Social Media Survival Under the New Regime
There is clear circumstantial evidence that Zuck plans to allow facebook to become politicized, and likely put it - at least indirectly - at the service of the current administration.
This was enough to make me seriously consider shutting down my account, but sadly I still have a critical mass of friends there who are not showing any sign of joining another forum like bluesky. So, I still find myself going back and posting, interacting with some silly forums, and chatting with random friends and semi-strangers.
I often joke that facebook is like a terrible bar that too many of my friends still frequent, even if the owner is a creep, snooping on the patrons, and probably running something ugly in the back.
Should I worry about what facebook can do to me, or what I could be feeding by continuing to engage with it? What should I worry about? What's realistic?
This was enough to make me seriously consider shutting down my account, but sadly I still have a critical mass of friends there who are not showing any sign of joining another forum like bluesky. So, I still find myself going back and posting, interacting with some silly forums, and chatting with random friends and semi-strangers.
I often joke that facebook is like a terrible bar that too many of my friends still frequent, even if the owner is a creep, snooping on the patrons, and probably running something ugly in the back.
Should I worry about what facebook can do to me, or what I could be feeding by continuing to engage with it? What should I worry about? What's realistic?
Comments
But in the end if you want people to move, you have to move.
There's a cost but if you want people to move you have to move first and tough it out until others move and accept that they might not.
If people don't begin sounding the alarm and moving, others won't move at all. Somebody has to start those conversations for them to happen.
What bothers me about Facebook is that they've facilitated genocide and they manipulate what people see and think hate and dehumanisation are good for business.
They're profoundly unethical but ultimately if I won't sacrifice, why should I expect others to?
I think sometimes of the abolitionist kids back in the 1790s who wouldn't eat sugar because it was made by enslaved people. If I want to make a moral stand then I have to give up the sweeties. I can't have both the sweeties and my morals about not dehumanising people.
Ultimately I had to choose. So I came off.
Yes.
I hide and snooze all sponsored pages and only interact with friends. Having moved from North to South two years ago there are too many people on Facebook I'd lose touch with. Not close friends but friends nonetheless.
I really do need to prepare plan B tho. 🤔
That's a bit like asking how much junk food you can healthily consume.
Yet you continue providing him with your data and your eyeballs, the raw materials of his monetisation of human interaction.
I think the principles of surveillance capitalism have progressed some way beyond "hearing it said".
Very interesting to see those who've returned here (including me) looking for a sensible discussion space.
That has been the business model, yes. I wonder if it's shifting as he's moving more toward politics, or as that kind of "business model" has hit a ceiling.
There's a fundamental problem with society rewarding someone financially for figuring out how to exploit the human need for social interaction, while in the process destroying social cohesion.
It's just political/capitalist expediency - tacking towards a favourable regulatory environment. But there remains a question about the Metaberg's longer-term prospects.
This. Our Place has a Facebook page, maintained by a member of the congregation, and another member (now housebound) organises a local community group. Both of these pages are useful to those who use them, I suppose, IYSWIM.
I remember when there were Facebook alternatives that were later shutdown like Google+ and usually when something becomes 'enshittified' to use Cory Doctorow's term there are at least some open source alternatives. Why seemingly not in this case?
It's not that it's hard to produce, there are facebook-a-likes (especially in non-English markets), it's that already existing Facebook has a massive network advantage in that everyone likely to be on a service like that are already on Facebook.
It was similar with Twitter- there was a massive network advantage and at first it looked like other alternatives couldn't work because of that, but first people in the most 'canary in the coalmine' groups were driven off and reorganised elsewhere, along with early adopters and people who had strong anti-Fascist principles and then others started to join - often being on both Twitter and Bluesky for a while till things reached a tipping point and then there were big shifts of people in their millions.
But without a few people/ organisations setting up base camp and taking the initial hit on grounds of necessity and principle, it's not possible to pave the way for other people to shift and make that easier.
Once a better destination is identified, then people can start the first part of that process but without an alternative that meets those group needs, it will be hard to make a boycott movement start to work.
I have friends my age who I suspect struggle with bluesky's user interface.
Heck, I know I struggle with bluesky's user interface!
I've been thinking, sorta tangent, about how I use different platforms since I used to only use one or maybe two at a time, and now I've got three running...
Facebook is really easy to use, it's almost like watching TV. You scroll until you see something that's worth interacting with, and interact. Nothing takes a lot of thought and the medium does not have the attention span to allow for essays or any kind of long form content. Often it's fire and forget.
