My Social Media Dilemma

I’ve been thinking a lot about binning most social media platforms given my own seeming addiction to them, and also recent news stories. But then I get cold feet about the idea. Would it be cutting off my nose to spite my face rather than the tech billionaires? I’m the sort of person who overthinks about worrying situations and it takes me a while to get a clear perspective, so I thought I’d share my concerns and show how I’m planning to react to the situation.

So, one of the questions I’ve been asking myself is: what would Cory Doctorow do?

If you don’t know who Cory Doctorow is, he’s a science-fiction writer who lives and breathes technology and seems to have superpowers of insight into what the Big Social Media Billionaires are going to do next to make you feel grumpy for weeks. He writes prolifically. Not only are there dozens of novels and non-fiction books to his name, but I get feeds every day from Pluralistic which is his blog, plus other links.

One of the things Doctorow writes about is the “enshittification” of platforms – which was made the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year, that’s how on the button he is. Read or listen to an explanation of the concept here.

What it boils down to is that when it comes to the online behemoths that are Amazon, or Facebook, they are the moon, and we are the moths. Actually, when you get closer, they are just lightbulbs…how disappointing. We thought we were getting a great product or service, very cheap or free, and super convenient, too! But they ended up not being the source of light we believed, and then we were trapped and couldn’t escape. There was nowhere else to go, even if we could tear ourselves away from that damn addicting light. And all our friends are there too. Even the dead ones. Especially the dead ones! If you leave, what happens to all those photos, all those memories…?

Oh, hang on, when you get even closer, the light sources are in fact bug-zappers. Tzzzz, we’re dead and they don’t care. We were being served, but in not the way we thought.

You might be thinking, well that’s an exaggeration. The likes of Amazon may have helped bring about the “death of the high street” but that’s an almost hyperbolic expression used to describe the decline in bricks-and-mortar stores. Wooly and Worth weren’t real creatures, and they didn’t die, let alone any real person, because of something happening online…

Oh.

How’s this for a grim realisation: I I’ve had friends who chose to leave the planet partly due to social media, and yet I’m still there.

That said, I’ve also had friends who were killed by cars, and yet I am happy to be a passenger in a car, or cross a road (heck, believe me, no one wants me to drive). I trust that most drivers will observe the law and obey traffic signs, markings and signals, and that I have my own learning, experience and common sense to be able to make my own commute relatively safe. I trust that there are sufficient laws, infrastructure, enforcement and penalties in place to make most drivers behave sensibly, and I trust that my country’s safety culture is pedestrian-centred. (We don’t have the stupid ‘jaywalking’ laws that exist in those countries that have seemingly also forgotten to add pavements to most roadsides, for example.) Also, I have to accept that if I don’t want to become a hermit, I’m going to have to leave the house and encounter a road. They’re not things that can really be avoided.

Is the same now true of social media?

In the UK, we have recognised that we have been relatively slow at catching up with the growth of online industries and their potential threat to individuals (and society?), but we have made some inroads into regulation. We now have the Online Safety Act in the UK, but some of the policies are so new that we haven’t had time to see how well they will be adhered to, in fact some of the duties are not in effect yet (some will be later this month, or the more vague “spring 2025”). Cynical me thinks the timing of announcements last week by Zuckerberg to remove fact checkers from its platforms would seem to be a direct challenge to this. The BBC has reported that “Meta says it has ‘no immediate plans’ to get rid of its third-party fact checkers in the UK or the EU.” Meanwhile, the i-News reports:

Announcing the plans, Zuckerberg said: “We are going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world who are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. “Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. The only way we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.” The changes will be implemented in the US at first before potentially being rolled out more widely around the world.

i-news

Simply put, Zuck-Face is driving the car, we’re approaching the crossing, and I think he’s going to ignore the red light that allows us to cross safely because his front-seat-passengers are egging him on. But we haven’t got there yet… so what do we do?

We know that social media companies have been dodging responsibilities for many years, arguing that they are not bound to the same laws as ‘publishers’, that they are not publishers. Except when they are. Clearly they needed laws specifically mentioning social media that they can’t dodge, and so The Online Safety Act has been put in place thanks to various widely supported campaigns to protect vulnerable individuals such as children, but also campaigns by the likes of Martin Lewis to protect people from scams (especially as so many scammers borrow his face to con people on social media).

