For my relatives Facebook’s not the problem, it’s all the far right wing propaganda on YouTube that makes claims without backing them up with any sort of evidence. The more they watch, the more they believe it, and the less they believe evidence to the contrary.
So I was right when I thought social media is propelling us to collapse and that it is analogous to cigarettes on a collective scale.
Small solace though, it already permeated every corner of civilization changing us in mostly bad ways.
I think we really need to choose our social media carefully knowing that every type has their own mental illness flavour risks from body dysmorphia to groupthink. We need to be self aware of our shortcomings and tricks employed by corps for harvesting engagement.
Nowadays you turn off your brain and browse social media to relax but you should rather do the opposite. Focus the brain knowing the site was purposefully made to trick you to spend as much time on it as possible and invest as much emotions as possible. This isn’t some harmless casual leisure activity, you become a cog in a corporation war for information when you open the site. On unfriendly territory, a battlefield of digital war, you ought to wear a helmet at least.
The last time I logged on to Facebook was this past fall because there was a death in our fairly tight knit group of high school classmates. It had been three or four years since I’d been in there.
So I went on and said my words.
While I was there, I didn’t really notice what was in my feed.
What I noticed was suddenly I was getting notification after notification that my posts from years and years ago were getting deleted because they didn’t fit whatever the current terms and conditions of use were.
This amused me.
So I left my words of dead classmate up for a week then sent my account silent again.
I can’t see Facebook or any social media being a place I ever hang out again, which is a little bit of a bummer because without any social media, IRL social activities all but come to an immediate and total halt.
Or even more better: just get rid or all social media that is associated with massive corporate giants (YouTube is still too useful to get rid of, but it dors still have lots of problems)
Can confirm giving up popular social media has made my life a lot better. You don’t need to know half the shit your friends are up to. It’s just going to hurt you. Go outside. Take part in trivia night. Make new friends. Feel the grass beneath your feet.
irrational belief based on fantasy fuels people to action a lot more than rational belief based in reality.
because the former is exciting and meaningful, the latter is boring and mundane.
hence why the crazies tend to believe in cabal conspiracies of evil people whom they must fight against. whereas your average voter is like ‘who do i want to have a beer with and make me feel like i’m doing better financially… i’ll vote him’
Facebook is 100% shitposts. Most of my friends on it have aged out of posting every little thing and so it’s mostly shitposts and soft core porn disguised as short form videos on the Facebook feed and not any of my friends that I actually wanted to follow when I made my account in the 00s.
I really want to delete my account but I still have to use it to organize class reunions and alumni events for my old high school. I’m going to try to float the idea that we move to a mailing list instead. I’d rather buy a domain and maintain a website for that than continue using Facebook for free
My mother in law entered some contest where the votes had to be verified through Facebook. It was the first time I logged in since 2016 or so. The majority of my feed was AI pics of kids missing limbs, or chicks with impossibly large tits/body proportions with the description “Please wish me a happy birthday no one else did” with 40 hashtags of celeb names or movies/shows that came out around then. Mixed in was fake news bullshit or videos that had 4 different watermarks on it. Maybe if I used it more I would see somewhat relevant things, but its worse than I thought if that’s a normal feed.
Add comment