Social Media Disease

I have to quit Instagram for awhile.

I turned my Instagram page into a repository for anti-Trump memes - two posts of anti-Trump memes with every third post a picture of a beautiful woman to provide relief from MAGA.  (Instagram pages show posts in rows of three.)  I posted pictures in threes twice, sometimes thrice a day at times, because the memes bashing Trump and MAGA were too clever to resist.  I was going overboard and spending way too much time on Instagram, but hey, it was fun.

Then two embarrassing things happened.  One was that I reposted the original post of a friend who also posts on Instagram - that is, it was an image my had created himself - and he was a tad miffed by my failure to credit him.  (I credited Go-Go's rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin for reposting memes on her Instagram page that she had likely not created herself, even though I don't know her from Eve, but not my friend.  Embarrassing indeed.)  The other embarrassing thing was this meme I posted not on Instagram, but on Facebook.   And I had found it on BlueSky.  

The hearing referred to above did take place, and yes, Pete Hegseth did in fact say that to Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).  Senator Slotkin's comeback is masterful.  Except for one thing.   She didn't actually say that.   Someone I know who had seen the actual Senate hearing told me that Senator Slotkin simply replied "Oh, my God!" and rolled her eyes in response to Hegseth's inane comment.  I was already going to post this meme on Instagram, but after I found out that the Slotkin quote was made up by someone other than the senator herself, I didn't.  

And so I have decided to stop posting anything on Instagram - for the time being.  It might be a long time being.  Because, after these two faux pas, posting anti-Trump, anti-MAGA memes on Instagram - or anything else - stopped being fun.  And I don't think I was enlightening any Republican-leaning voters with my posts.  

I'm not big on social media these days.  I still go on Facebook and I'm active there because, well, that's still fun.  Instagram, Facebook's sister platform, has become a grind.  Threads is just boring.  And if not for the ability to post links to my blog on LinkedIn, Mastodon, and BlueSky, I wouldn't bother with any of those platforms.  (Yes: Meta platforms still won't let me post links to my blog there.)  So I'll just wait until I really want to post something on Instagram before I do so again.  And with all the time I save not going on platforms not named Facebook, I have more time to write blog posts here. 

Not that I will.  I need more time to enjoy being with my cats. 

Out Of the Tribe

I just quit Tribel.

I don't know what it is about this blog that offends people.  It is my writing style?  Is it my choice of topics to write about?  Is it because I think black women are more attractive when they don't wear their hair in cornrows?  But apparently someone at the social media platform Tribel - the more liberal, more fair, more welcoming alternative to Facebook - was ticked off at me for something.  When I tried to post a link to my previous blog post - about Gaza -  I got a message saying, "You cannot post this link in Tribel."  I tried repeatedly to post it again and got the same message.  I posted the link to my entire blog to see what would happen; that didn't work.   An attempt to repost a link to a blog entry that had nothing to do with Gaza proved to be equally futile.   

So I terminated my account.  So what? No one I knew posted there, and I had little if any reason to interact with those who were on Tribel.  And I only set up an account there to post links to my blog because Facebook wouldn't let me do so on its platform.  I got approximately the same number of pageviews for my Gaza post that I'd gotten with previous posts, indicating that Tribel was a waste of time anyway.   

And any social media platform that purports to be liberal, fair and welcoming only to block something you have to say ought not to stay in business.  

Twitter Quitter (Or, Xed Out)

Add a social media platform to one of the many things I've quit.  I've quit a lot of things, but never a social media platform.

When Twitter became X under Elon Musk's ownership, I shrugged it off.  I mostly used it to publish links to my blog anyway.  The operative word is "mostly"; once in while, I would make a comment on someone else's account.  If anyone, including the account owner, dislikes my comment and told me so, I'd either apologize and/or explain what I meant or let it run down my back.

But last week, I made a critical but innocuous comment to someone regarding a selfie this person had posted.   What was the comment?  I'd, umm, rather not say.  If I repeated it here, I might cause trouble for myself.  Which is exactly what I did on Twitter/X where I made the comment originally; responses to what I said ranged from angry to furious to catastrophically nasty.  I blocked some the accounts the incoming flak was coming from, but the person I made the original comment to was particularly angered by what I'd said and responded only to make an example of my apparent thoughtlessness despite usually ignoring such foolishness.  I apologized to this person and explained there was no malicious intent and decided to wait until I got a reply acknowledging and/or accepting my apology.  Then I would leave Twitter.  Instead, I got more angry comments from others.  I decided then not to wait for any acknowledgement of my apology, and I left Twitter immediately.

