I can actually catch the ear of the uninterested and possibly hostile majority.
    Would I post a grandchild photo on Twitter, or a pretty scene from my morning walk? Nope. I doubt that any of my Twitter followers give a hoot about how many grandchildren I have, and they definitely don’t want to see what I had for lunch yesterday. But I feel the same way about those I follow, too, so it all works out nicely. We don’t want to be friends, we want to be comrades in arms.
    Then there’s Instagram. I resisted this one for even longer, but this year decided I wanted to see how non-profit organizations were using it.  I quickly became an enthusiast of the form for personal use, though remain skeptical of its effectiveness for non-profits unless they’re skilled at telling their stories via powerful photos with very few words. (Humans of New York style.)
    But as a medium for sharing photos of the weird, wonderful and breathtaking scenes one might see in the course of an ordinary day, it’s really fun.
    Once again, I’ve found myself resistant to automatically following the same people I’m connected to on Facebook, as much as Instagram encourages me to do so. I don’t want to repeat my Facebook experience; I’m looking for something different from Instagram.  That said, I’ve sometimes seen a totally different side to some Facebook friends who I now follow on Instagram, and who also get that there are distinct reasons for choosing one or the other medium.
    Wearing my strategic-communications hat, this is what it all comes down to for me:

• Use Facebook to connect with real friends and allies in warm and fuzzy ways, but don’t count on it to drive issues forward or effectively challenge societal assumptions. Useful for calling out people to events, but I suspect you are still only calling out to the people who probably would have come anyway. As an aside, I also wouldn’t advise using Facebook as your main news platform, because people use the craziest sources and are very lax in checking whether the stories they share are real and recent, or six years old and virtually fiction
• Use Twitter to find great news from around the world that you care about by following people and organizations that know how to find legitimate and dependable sources. Pick an issue or theme that you want to specialize in so that people interested in the same things can follow you, and be equally stringent about your own sources. Find the hot hashtags for your issue and use them religiously to build followers
• Use Instagram to share interesting photos with other people who also like looking at and sharing interesting photos. Sure, you can use the medium to share personal photos with your family and friends, but for broader use remember that you’re going to be up against a world of staggeringly compelling photos if you hope to get noticed.
• If aiming to raise awareness for a cause or issue via Instagram, ditch the inspirational memes and follow the lead of the Humans of New York project, which in my mind leads the micro-story format with their brilliant photos and minimal writing.
• Write blogs when you really need to say something. Not only do blogs give you more room and create a permanent, searchable space for your thoughts, they provide those all-important links for sharing on all your other social-media platforms.