Here’s a problem I grapple with every day:  I hate providing content for social media companies.  They profit from it, draw attention away from other platforms, censor it, and use it to divide and conquer our civilization.  But… a lot of you are there.  Many people who don’t yet know they’re Anchor Rising readers are there.  Until things start to change, we have to be there to some degree, too.

So, the compromise I’ve been following since reviving Anchor Rising as an independent website has been to engage on social media mainly for promotional purposes — to get more out of it than I put in.

Still, it’s tempting to use social media for the purposes most people use it for:  quickly sharing interesting news and links, offering one-off thoughts on anything that comes to mind, and so on.  When it comes to social media, this is more of an itch than anything, so to allow contributors to scratch that itch, we’ve created a new feature:  Ripples, which are basically tweets that you can find at the top of the right sidebar on the desktop and tablet sites and between the quick reads and the long-form posts on the mobile site.

Social media is the first reason for Ripples.  The second is the number of news items that come across our desks that should really be highlighted on Rhode Island’s leading conservative news and opinion site, but to which we’ve got nothing substantial to add.  For that reason, this will probably be the most-frequently-updated part of the site, so check back frequently!

Featured image by Jonathan Cosens on Unsplash.