Because Zuckerberg has said he has no “immediate” plans to roll back fact checking to the seeming Wild West in UK or Europe, many of the comments I have seen online from my friends in those regions believe we won’t “see” the torrent of bad actor posts that are coming to the US for certain. I think that view is naive wishful thinking and things are about to get very bad.

For one thing, Facebook is borderless, so non-fact-checked posts will most certainly be spilling over into our feed, so the fact-checkers currently employed to monitor UK and European content will have more to cover. And of course, they are overwhelmed right now, burnt out and traumatised. This was the subject of a Channel 4 Dispatches programme a few years ago. You can find this video on YouTube now but the original programme description is here. I would warn you, it is a disturbing documentary.

Secondly, Meta have recently updated their policies. The Hateful Conduct policy is interesting. Here are a few excerpts:

We define hateful conduct as direct attacks against people – rather than concepts or institutions – on the basis of what we call protected characteristics (PCs): race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. (my emphasis)

People sometimes use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement or teaching roles, and health or support groups. Other times, they call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration or homosexuality. Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up. Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech.

Tier 2, Do not post […]

• Political exclusion, which means denying the right to political participation or arguing for incarceration or denial of political rights.
• Economic exclusion, which means denying access to economic entitlements and limiting participation in the labour market. We do allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.
• Social exclusion, which means things like denying access to spaces (physical and online) and social services, except for sex or gender-based exclusion from spaces commonly limited by sex or gender, such as bathrooms, sports and sports leagues, health and support groups, and specific schools.

Mental characteristics, including, but not limited to, allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.

Facebook Hateful Conduct Policy, 2025

It would seem to be a broad brush targeting of LGBTQ people, so long as you don’t target the actual people, just the “concept” of all they are. But even if you are not LGBTQ+ or have any friends or family who are (which I very much doubt, by the way), think about all the things that are “allowed” as non-hateful here. Maybe you want to say Trump should be in prison as he’s a convicted felon – according to the policy, that’s not allowed! But you can say women shouldn’t teach science because they’re mad, or weird, or just women. You can say women shouldn’t play snooker, that men shouldn’t work in childcare, that gay people are mentally ill, and lesbians have abnormal brains. Just to be clear, I don’t think any of those things. And also to be clear, “what we call protected characteristics” is a Miranda’s mother approach to the law in the UK. “No, it’s not ‘What I call the law’; it is the law, Mother!” Here’s our Equality Act 2010 legislation. There you go. The Law!

Facebook says at the bottom of their policy that we can make a legal challenge to content that violates our law. Oh great, a “legal challenge” – that doesn’t sound complicated or expensive at all!

Thirdly, have you had enough of Russian bot farms and scammers creating fake people to misinform you? Well, Facebook are doing it themselves now! I have seen one story from a week ago saying that due to backlash they are considering removing AI chatbots, but more recent stories such as this one from the Washington Post reveal that these are not going away, and they are very problematic indeed. So, because they have no black engineers working on their black AI characters, maybe you’d think they’d be trying to hire some? Oh no, probably not, as they are also rolling back their diversity initiatives now.

Of course, Zuckerberg is currently trying to reassure us that the changes are innovations and improvements. But a lot of people are, I think, justifiably concerned.

I personally think the Online Safety Act is very much needed, but I am hugely concerned that social media CEOS are trying to head it off, and that it is taking too long to implement the laws, and where it is in place, not being acted on swiftly enough. The campaigner Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her life aged just 14, after being encouraged on social media, shares similar concerns, as he recently told the BBC. His letter to the PM is at the bottom of the linked article, and you can sense his despair and heartbreak.

Put simply, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are at the leading edge of a wholesale recalibration of the industry. We should be in absolutely no doubt that when Zuckerberg speaks about a ‘cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech’, he is signalling a profound strategic shift away from fundamental safety measures towards a laissez-faire, anything goes model. In this bonfire of digital ethics and online safety features, all of us will lose, but our children lose the most.

Ian Russell, Chair of Molly Rose Foundation, and Molly’s dad

My fourth point circles back to what I mentioned earlier, and that’s addiction. I don’t know if I’m addicted, but I probably spend too much time on Facebook and for various reasons it doesn’t scratch the itch that made me open the app in the first place, which is very like crack. I imagine. Having recently read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, I know that were I to be able to afford an extreme disconnect, I’d probably be happier, but like him (and others who have tried the cold turkey approach), would I just go social-media crazy once the dry spell was over?

