A few reasons why, i closed my accounts on WeMe, Gab, Parler, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook Pages.
At the moment i only have my main Facebook account, and in part because i have a few family members outside of the USA, who i otherwise don’t communicate with.
In 2021, I’m finding social media less useful. I don’t trust it. Its reached a point where social media platforms are media propagana no longer the innocent platforms they started as, during the race to develop their networks.
Once upon a time, social media was innocent, like Walt Disney corporations, it’s a small world ride, but in 2021 going forward, its become a global mill house to manipulate culture and deliver toxic amounts of controlled propaganda.
Social media began as a spot on the internet, where 16 year old went to blog and post about their cat barfing up hair balls, and the awkward first date.
There were no professional journalists writing opinion pieces, no politics, no gorilla political movements, no experiments in mass social psychological manipulations.
Then Facebook became a tradable share dependent pure profit influenced corporation, and selling influence to media billionaires and political influence became a thing.
But you already know this story, You’ve been down that road before, you know what’s at the end of this street, You’ve eaten in that noodle shop already.
So I think i will just give my reasons, for turning of Social Media, in search of real people, in the real world, around, me.
- Facebook Pages: When Facebook launched their pages, it was a chance for anyone with a talent or hobby, to connect with others. But in 2021, Facebook charges fees to de-throttle views, or in other words, they put your posts on their “Pages” feature into a virtual prison. If you want anyone to see then they’ll either have to be viral worthy posts that Facebook’s media censors think will cause enough interests to serve Facebook’s purposes, or you’ll have to pay money to release their hostages with a “Boosted Post”, to be seen. Prior to 2020, a maximum viewer penetration of 20 views was the current hostage rate, but in 2021 that number is around 5. For your posts to be seen by what was originally a common organic reader rate of 100 will costs you around $5 per post. That’s a lot of money, if your trying to use Facebook Pages as a community or fan blog, with daily updates about your hobby. Also in 2021, Facebook is revamping their pages for profit again, but transforming them into marketplace stores, to compete with Shopify. So pages are becoming less about community, friendships, family and friends, but instead about shares, money, commissions. But that should not surprise anyone of you’ve watched the congressional inquiries over recent years, the reality is, Facebook in particular knows everything about you, they manipulate what appears in your new feed, they have algorithms to choose which friends they think you’ll want to see most, so you’ll keep coming back. They sell information they have collected about your interests to the highest bidder, like a pimp giving away free crack with every whore, to get you hooked. In 2020 we saw the most horrifically significant abuse in the history of Social Media, with Facebook inserting money into local and national politics directly, to influence US Politics in a manner feared since the near world domination of an infamous past world war. Censorship of politicians, media journalists, posts of nobodies talking with their friends, whose posts didn’t align with Facebook’s direct politics agenda and psychological manipulations of the new feed. If your ideals, thoughts, discussions didn’t align with their agenda, you received a warning, a block posts warning graphic appeared to your neighbor, pastor, friend, boss, co-worker warning them that their, “fact checkers”, were offended, threatened, by what you “privately posted” to your mutually agreeing friend. They called you a straight out liar, a conspirator, aligned with the devil in hell itself, of your thoughts were anything other than what Facebook’s agenda prescribed. It was the most overt and dangerous manipulation of the public in American and Global History. But you continued to use it, because your friends in high school from twenty years ago are on it, your cousin who lives in Germany is on it, and your both to lazy to write a letter, You were conveniently quarantined and banned by government state leaders from being on the street or eating with friends, while those same elected members broke their own rules, why? So you were forced to sit at home, in front of the Facebook manipulating algorithms and Fact Check approved propaganda. So i closed three innocent Facebook pages, and the more i think about those family members who never contacted me before Facebook, with anything but an obligatory pre-printed Christmas card, that person who i honestly didn’t like much in college anyway; that person i used to go to the same church with, the less i think i really enjoy Facebook anyway. Maybe those old days of feeling kind of bored, were not so bad anyway.