I joined Mastodon, a social media platform similar to Twitter but with far more safeguards against the sort of behavior seen on Twitter, as a substitute in order to keep promoting my blog, but I'm likely to use it less often because I'm continuing to hold back from blogging too often. (That includes my beautiful-women picture blog, which I post links to only on Facebook, because it seems less and less important to me as time passes.)  I'm moving away from most social media, because it's not only too tiring, it's, as Twitter proves nowadays, too dangerous.  At least Facebook allows me to connect with friends. 

When I had two blogs I promoted on Twitter, I wanted attention in the worst way.  And that's exactly what I got on Twitter last week.  And Elon Musk thinks it's a good thing when someone gets liberally and repeatedly excoriated for an inadvertently inappropriate comment about a selfie?  I'll pass, thanks.

The Stench of Musk

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of people wondered if he'd let Donald Trump back on.  Many more wondered why he let Kanye West back on.  I simply wanted to know if and when Musk would make it possible to edit previously posted tweets or when he'd expand the maximum number of characters in tweets by another 140 to 420.

Instead, Musk - long celebrated as the first American automaker to successfully challenge Detroit's Big Three since the heyday of the AMC Pacer - endorsed a bogus homophobic theory surrounding the circumstances of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Speaker of the House's husband.  

In response to a story Hillary Clinton tweeted a link to about the right-wing conspiracy theories Paul Pelosi's attacker spread online, Musk cited a story in the Santa Monica Observer about a possible homsosxual realtionship between Paul Pelosi and the assailant and how the incident at the Pelosi home in San Francisco was a lover's tiff. "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk wrote.

There wasn't, and Musk deleted the tweet later on.  He should have done his homework before he tweeted; the Santa Monica Observer is known for fake stories like The Onion is, with one key difference - the Santa Monica Observer is not a satirical publication. A media watchdog group cited the online paper for "the routine publication of false and misleading information and the use of poor sources."

Musk said that he wanted to promote free speech on Twitter when he bought it, and he vowed to keep it from becoming a hellscape, but so far he's been making a hellscape of it himself since he took possession of Twitter.  He's trolled the New York Times by insisting that he did not "tweet out" the Santa Monica Observer link to the Times directly and dismissed The Guardian as a "far left wing propaganda machine."

Oh yeah, hate speech has increased fivefold on Twitter since Musk took it over.

So what can I do about this?  Apart from promising not to buy a Tesla, nothing, really.  I mostly use Twitter to post links to two of my blogs, including this one, and the only other social media site I post links on is LinkedIn.  Facebook still - still - won't let me publish links to my two blogs on the grounds that they're spam, and my attempts to have the ban reversed have amounted to nothing.

Maybe I should play the Powerball lottery and buy Facebook if I win the jackpot.  Then I can reverse the ban on links to my blogs and delete my Twitter account.  Oh yeah, and buy a Lucid.  

It's a thought.

230

230?

Yes. Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which Trump is trying to nullify by executive fiat.  It's the part of the law that shields Internet platforms from lawsuits against what their users post.  Like Trump.  It also allows platforms to moderate content and delete or flag whatever they feel violates their own standards.  So when Twitter dared to fact-check one of his tweets, he threatened to shut down social media - which, perversely, would deny him his strongest communication tool.  Then when he advocated violence to combat the violence of the Gorge Floyd riots, Twitter branded it as incendiary speech. The White House responded by saying that he didn't mean what he said, though he clearly said what he meant - he wants to shoot those who loot.  Especially if they're on Fifth Avenue.

Trump can't close down Twitter (which might be a good thing) or close down Facebook (which, given that I connected with a lot of the top models of the 1980s through Facebook, would definitely be a bad thing), but the mere fact that he wants to suppress free speech is chilling.  Not that it's anything new, of course; he's been wanting to do that since January 20, 2017.  

Interestingly, Joe Biden agrees with Trump that Section 230 should be repealed to make social media platforms more responsible for a lot of the misinformation posted on their domains.  You'd agree with Trump, too, if you, like Biden, had progressives who literally hate you spreading since-debunked stories about your aggressive womanizing.  But if social media platforms start policing content in order to avoid lawsuits, it will make them less free for their users.  Sure, libelous comments and false stories can be removed more easily, but what about other circumstances?  If Volkswagen of America, for example, had a problem with me pestering the company on social media to get it to bring the base eighth-generation Golf to the U.S. and decided it was a form of harassment, would Facebook or Twitter, without Section 230, block my posts on that subject to avoid a lawsuit from Volkswagen of America?

I say, let people post what they want, but make sure that people can tell the difference between legitimate news and conspiracy theories, and allow the social media platforms to maintain their standards as they have been doing.  Misinformation will still get out, of course, but social media users should be educated to separate the wheat from the chaff.  I do so, and so I ignore any posts linking Hillary Clinton with a child-prostitution ring.  Also, I ignore anything Trump tweets.

As I said, Trump can't close social media, so don't pay attention to his rants about that.  Pay attention instead to his decision to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic that has affected this country more than any other.