this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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if you get fucked because you’re still on a Meta platform, why should I feel bad for you?
after all these years, you’ve all had plenty of warning. you should very well know better by now. whatever bad happens is totally on you.
This is mostly an issue for businesses that were using groups, not individuals.
But beyond that, Facebook is particularly difficult to separate from depending on what you use it for. If you don't care about anyone else on it, sure, you can leave the platform. But if you need to communicate with certain people and they won't leave it, especially regional groups, you're stuck.
Nothing I hate more than a company's website being a Facebook page
Worse is when any level of gov't uses it... "Join our community consultation meeting about city planning live on facebook."
Fuck that. I can choose to do business or not with most companies. But i cant choose to opt out of civic participation (no, i'm not going to live off grid as a sovereign citizen)
A lot of companies hate it too
And when people send me FB links that only display the login wall.
My neighbourhood facebook group is pretty useful. I have discover a running group on facebook to run with people, it's cool and improve my mwntal health. All critisizm about facebook is valid but as long as it's useful to me, i'll stay on it.
This is me, I occasionally post something we're doing, but by far most of my feed and interaction is with groups. I created a neighborhood FB group as an easy way to pass along info/communicate
With pihole, ublock origin, Firefox (FB container) and social fixer browser extension, Facebook isn't all that bad... Haha
Add in 2016 allowed me to prune/unfollow a number of crazy people.
It's used as a source of income for a lot of people. It's easy to group everyone and say they deserve all that happens but take a minute and consider those who are struggling and it's their only way to find work and others are just trying to stay afloat in the sinking economy
This is how I see it: Facebook is essentially a government. (Replace Facebook with any other social media platform that's too big to compete with). It's where the people are, and like it or not, you have to be on Facebook to reach the masses.
I've never used Facebook in any real capacity, and at times it was to my detriment. At University, Facebook groups were (are?) how students communicate with each other, share information and knowledge, ask for help, etc. By not being on Facebook I missed out on all of that stuff. It's futile to try to get everyone else to move elsewhere - it just ain't happening.
So Facebook is a de-facto government: people HAVE to be on Facebook, and the company has the exclusive ability to police the platform and control how it can be used - e.g. through APIs and the website interface. Everyone else is at the whims of that.
But as a government, Facebook is obviously not a democracy. It's a dictatorship. Maybe an oligarchy. Look I know very little about political systems, but we can all probably agree that it's as far from a democracy as can be.
It is my opinion that governments need to wise up to this. Tech platforms that become nearly as powerful as governments are a direct threat to democracy when they don't have any of the checks and balances that democracies have. Not to mention when the governments themselves begin to rely on these platforms to publish announcements and stuff. The EU's Digital Markets Act is a big step in the right direction. I hope it's just the start.