After watching recent developments on Facebook, partly involving an influx of people who spend a lot of their time behaving like trolls in discussions, and then having to see Jim Wright suspended from the platform temporarily due to a co-ordinated set of complaints of abuse by people he upset with one of his postings, I have been considering how I might scale back my presence on that platform. Jim has already taken one of his groups Private, and he is considering his future on Facebook.
Facebook has no idea how to cope with UseNet syndrome (the tendency of any social media platform, over time, to move towards a zone of spam and junk) and it will not effectively moderate threatening content or give persistent trolls the heave-ho.
Now, after writing a strong note about my lack of patience with absolutists and name-callers on the subject of abortion, I find myself reading comments from people on my Friends list that I need to be careful what I say and how I say it on this topic, unless they end up (as one of them said) “reading about me on the news”.
This is both disquieting and dispiriting.
If we have reached a point on social media where honestly expressed (albeit blunt) opinions are regarded as potentially dangerous to a person’s physical well-being, then this is telling me something rather worrying about not only the state of the nation, but also about the level of discourse on social media.
It is also telling me that it really is time for me to modify and re-scale my Facebook presence.
So…I will be thinking over the weekend about what actions to take.
Most likely that will take the form of my abandoning Facebook for any day-to-day interactions, retaining Facebook Messenger for private interactions with trusted friends, and using only my related pages such as White Cat Publishing and Aerial Savant for posting information on my writing and UAS activities respectively. I will retain memberships to closed groups of interest such as my aviation group memberships. I may post there as time allows on topics of interest.
All new content on topics that I find interesting will only be published here on this blog.
I will also delete most of my prior postings on Facebook on serious subjects. Most of that content, if not overtaken by events, will be transferred to the blog if it did not already exist there in some form. I have no intention of allowing Facebook to capture the IPR for that content more or less in perpetuity, when their current behaviors show that they are not prepared to be wise stewards of the platform.
Short Summary – be prepared to see a lot less of me on Facebook.