- TWITTER: Twitter began similarly innocently liked Facebook. It was a place people who mostly didn’t know each other could write and respond to posts about any topic. It was and is the fastest paced Social Media platform, in that what your post has a general lifespan of a few hours, before fading into the global archive of things you wrote in the past, for archeologists, forensics, attorneys, investigators and political adversaries to use against you in the future. Unlike Facebook who had denied having agenda other than connecting friends together, while poorly hiding their activities, Twitter is in your face about their political agenda. Twitter is no longer an unbias universe, but an unashamed one sided politics and culturely closed- ended echo chamber. Like Facebook, as of 2021, Twitter is a propaganda machine, with censorship, filtering algorithms with politically motivated agendas and the most protected platform of extreme socialism that exists. If you’re politics are extreme, your probably on Twitter. If your politics are in the middle somewhere or traditionally valued, you’re probably one of Twitters punching bags who enjoys self abuse in the name of arguing your cause, who gets suspended frequently. Wherever you fall on Twitter, its the global political social media platform in 2021. Long gone are the days of interacting about Minecraft and how to prepare for your SAT test, yes there are a few people still taking, but every company and corporation uses Twitter as a cheap or free tool for their customer support, but more and more customers have left, and will leave Twitter. Those companies will not however, because there is no where else like it that they can use for free. To get similar using tools developed specifically for customer service costs hundreds of dollars a month. So as long as Twitter keeps its corporate influence, it’s radical internal echo chamber will continue. But i won’t. I ditched Twitter multiple times over the last few years for personal social media, and its use for anything other than politics and media manipulation is miniscule as far as penetration goes. Before it became a political platform, it was a great tool for those of us who sell online, to reach interested people with things we were selling on eBay, for example, or reach out to or YouTube fans, but in 2021 Its one of the lowest yielding tools for social media platforms according to analytics. Twitter also made history for being the first platform used by a publicly traded social platform to successfully manipulate, influence and corrupt an American election in history, ban free speech of publicly elected representatives who did not align with Twitter corporate political leanings, and ban a sitting US President based on agendas, and actions that resulted due to its direct involvement as a propaganda echo chamber. So of you enjoy arguing and debating in a one sided echo chamber, you’re probably still in line with Twitter, or if your a corporation or politically aligned media conglomerate your own Twitter. But I’ve seen the signs before, on Yahoo, Prodigy, MySpace, AOL and i predict that Twitter, though it will survive, will follow a similar demise. The moment you remove the social nature of free and non-influenced exchange of ideas from a platform and set preferences towards a corporate vision, that platform begins its slow death to becoming non-relevant.
- GAB: I joined GAB for a while, and its pretty popular, but i didn’t stick around longer than it took to get a clear idea of what it offers. GAB, is a mixed platform with Twitter like news feed, but with Facebook like groups and profile pages. Initially i liked GAB, but ultimately several things stoodout that i didn’t like. First and most prominent, is its founders persistent presence which made me feel like i was a staff writer of someone else’s blog. To be successful, a social media platform has to be a non-interfered with platform. In other words, historically the platforms that have succeeded have allowed free exchange of ideas, were built in micro blogging and those running it were never center stage. On GAB that is not the case. It’s founders presence dominates the platform, despite his statements to the contrary. GAB is also niche, in that its focus is on those disenfranchised by Fakebook and Tweety. (Those are intentional misspellings). It’s agenda is clear, it’s a social platform for people who want to gather on a political and religious aligned platform. If Tweety is the far left platform, GAB is a far right platform. Tweety is the platform of choice by atheists, agnostics and anti – Christian agendas. GAB is the platform of those with traditional morals and evangelical Christian leanings. This is very clear in the way it supports itself via merchandising, its statements that appear at the top of the news feed and elsewhere by its founder, etc. That’s fine if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s not what i was looking for. Yes i am conservative in my values, i have traditional morals, i am a Christian, but i have no interests in talking politics. I have no interests in political debates or religious debates. I want to talk about YouTube projects in working on, Minecraft creations, video production, cycling, caving, other things. I will inspire with an occasionally timely and relevant bible verse from the book of proverbs or a prophetic word, but that’s it. I don’t want to debate about whether Joel Osteen is a good teacher. I don’t want your opinion if i do not know you, or we haven’t mutually agreed we have things in common. I don’t want to need be to defend my faith like on Tweety to every atheist in the universe, nor to every religious person on GAB. I also don’t care, or want to know every thought about it the CEO of a social media platform has on the topic. So that is a big problem with GAB. It often felt like a sub-platform rather than an open platform. I never asked to follow its