For my relatives Facebook's not the problem, it's all the far right wing propaganda on YouTube that makes claims without backing them up with any sort of evidence. The more they watch, the more they believe it, and the less they believe evidence to the contrary.
So I was right when I thought social media is propelling us to collapse and that it is analogous to cigarettes on a collective scale.
Small solace though, it already permeated every corner of civilization changing us in mostly bad ways.
I think we really need to choose our social media carefully knowing that every type has their own mental illness flavour risks from body dysmorphia to groupthink. We need to be self aware of our shortcomings and tricks employed by corps for harvesting engagement.
Nowadays you turn off your brain and browse social media to relax but you should rather do the opposite. Focus the brain knowing the site was purposefully made to trick you to spend as much time on it as possible and invest as much emotions as possible. This isn’t some harmless casual leisure activity, you become a cog in a corporation war for information when you open the site. On unfriendly territory, a battlefield of digital war, you ought to wear a helmet at least.
The last time I logged on to Facebook was this past fall because there was a death in our fairly tight knit group of high school classmates. It had been three or four years since I'd been in there.
So I went on and said my words.
While I was there, I didn't really notice what was in my feed.
What I noticed was suddenly I was getting notification after notification that my posts from years and years ago were getting deleted because they didn't fit whatever the current terms and conditions of use were.
This amused me.
So I left my words of dead classmate up for a week then sent my account silent again.
I can't see Facebook or any social media being a place I ever hang out again, which is a little bit of a bummer because without any social media, IRL social activities all but come to an immediate and total halt.
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