Maybe for several weeks. Perhaps for several months. I think it will be the latter.
FaceBook has been more or less a vestigial part of my online activities of late, and something I gave a cursory look at maybe daily. As is the fate of ‘social media’, it’s become increasingly enshittified for some time, and to the point I've found myself wondering just how I came to be trawling through a stream of sponsored and 'suggested' content for the minority of posts by people I care about.
I've also been at a loss about what I could post there, because FaceBook doesn't lend itself to long-form content, I don't really have a lot to 'microblog' about, and very few referrals to my site come from it. And maybe I'm getting too old to care much about how many followers and 'likes' I got.
The main reason I’m taking an indefinite break from FaceBook, though, is that I don't think it's healthy to become dependent on it.
There are a couple of misgivings I've had about it for a while. Much of the 'suggested content' was unsolicited transphobic shite. It's mostly from groups and pages nobody's heard of, yet those groups typically and inexplicably have somewhere in the region of ~12K followers and ~2K comments on their posts - when comments aren't disabled, that is.
I’ve seen that as an irritation more than a cause to feel offended, but it does get tiring after a while.
At the same time, other stuff - comments and replies to 'suggested content' especially - is heavily censored. Aside from having opaque algorithms determining what gets seen, there is a tab that's invariably set to 'Most Relevant' above the comments for a post, as a way of hiding any disagreement or criticism.
Clearly it's far from a level playing field when it comes to free expression, debate and the right of reply. It’s become a heavily censored advertising platform.
What really did it for me, though, was seeing how 'social media' poisons relationships - something that should be treasured above all else - over the stupidest of things.
It was quite ugly to watch myself recently being maligned by a loved one, and subsequently by a virtual entourage of complete strangers who felt the need to pick a side, because someone wanted their dose of drama, sympathy, likes and comments. It doesn't matter who is maligned or why, or how much damage it would cause. Getting a load of people to comment and click a ‘like’ button is all that matters.
None of it I take personally, firstly because it wasn't brought about by anything I’d actually said or did, and secondly because I know that 'social media' is engineered to encourage that kind of drama, and to make people addicted to the endorphin thing that comes with constantly checking how much attention we get. I haven't been immune to that myself in the past.
It seems a lot more trouble than it’s worth.
Hi Emma. I completely understand about Facebook. I closed my Twitter account on January 1st this year because of the way people treated one another. I haven’t missed it. I hope it doesn’t stop you blogging though because I really enjoy reading it.