CEO, and i couldn’t find a way to permanently disconnect from his posts. Second thing i don’t like about GAB, is i started seeing a while lot of posts using the term for Black Slaves in many posts and images which i found offensive. Third, I started seeing what i would describe as extremists posts. I don’t want to see or know your radical ideas whether left or right. Yet, because the GAB main feed is global where as the main Twitter main feed is topic oriented , i saw things that were just to much effort using GAB’s set-up and rulers to bother reporting. I didn’t sign up to work as a GAB moderator. Last, after trying out its groups for a few months, i decided they are neither active enough for my liking, and again i saw a lot of unrelated politics and racism posted within groups, not surprising since the persons who started and moderated the groups i joined, also posted similar in their own feed. (I was only in Minecraft groups). Ultimately, i decided that my only connections were ones i made on GAB, who were those types similar on Twitter who add everyone randomly to build up a massive follower number, it just wasn’t as good of a platform compared to WeMe, which i was also evaluating. One more thought. GAB is use funded, so those who contribute have higher public exposure within GAB.
- PARLER: I really enjoyed Parler when it began. I had a verified account, relatively positive experience, genuine followers, even mutual connections with real Minecraft players. I never saw any of the things the far left advocates accused it of related to the US election fraud capital event. What i did see, and I’ve written about this previously, was political adversaries from BLM lead a massive invasion of Parler, in which multiple thousands of black men and women joined Parler in 2020 all within two days, and began posting pornographic images, making racist comments, searching out and attacking conservatives minding their own business and singling out individuals to harass of any ethnicity, even fellow blacks who were not part of their radicalized agenda. This lasted for several weeks. Other than several times they and other groups from Twitter did that, Parler had been very peaceable, which was an amazing shift from my experiences on Twitter. However that changed after Amazon and other left leaning corporations, media and politicians put the capital event blame on Parler, allowing Amazon, Apple, Google to all de-platform and shutdown Parler within minutes of each other, obviously coordinated in advance. There is so much evidence that the shutdown was coordinated, including a group of hackers, just happened to decided to exploit Parler and supposedly archive all of Parler’s posts, right before Amazon which had Parler on its cloud server shut it down so no-one could validate the claims. I was on Parler that week talking about YouTube and Minecraft and everything seemed normal until the shutdown. Unfortunately, the rebooted Parler is not the same in 2021, with an unknown quantity of inactive accounts of users who never returned. There are also many bot accounts and fake accounts on Parler after re-boot. Twitter is notorious for its bots accounts, but i never saw any evidence of bot accounts on Parler in 2021. Maybe they were there, but it wasn’t obvious because there were so many real users. After the reboot, runs were slow but steady, then all of a sudden it seemed to be back to normal, at first. Until i realized one morning at 3AM that several accounts liking my posts, i had seen other times during the day liking my posts. Always within seconds. I keep an unusual schedule as independent contractor and pre-pandemic small business, and out dawned on me that its impossible those accounts could be real, based on my schedule. So i began observing and testing it, as discovered 25 to 30 bots initially. At first it wasn’t easy to spot because i had a high amount of followers pre-shutdown, but i knew 95% of then had not returned. As i did more research, i noticed, none of those were followers, again making it unlikely that every post would be LIKED by those accounts. Another Parler member who saw the bots had discovered 100 bots. Some of the bots became careless, using multiple accounts with the same or similar name, for example there were about five bots using the name of someone running for a political office in a state who at first began as a single bot based on a particular hashtag. When i added additional hashtags, other bot accounts with the same or very similar name and agenda, also LIKED my generic trap post. So i had five “upvotes” on the same posts from five different fake bot accounts, causing the political candidates name and photo to repeat. I carefully went through my last few months of posts, as saw that only two followers had actually interacted with me and the rest appeared to be either fake bot accounts hoping I’d follow them. I don’t know who is running the bots. At first i thought it is Parler using bots to make it seem alive again after the shutdown. Then i wasn’t sure. Followed by questioning if Parler might be leasing bots to political candidates to help fund itself. I still don’t know. I only know, here in the middle of 2021, Parler has a major uncontrolled bot problem. I also noticed based on my analytics on Parler and off Parler, that none of my YouTube or Minecraft connections returned, so i was only seeing politics. I left Twitter and GAB because of politics, and after carefully considering the current and projected direction of Parler, i decided to delete my verified account. I hope its leadership gets its act together and helps Parler survive, because it was definitely beginning the best alternative to Twitter, and apparently a massive treat to the left social media platforms. So big a threat that when they decided to black-out president Trump, that they had to set-up and take out Parler, who was being falsely rumored to be Trumps pending destination.
