Is it Social Media? or something else?

I don’t know what’s worse:

Being unable to post to social media with no way to report it,
or going off social media for good.

I’ve toyed with the idea of closing my Facebook account for over a year, now. I haven’t, yet, closed the account. I blacked out my profile and header pictures quite a while ago, and I want to find a way to delete all other online information and media. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do that – to delete media that really belongs to you, not the website where you published it.

I’ve been involved with a writing group that I adore. The facilitator put up the group through Facebook and uses it as her only medium of advertising. It works for her.

I’ve run several groups myself, and have one that is quite active. However, I’ve already put in place another person to handle it in case I’m not online.

I’ve been able to support my cat and crochet folks and found some interesting magical stuff available that I might not have found, otherwise.

I’ve made new friends and re-connected with old ones.

I found a way to hide most of the politics, which made the experience more pleasant for me. While being an informed voter is important, constant bombardment of inflammatory posts only upsets me. So, I hide them.

I’ve been able to find support groups for my diet and way of life on Facebook, though the continual posting of some women’s “success” photos has caused me to re-think that last bit. There are a few women seem to think that their success photos need to be in the nude, and I find it unacceptable in a group on social media. Other places, fine, but not someplace where children congregate.

These are my boundaries, and I just “snooze” the groups and make a comment on the discussion thread for that group to voice my objection. If the group continues to have such photos or objectional content, I can drop the group. Simple.

Inciting Incident:

However, yesterday was my birthday, and many wonderful people wished me a happy birthday. Good as far as it goes, right?

I couldn’t say thank you to them for their good wishes. I couldn’t “like” a post from someone else. I tried to go to support and the site timed out. I gave it 30 minutes and it happened again.

This may not seem like a big deal to my readers, but I think the niceties are important. Courtesy is important. Saying “please” and “thank you” are important. Being able to contact support by other than your own website is important. If you notice, there’s a way to contact me in my footer if you can’t get to my contact page because WordPress is having issues. This is important.

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook et al, and all the young people who work there; have repeatedly made it clear that they don’t have a clue how to control their product – or that they have no intention to do so. They evade the issue or obfuscate when directly asked by reporters or the government about these issues.

They would rather collect revenue than protect children, governments, accounts, and so much more. They take no responsibility for allowing people to foment political upheaval using their site. They don’t care what falsehoods are spread through their product. The anti-vaxxers, the Russian data-mining, privacy violations, etc, have become so rampant, regardless of any action they have stated they would take, are enough to close the site in other times.

But these are the times w live in.

I think I’ve come to the end of my relationship with Facebook.

They control the only messenger I use outside of my phone, “Whatsapp,” and can mine those conversations. The app used to be worth something, but not anymore.

They’ve already blocked automatic posting from here – not that anyone would get a preview of a post. I have to manually post that I’ve added something here on Facebook, and have for almost 6 months. It’s just part of running a website, I guess, to deal with the vagaries of marketing processes at other sites.

When do you say when? When is enough, enough?

I find it interesting, that in other areas of my life, I’m also dealing with boundaries and limits. In that case, people have accused me of making an attack, when really all I did was state a boundary to my relationship with them.

We teach people how to treat us. We teach others how to value us by how we value ourselves.

When did it become acceptable for a company run by spoiled and unsupervised children to dictate to the rest of the world how we should behave toward each other?