Social media are like hairstyles. You have to suit yourself and be ready to keep it up. Do you want color? Or braids? Are you someone who is happy spending quality time in the salon every six weeks? The bottom line with hair: you gotta work with what you got and know how much you’re willing to do for your “look.”
This brings us to social media. (Be patient. I’ll get there.) I was amused by the irrational exuberance of many internet people this past week when Mark Zuckerberg launched his latest venture: Threads. I’m not the only skeptic. Tech journalist Charlie Warzel told The Atlantic:
Charlie Warzel: I’m a little bit baffled by the enthusiasm. I know that I’m an incredibly jaded tech journalist who thinks too much about these places. But on Threads, I’m scrolling around there, and I’m like, Do people not understand that this is a Meta production?
Last October, tech journalists wrote that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse was a sad, empty and unpopular flop. Meta lost $4 billion in the first quarter of this year on Zuck’s virtual reality gamble.
That was then. This is now: the spectacle of Musk and Zuckerberg going mano a mano. Entertaining, and if you sign up for Threads you can cause pain to at least one billionaire. Twitter refugees thrill at the prospect of having their cake (thousands or millions of followers) and eating it, too (Twitter reborn! And no Nazi bar!)
By dinnertime, those of us with unhealthy relationships to Twitter had already begun [posting threads] . . . one of us even enabled notifications to feel the warm buzz of approval as our comrades rushed into the newest and least cool club on the internet: a Twitter clone run by Facebook.
As Elon hurls the flaming Twitter spear into the lake of oblivion, its formerly high-profile users mourn and flail about. I suspect Meta/Threads will not be the homecoming they hoped for. Remember what Frances Haugen, the whistleblower from Facebook, told us?
Facebook’s revised algorithm gave less weight to “likes” and higher scores to emoji reactions and reposts. Facebook’s own internal research found that ‘misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares’ which fuel reactivity and sustain engagement. ‘It’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,’ Hagen said. She called for government regulation of social media.
Last December, I did a deep dive into security problems at Facebook in “Love-Hating Social Media.” Here’s what I found:
Facebook doesn’t have a data breach scandal. Facebook has a data breach timeline. And good luck relying on their privacy and security settings to protect your account. For example, I turned off “location services” because I don’t want FB tracking me. But guess what? They do it anyway. Buried (four levels deep) within the privacy settings is the company’s notification:
“When Location Services is turned off, we may still estimate your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection.”
Meta laid off more than 20,000 employees in the last nine months. I predict: six months from now the big story will be about millions of users who have had their Threads accounts hacked.
Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter-world Savior? Please.
Back to the metaphorical hair salon. Whether or where to engage on social media is a personal choice. Suit yourself and get what you want out of online engagement. Platforms are proliferating . . . and I’m tired. I’m done with platform-hopping.
I’ve settled at Post.News. Here’s a message from the Post publisher which gives you an inkling of why I’m there:
Right now we see Twitter users migrate from one app to the next in an attempt to recreate Twitter, only to go back to the "OG " Twitter which is the closest thing to what they are looking for.
Once this era ends, I believe people will settle down and choose among different platforms based on their preferences. I do not think it will be "winner takes all" but rather different platforms for different needs. . . . Every platform will need to define itself as more than just a Twitter clone.
At Post - we are focused on news . . . in the widest sense, publishers, creators, and regular folks, creating, sharing, and reading news content while helping support the creators and publishers who create the content. Let's not forget that Facebook is removing news from the Feed and the Twitter format of links is not a great user experience. We want to be a place for civil conversations; this requires strong moderation to keep the conversations civil. We are working closely with creators and publishers to incorporate their content to the platform, instead of linking out to paywalled sites, focusing on a smooth and clean user experience vs the jarring ad load of traditional media sites.
And Post has figured out a way to compensate writers for their work. I like that a lot.
Keep scrolling down (below Notes) to reach the comments, share, and like buttons.
Notes:
Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel, Zombie Twitter has Arrived
Lora Kelley, The Endless Cycle of Social Media
Jack Zwiezen, Facebook’s Metaverse is an Empty, Sad, and Unpopular Flop.
Just saw two articles in The Guardian that support my arguments in this piece. Today: As Threads app thrives, experts warn of Meta’s string of privacy violations (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/11/threads-app-privacy-user-data-meta-policy.)
On July 7: Rightwing figures sign up for Meta’s Threads app ‘within 24 hours’ of release (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/09/meta-threads-app-rightwing-fringe-figures-sign-up)
Threads is subject to moderation, which will keep it nicer than the Nazi bar that is Twitter. Yesterday I responded to someone’s comment about senator Tuberville screwing up the military promotion and transfer system. I stated that Tuberville is a traitorous idiot (true) elected by idiots (also true), but Threads said that wasn’t nice. (Remember, among his many wrong answers, Tuberville responded to the question “what are the 3 branches of government?” Tuberville said the “President, the Senate and the House”- although after the last few years, the idea of eliminating the Judiciary does have some appeal.