Marble Falls Exhausted from a long drive, sitting next to mi companera for assistance, I set about trying to join Bluesky with mixed feelings. I’m not really a Twitter X guy. Yeah, in automation mode, ACORN’s comms guy shares the Chief Organizer’s Report on that platform, but at a personal level I dropped off years ago. At one level, I just don’t have the bandwidth. At another level, there was some change in Tweetdeck or whatever it was called back then, and I dropped a stitch and just said to heck with it. More recently, under the Elon Musk regime, I’m amazed that, except for his fortune, and now Trump’s reincarnation, that the thing is still alive. Tesla drivers have a rationale, as they build his fortune as the richest man in the world, “hate the man, love the car.” Well, with Twitter X, I’m “abhor Musk and the platform he bloviates on.” In short, I’m signing up as a protest in a small and ridiculous way, and definitely do not have the bandwidth to do much more, but any port in a storm these days.
After years on Facebook, I’m mystified about what’s happening over there as well, especially their new weirdness about politics. I’ve had three posts in the last six months that were rejected by the Face for breaking community standards. When that happens, they say you can appeal, and they will get back to you and explain it all. The first time it happened, they were rejecting one of my blogs that was pretty milquetoast, so, scratching my head, I appealed, since it was so ridiculous. Never heard another word from them, and now I can’t remember which blog it was. More recently, they felt their standards were offended when I summarized the work of a well-regarded political scientist whose work was the subject of a profile in the Times. His views that democracy was in danger, despite earlier arguing that subsequent elections brought stability and assurance, were increasingly seen importantly. I introduced the piece pointing out that democracy wasn’t a game. Boom, they deep-sixed it. I tried changing the intro comment, since I was absolutely sure that no person or algorithm had actually read the blog. No soap. Tried three or four combinations, no luck – Facebook wanted no part of democracy. The other day, leaving a four meeting in a row marathon in the Netherlands, when I posted, I did so by saying “back-to-back-to-back-back meetings,” and this offended community standards somehow? Wow! In this case, I changed to something anodyne like, “meetings finally over in the Netherlands,” and the Facebook gatekeepers allowed me to sneak back in.
There can’t be any doubt that Twitter X is little more than a personal plaything and soapbox for Elon Musk. What is the role of Facebook now that it wants to pretend to take itself out of the public forum, even as 20% of Americans say social media is where they get their news? I’m not sure.
Zadie Smith, the great contemporary novelist, and, yes, I’m a reader and a fan, somehow slipped in some notes on social media, ostensibly as part of a review, in the recent New York Review of Books. She claimed she was in Barcelona talking to a bunch of 14-year-olds and ALL of the questions were about social media, which to her understated chagrin, meant that none of them were about her writing or work. She then raised what she pretended was a radical suggestion that she had been harboring secretly. Recognizing that we are all the product that social media is selling, she posited that we collectively have a unique power in this area, compared to others: we can hurt them severely by exiting.
Right on! But who is really going to do that, much less organize it? In modern life we’re chained by velvet ropes, and that’s the real community standard. FOBO for now and maybe forever.