Having all but abandoned Nazi-saluting Elon Musk’s poisonous X platform, Meta-supremo Mark Zuckerberg’s brown-nosing endorsement of Donald Trump and abandonment of fact-checking has encouraged me to close my Threads account and row back on my use of Facebook. My current platform of choice is the kinder and gentler Bluesky, a source of light in the increasingly darkness of fascism. But, entirely predictably, the forces of hate and division are attempting to make their home there, too. The internet of things is both a miracle and a menace.
Inevitably, the internet, which was supposed to set us all free has its drawbacks, one major drawback being the ownership of the various platforms. For all the hate speech, the bots and trolls, which was there long before Musk arrived, I liked X, in its previous guise of twitter for a variety of reasons. The exchange of ideas, humour, links to interesting sites and places; it was by and large a good place. As it became more popular, the culture warriors joined in, injecting poison at an industrial rate. My twitter account turned into an echo chamber where I interacted mainly with like minds. A bit like real life, really, except that sometimes it is good to hear a different point of view. When that different point of view was dripping with poison, I quickly concluded that it was an echo chamber or nothing. Musk brought that all to a head.
A prolific Facebook user in the past, I have tired of it in recent years. It is primarily a meeting place for, shall we say, the more mature internet user. While you do find people aged under 50 on the platform, you find very few young folk. The platform was set up by Zuckerberg to connect people within the university he was attending. Now, it’s a weird hybrid of staying in touch with friends and becoming “friends” with people you barely, or actually don’t, know at all. It serves a purpose – in my case mainly plugging this blog – but I am increasingly unsure as to what that purpose is.
Meta’s decision to abandon fact-checking in order to appease liar-in-chief Donald Trump is a good reason for using Facebook a lot less, but also that it is, at least to me, becoming somewhat dull and repetitive and, in my life, a waste of time and life is my main reason. In a world where social media is so highly influential, I like to think I am reasonably aware of they way it works. Social media, it is generally accepted, did enough to tip the result of the 2016 EU referendum to encourage enough people to vote leave, even though it was against their own interests and no one would seriously suggest that the power of Musk didn’t have some effect on the recent US presidential election, would they? But what is to stop Bluesky going the same way as X and potentially Facebook?
Bluesky is currently more of a safe place than X, but the goons are arriving. Just last night, it was the hard left – and the Greens, who increasingly come under that category – who launched a concerted and sometimes abusive attack on former Labour cabinet member Peter Mandelson. No different, and no less unpleasant, than the hatred of the hard right, the friends of Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson.
As I enjoy Bluesky so much, I am more trigger-happy with the ‘block’ facility, something I deploy to my use of Facebook, along with the ‘unfollow’ facility, which enables me to avoid unpleasant and tedious content, if I so wish. I am not too old to learn something new, but my views on politics and life have remained largely unchanged throughout my life and I very much doubt that leaving my echo chamber would do anything other than to make me more angry and pissed off. So, why bother?
Maybe the next step is to get rid of social media altogether? Some of it is beginning to feel so yesterday. Maybe tomorrow? Well, soon anyway. Possibly.