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I Pulled the Plug on Facebook Today
I received a message that I had violated community standards on a post that I had written. I found it odd since I haven’t posted anything on Facebook since February. Odder still since the post wasn’t available for me to review. I observed the same standards that Ricochet requires of its’ members on Facebook. All my posts were available to friends, I never posted for public consumption.
I’ll be brutally honest, I consider people like Zuckerberg, and Google execs – techie-idiot savants. Community standards are quite subjective and constantly morphing for techies that are moral relativists.
I deactivated my account and will send emails to close friends, and family to inform them of my decision. Ricochet is now what I consider my only social media account.
Published in Culture
@suspira @aaronmiller
Agree – definitely keep all politics off of Facebook. There’s no benefit to sharing your inner thoughts there on most anything, but especially that. If you have any business dealings in the real world or even cyberworld, people are prone to check it out for suspect “attitudes” and avoid people holding the ones they disagree with. I keep wanting to get off, but it is an efficient way to give distant family things that are graphic and probably too trivial for email such as photos of the garden etc. where you don’t want to write a lot but would like to share, ie. safe jokes. Global putdowns based on politics once engaged in can’t be taken back and you never know who you’ll offend.
We use Facebook to share photos and, among my friends, links to political articles. I have yet to be punished but do limit access to friends and family. Messenger is trash and a gateway for hackers.
Oddly though, a friend told me a post on Facebook took him to a porn site. It was a PJ media article written by Michael Walsh and the link didn’t go to a porn site for me. I deleted the post anyway and didn’t see any signs others were posting in my name. I asked friends to let me know if they saw strange posts from me. You have to be careful clicking on ads inside of FB. My husband calls it spyware.
I stay there….gives me great pleasure to know I am spreading conservative articles for free on that leftie goofball’s website.
And if I might add – finding email addresses for many of the people that I’ve connected with on FB would be a daunting task. And I have enough of a challenge navigating my current email traffic, never mind adding to it from Facebook posts/messages.
I’ve never been on either and I never will be. They seem advertisements of loneliness. Or of something worse: Mexican Railways and the IRS should not have those icons on their homepages.
As for Twitter specifically, my only exposure to it is on the margins of certain blogs. Some bloggers showcase their social-media emissions. Maybe each one resides within a thread; maybe within such threads these posts especially sparkle; I cannot say. For example, I was just wondering whether Claire Berlinski is still answering her own tweets. It appears…not always. One tweet of hers, from May 27, enjoys the bizarre isolation of being in Slovene: “Nekateri pravijo, da je največji afrodiziak na svetu moč. Imajo ga nazaj. Afrodiziak je največja sila na svetu.” Since she provided no translation, I will give one for you: “Some say that power is the greatest aphrodisiac in the world. They’ve got it backwards. An aphrodisiac is the greatest force in the world.” Did she write this? Why? Is she quoting someone else? Whom? Are she and Slavoj Žižek in a firing squad and if so is it circular? Maybe. Does it have anything to do with her idea for a novel whose narrator would be Melania Trump? Could. If as appears to be the case Twitter is less regulated than Facebook, there is hope for those who cherish it that this might someday be publicly figured out.
As a general rule – if Big Tech is censoring you then you are doing something right.
What about Ricochet? Like Facebook, Ricochet is not a traditional publisher. A newspaper or magazine has an employee review every word before it goes to print. Neither Ricochet or Facebook could afford to hire enough people to vet every sentence before it’s readable by the members. So if they have to behave as publishers, the quantity of posts and comments would drop to a trickle and no one would bother anymore.
So go the 100% platform route then, like the phone company! No discrimination for content at all. Ricochet members are pretty well behaved but if there were no Code of Conduct and absolutely anything goes, you wouldn’t just have the occasional member posting cheerleader photos. If management couldn’t edit comments and profanity were allowed, do you think it would go unused? The most common membership plan is only $5 a month, do you think that you wouldn’t get at least the occasional troll who would sign up for a month (actually the first month is still free, right?) to post their Melania Trump rape fantasies? To be countered by other creeps with their Hillary Clinton rape fantasies.
