Recently I ended my long association with Facebook, cancelling both my personal account and writer’s page. The primary reason? Mark Zuckerberg and his evil minions (the ones left) have changed Facebook too much because they’re only interested in making more money. But my action was also that because Facebook has been slow to moderate bigotry, violent rhetoric, and wild conspiracy theories with no basis in fact.
I might end my association with Twitter soon too for similar reasons, although its recent purchase by Elon Musk probably means there will even be less moderation! Musk himself signaled that by retweeting the absurd conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi knew his attacker (and more). (I’ll confess that I didn’t follow Musk’s link and read about that conspiracy theory secondhand, but the veracity of what I read is borne out by the fact that Musk didn’t wait too long to take his tweet down.) If the owner of Twitter acts in this way, what hope is there for the website?
Scott Galaway, Professor of Marketing in the NYU Stern School of Business, in a recent appearance on CNN, averred that more moderation is better for social media sites, not les.. The latter was basically Musk’s reason for buying Twitter, calling it “free speech,” a standard fascist ploy that follows the teaching of Nazi propagandist Goebbels. The professor offered the interesting stat that TikTok (that site has its own problems because it’s owned by the Chinese) is more profitable than Meta (the social media giant owning Facebook) because TikTok moderates their content more, so advertisers like it more! (Galaway neglected to mention that its profits go to China!) No advertiser wants to be associated with bigotry, violent rhetoric, and wild conspiracy theories. (Ye was too much of a moron to know this!)
However, Elon Musk is now an example of all that’s wrong with most of social media today, just like Zuckerberg was in 2016 when he morphed Facebook, a social gathering place for family and friends, into a propaganda machine for Russian agents interfering with the elections (Lord knows what’s getting by them now). Whether Trump beat Clinton because of that remains to be seen (he lost in the popular vote, which showed that the Russians weren’t completely successful), but back to what’s wrong: Social media sites are seen by their owners as a cash cow, and they’ll do anything to make money, even take funds from fascists.
Even if they don’t, they can be too permissive (Must calls this free speech) and let minority groups who loudly shout on the internet (using a lot of caps in a post is often evidence for that) have free rein. I’d seen that kind of malicious mischief take over other social media sites before Facebook and Twitter, changing a haven of intelligent discourse and debate into a place where multiple moronic misfits vie to see who can shout the loudest and be the most insulting. Microsoft bought LinkedIn and ruined it; Amazon bought Goodreads and ruined it. (And I was banned from a chat room for authors because I dared to say that having a bestselling book was like winning the lottery!) Both occurred because the parent companies were overly greedy and supported anything that would bring users to the site.
Yes, what’s common to all these sites—LinkedIn, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and so forth—is corporate greed! Corporations who own these sites want to make them more and more profitable, and they see that allowing strident, barking morons to dominate the site accomplishes that. As a consequence, they follow the Fox News model that gives the screaming idiots more voice than intelligent people who want reasoned discussion and debate.
This practice will eventually kill the internet unless good people everywhere rebel and state, “Enough!”