- MeWe: MeWe is the best alternative to Facebook, since alternatives became a thing. Like GAB, it is user funded, but offers a free account which is very generous. Unlike Facebook, there is no advertisers in the news feed, no experimental psychological manipulation experiments being conducted, no political or social justice agenda propaganda on MeWe, its what Facebook used to be before Facebook became owned and controlled by media billionaires and stock holders. MeWe, of it can gain ground is the biggest real threat to Facebook. It has many features of Facebook and when you get used to it, is just as good or better. The stumbling block for MeWe is being user generated funded, vs finding advertisers and sponsorships of the like minded. Most people think of Social Media as being free to use. MeWe could probably adopt an advertisement arrangement similar to the DuckDuckGo search engine and do really well. I really like it as a a platform, even its free version, but i couldn’t get anyone else to cross- over. Facebook succeeded, because it started out as a generational movement of youth that propelled it. Facebook is now the “adults”, platform. If Facebook started in 2021, it would either struggle or fail, because it’s youth have turned adults and the youth of 2021 have adopted other forms of social interaction. MeWe is trying to build off of the Facebook and Twitter disenfranchisement, and that’s not enough. I left MeWe this week. I had stayed on it to connect with a single Minecraft person whose realm SkyThrusters developed on. Now treat the main projects are done, i decided to leave.
My conclusion, Social Media has a problem. The forefathers of Facebook and Twitter have sold their visions to corrupt political agendas and propaganda, used in 2020 to interfere and manipulate US Politics, perhaps even foreign politics. They can no longer be trusted, despite the toys they create entertain us. The price and cost of admission is higher than the value of their rides. They’ve censured a sitting American president on faked accusations, they’ve censured you and me for mentioning his name, they’ve created internal police who decide if what you posts is politically correct and aligned with their social justice agenda, they’ve experimented on us by manipulating our news feeds, they have abused the data they have collected about us. If those were not bad enough, they’ve also become irrelevant to their original target which make or break a social media platform which is the current generation of youth.
They’ve lied before Congress, made deals with China that or unAmerican, and abused our data. They will die. They will Become MySpace, even if they keep buying the trending new platforms, they will die, because they are no longer care about us, they care about profit, politics, and global influence, but we are smarter than that.
Will any of the platforms that have risen as alternatives survive? Honestly, probably. Most not for you put me, because all of them, began as a direct reaction to one of the evils of Facebook and Twitter.
GAB, Parler, MeWe are all reactions to Facebook and Twitter censorship.
GAB and Parler are also reactions of Facebook and Twitters attack on religion, morality, faith, capitalism, free speech.
MeWe, GAB and Parler are reactions against Facebook and Twitters data privacy for sale, advertising and stock market influences too.
Though their causes are honorable, people have a low selling point called, Free! The more free you give them, the more of their soul you can own.