I’ve never been on Facebook and have no interest in Twitter. If someone invents better services than those, great. The last thing I want is for government to try to “fix” these companies. If there is a book store in town that doesn’t carry the books you would like, find another book store. Don’t ask that the government tell the bookstores that they cannot choose what to carry and what not to carry. Sorry if this sounds like a rant, but I cannot understand how conservatives who realize what a dog’s breakfast government has made of healthcare or education can believe that government regulation is just the ticket to improve social media.
Twitter is a very different beast. In theory and at its best, it epitomizes Bill O’Reilly’s advice to commenters, “Keep it pithy.”
Twitter is ideal for sharing pithy commentary on a wide range of topics. It is unsuited for long or deep debates. But it also excels as a way to share links to videos and articles, which is why it prompts so many absurd spats among immoderate fools.
James Lileks often exemplifies how Twitter can be used without melodrama or vanity (such as infamous “Hey, I’m walking to my car” or “My cat is so cute” tweets). James focuses on humor and wry observations about life, cinema, or history.
Many accounts satirically lampoon famous politicians, actors, or fictional figures. FauxObama poked fun at the President while TV comedians wouldn’t. There are accounts for Cthulu and SMOD (the Sweet Meteor of Death, come to free us of an insane world). There’s one of Conan the Barbarian stuck in Dilbert-like pencil-pushing work. Twitter can be purely fun.
Or Twitter can be used to educate. One account shares newspaper reports from WW2 over a 5-year cycle, showing what it was like for people of the 1940s to see it unfold without knowing how it would proceed or end.
I use Twitter as a way separate from Facebook to keep in touch with online gaming buddies and to voice observations about game design, since I no longer blog on the topic. Sometimes it is a way to communicate directly with developers, to offer feedback or to report software bugs.
In short, Twitter has potential — realized potential — for many good uses. Whatever you might use it for, I recommend the Tweetdeck site or app for better filtering and organization of Twitter content.
This is precisely why Twitter does not appeal to me. I can’t stand sound bytes. I prefer more in-depth commentary.
“Hillary Clinton” rape fantasies? Are people out of their minds???
Yeah, I threw up a little when I read that.
Desperate
They are going to be so hurt – they were planning to pull the plug on you, but there’s a backlog.
He is so soulful and human-looking!
“Make this Cheese guy an account and deactivate it with predjuice!” – Zuckerberg, probably
Hey, I’m still on Facebook – need to pledge my fealty! Though whether he actually is a Human Being is probably the most questionable part of my pledge.
That is the weaker argument. The stronger one, the 10 pound sledgehammer waiting to be swung, was pointed out by Sen. Cruz to Zuckerberg when he appeared before the Senate. Pick one, and only one: do you want to be a neutral platform, in which case you get federal protection, or do you want to be a “publisher,” in which case Facebook is fully liable for each and every instance of intellectual property violation and each and every instance of defamation.
It is that hammer that must be swung, immediately, on Facebook. I think, 50/50 push to me, that the opening move needs to be a very sympathetic young female user, who gets a motivated major law firm to represent her. She would allege that she has had her life destroyed by other Facebook users. Rack up the life-time earnings to the millions. Then name Facebook for punitive damages at a very high multiple.
The SEC should then step in and start asking about the failure of Zuckerberg and the rest of management to properly account for the risks associated with their little game of playing between neutral platform and publisher. Surely they knew, or should have known the risks to the value of the stock..
For those still on Facebook, I would urge you to follow Tara Ross. Hopefully this link will take you to her page. Very good historical posts daily, frequently honoring MOH winners.
And like many successful things, it has degraded into a tool the left uses to manipulate information and stifle opinions it does not like.
I’ve looked up old classmates and friends not using Facebook. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find people with whom you’ve lost contact . . .