And yet, and yet… have you noticed your Facebook feed is getting worse lately? If you have, you are not alone. This was the subject of Radio 4’s Rethink in September 2024 (also featuring Cory Doctorow). All the internet is getting worse. But social media is absolute cesspool.

What I have thus been tolerating in return for a convenient place to see what my friends are up to, is a feed where most of my friend’s posts are drowned out in favour of ads, nostalgia-based pages for harvesting likes (that have a real potential to suddenly turn evil), Reels, AI images and videos (with loads of people thinking they’re real, or maybe they’re bots, driving engagement), disgusting ‘makeover’ games, ads, pages I’m not interested in, seeming far right bait content, and scams, including scams for products with hundreds of fake endorsements.

Recently, I found myself chatting online with comedian Harriet Dyer, and she didn’t sound like herself. Turned out to be a clone. Let’s face it, Harriet is inimitable. That really annoyed me, but I reported and blocked the profile. Others had too, but Facebook didn’t find the profile an issue, because the scammer has copied the name on the page not the profile. Then Microsoft Defender had to come to my aid when I clicked on a sponsored post about the Arctic that sounded interesting in my feed – it went straight to a virus. While looking at an artist’s page, she has mispelled her link on her Facebook wall, so that had been grabbed by miscreants as well and needed me to do a bit more work to sort out. And that’s me, who is very tech savvy. Savvy enough to spot that the Cath Kidston and Sea Salt ads I’ve seen are fake, but what about your average Joanne?

And to think, this rubbish is what is currently getting past the fact-checkers… What kind of hellscape are we going to be treated to when the US loses theirs?

Leaving Twitter/X was an easier decision. The format was completely broken; it was full of horrible commentary, and it is owned by the richest man on the planet, who really doesn’t care that there was a mass exodus on his watch. But for me, it wasn’t really a social place, and as I no longer had the possibility of finding a lot of people of my shared interests to share my business stuff with, there was no point.

According to Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, “Meta’s massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulate it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus,” she told the BBC. I think she’s right: a lot of people have declared that they don’t like it much, but they’re going to stay. The tipping point that pushes people from this platform is going to have to be much more, because Facebook is both a functional and fun platform, in spite of its issues. Not only is everyone you know on there (especially all your middle-aged friends), it’s basically where you store your photos, your birthday calendar, your diary of stuff you’re going to… your brain! There are pages, videos, reels, games. It’s so useful! Plus, how many sites are you signed into using your Facebook profile? See! Even though Zoe Williams found it easy, quitting absolutely would feel a little risky. I want to do it… But I also don’t want to! I basically just started my publishing business and although I don’t feel Facebook currently aligns with me ethically, I’m scared of losing so many potential connections. Even though it’s getting more rubbish at that kind of thing (see “enshittification”).

So, what to do. First of all, we want to try to tell Meta that they are being more than a bit pants to the humans that are its raison d’etre. So, I’ve decided to join a week-long boycott – ironically being organised on Facebook. Why there? Because we’ll be back. Mostly.

However, once that week is over, I do need to check my overall use of Facebook and get back to reading and writing more. Plus, it’s a sensible idea I think to build alternative connections in case things start to get worse on the internet. After all, it’s getting almost impossible to even be able to Google things and trust the first page of results.

So, what are my plans?

Digital Declutter

Time to make my email inbox mine again. Bye bye random marketing emails. Hello newsletters. Substack, why are you emailing me? I’ve done a bit of tidying every day as I go and my emails are no longer overwhelming.

All in One Place

RSS feeds are a bit of an old-fashioned thing, but my browser is offering me something called “Collections” making it easy for me to keep a curated links. And one of those links is a free RSS-functioning app called Feedly. The free version doesn’t let me feed newsletters to it, alas, as that would be better than my email or Substack, but I can store up to 100 blog feeds on there.

Reading blogs rather than posts helps with keeping up with my creative pals and reducing overwhelm.

Actually Talk to People

What it says in the subtitle. This could involve the pub, a cup of tea, board games or a nice walk.

Let’s Get Physical

Paper books, DVDs, CDs etc… I’m not sure why format helps with concentration, but it absolutely does.

So, what are you planning to do now that Facebook is basically turning into this?