Bluesky is like...you open it up, and look at it, and go "what am I looking for?" And you pick a tab that might include the sort of interaction you're looking for, and you scroll down until something hits you a la facebook. And then you can interact, with the same limitation as facebook about limited attention spans plus the character limit. But you really have to set your system up to tell it what to show you. It's a lot more user-directed, kinda like linux versus windows.
Ship of fools is like..."OK, there was this conversation I was having...there are more posts! read the posts...reflect on the posts...start typing...before long it's a short essay...now the essay needs to be edited so I don't force people to read through my half polished thoughts...where was I?...oh yeah, that..."
I think ship style interaction is actually more rewarding when there's interaction, but it's a lot more labor intensive. Bluesky you kinda have to apply yourself to it to get what you want, while facebook is very close to flipping the channels on an old school cable TV screen.
It's a thing. And I feel in my 40s that I'm just barely starting to embark on the "I'm getting too old for this crap" stage of life. And even now I can feel IRL leaning on me.
Some on Facebook have been suggesting that they plan on buckling down there and maintaining the positive communities they have formed. That’s my current plan as well.
I don’t generally boycott things these days, not that I’d go to places whose focus is icky right-wing stuff (Gab, Truth Social, etc.).
I think once enough people I follow on Twitter go to Bluesky, I’ll likely close my Twitter account.
So the surviving ones are mostly foreign language focused; probably the one most like Facebook is VKontakte (Russian language, owned and operated in Russia), there's also Tencent QQ and Qzone (Chinese language, owned and operated in China), LINE (Japanese language, etc etc). Then there's Tribel (aimed to connect people with the same interests) and MeWe (which bought in heavily into blockchain etc).
As a result of the dominance of Facebook, no one has tried to create a like for like replacement of Facebook in English, you either get a similar site in another language, a similar site revolving around 'one weird trick' or a mix of both.
I think it might be that facebook, bsky, et all are simply too huge to be properly hosted by admins, and so they become a system where that power is de-centralized to individual users. We are all hosts of our own private feeds, my wall is "my space" and I guard it territorially. I think when I first came to facebook from the ship, this confused me, as I would often get into heated fights on other people's feeds and get confused when they acted territorial instead of tolerating my impertinent opinion as a good host should.
A smaller space like the ship can actually function without giving each individual member the power to privately erase other members from their sight. That power is ceded to the hosts and admins.
That's neat, not sure I thought of that before.
If you take the people most likely to vote and comprehensively poison their main information sources when it's harder for them to switch, then you can get major problems. Younger people have similar problems with poisoned algorithmic feeds and non-existent/ poor moderation in social media but may be better placed to switch. I find it hard myself to stay on top of information problems with eg. search engines and their algorithms and use of AI, despite research being a big part of my job.
Partner and I do a lot of tech support for older folk in our families. Of recent years this has begun to include issues of what I call 'information hygiene' eg. I had to warn a relative about an algorithmic newsfeed on their phone which was pushing them anti-vax material from a dubious source which was endangering them.
But how to get people to relative safety thst doesn't endanger others? To take Bluesky for an example. I have the app on my phone- and though I acquired other pinned feeds as tabs in the beginning, I now rarely look at them. There's so much to see on my home feed that I just scroll down and interact with it exactly as Bullfrog is describing as the easier Facebook experience.
This is something someone could maybe set up or facilitate for someone else just as there are IT support people who help people who are not technical with other IT issues at home. I helped quite a few friends get onto Bluesky and get set up.
But it also speaks to accessibility issues, alternatives to poisoned sources need to be easy and accessible and people may need to provide support to help others. Ways of making things easy may exist but it may require somebody else who knows it to set up that easy mode for you.
But it's a conversation that needs to happen because so much is at stake. On top of all the problems with traditional media and billionaire owners distorting public opinion and misinforming and whipping up hate, there is now algorithmic social media and its billionaire owners leading to more social problems.
Ultimately there probably needs to be responsible social media regulation but America won't get that because the foxes are already in charge of the hen house. The EU might- though they can be spineless and I severely doubt we'll get it in the UK because the noises from our current government sound even more spineless, so till then we have to help people find reasonably safe and healthy social media spaces as best we can
During the 2016 floods my husband would have been trapped in Aberdeen if I hadn't been able to navigate him home via back roads as per FUBAR. They were practically co-ordinating everything - places offering free accomodation, free food for people who couldn't get home, which roads were impassable etc. At the same time, our village had a FB page which was directing volunteers, donations, location of supplies.
I don't know of any other means of doing this. The BBC travel webpage is usually a couple of hours behind, and just doesn't have the same level of detail.
I wouldn't count on Zuckerberg not doing that.
More about Meta - how it targets people and what you can stop
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/mad-meta-dont-let-them-collect-and-monetize-your-personal-data