I quit Meta's products last summer. I used to be a daily user of Facebook and a near-daily user of Instagram, but I stopped using both. I avoid WhatsApp wherever I can.
Why?
On Facebook, I came across a comment in a post that was blatantly racist. I reported it. The response came back that the post did not violate community standards. I could find no dispute/escalation mechanism. I attempted to report it again and received an automated response that chain reporting a user constitutes harassment.
The Facebook algorithm was clearly testing to see if it could bait me with transphobic content. I was seeing periodic transphobic articles and clips and my attempts to suppress them from my feed seemed to only encourage the algorithm to show me more. The fact that this content is even allowed to persist on the platform is sickening.
On Instagram, I began to see an uptick in content that was not associated to any of the pages I followed, which for the large part were professional photographers and my friends. I got the impression that the algorithm was trying to figure out what vices I have. It felt inappropriate.
On both platforms, I saw relatively moderate right-leaning friends go deep down the alt-right / QAnon rat hole. It was frightening how quick that journey was for some of them.
Last, and least concerning, I could find no way to avoid spoilers. Because I had once liked the official Game of Thrones page, even though I later unliked it, as soon as House of the Dragon came out my feed contained an abundance of HotD spoilers which I could not suppress. I didn't have time to watch the show until months after it came out, so not being able to explicitly filter out spoilers for the show was just obnoxious.
It's been over 6 months, and the only thing I miss is the occasional updates from people I don't see often, just to know what's going on in their lives. Unfortunately, that was the minority of the content in my feed. The majority of my content seemed to be deliberately designed to drive the hate machine, and I'm not playing that game.
For those of you in my feed at Meta, please influence the direction of the company's strategy into something that is a net-positive for our society.
Wrote about #Meta's spectacular quarter ... and its effect on kids' #mentalhealth.
Meta's latest earnings were singular, as is the platform. Unlike the rest of Big Tech, however, Meta is a net negative for the world. Depression and despair are costly, and we are spending more time worrying about your kids than a $200 billion increase in market cap can assuage or buy back.
Many equity analysts argue that at $470/share, Meta is too expensive. They miss the larger point. Meta Inc. has become too costly.
#nomercynomalice
https://lnkd.in/eBAJQMdP
Marketing Data Executive at Housiey
1wThanks for sharing