The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook.
I should add that I'm not from the US.
Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.
Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.
Somebody going in a hot air balloon.
Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things to do.
Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their life.
Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.
Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month
Somebody going on a train ride.
Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today (cool).
A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.
A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that I'm a part of.
I see literally nothing related to politics.
However, jumping over to twitter it's:
Something about "the establishment"
A news story about somebody getting shot.
Something about counterterrorism strategies.
North Korean FUD
Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.
etc. etc.
Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together and talk to each other about happy things happening in their lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things happen).
Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream at each other.
There's a national pizza month?
But honestly: who cares. Any excuse to eat some pizza is good enough for me!
Pretty much all that makes a homemade or otherwise decent pizza less healthy than a sandwich is the amount of it one typically eats in a sitting. Or of course if you for some reason pile unhealthy stuff high on your pizzas, but stuff your sandwiches with the height of nutrition. But I assume that would be uncommon.
These things are figments of marketing imagination. They spread through people, not TV or ads. Albeit they start that way. You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick. Which is becoming increasingly easy as we become a whole connected people.
Sales (lower priced periods) are marketing. "National ___ day" is way more than that.
Well firstly I meant economic globalisation, I was thinking in terms of trade; it seems it has broader/other usages too that I didn't realise. Secondly I'd point to days like Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day which has a slew of different dates throughout the connected world (even the countries where it's a wholly secular marketing creation can't agree):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Dates_around_th...
> These things are figments of marketing imagination.
Did you mean not? Otherwise we're in agreement.
> You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick.
They don't need to stick, very few do, you hear for the first time about world tie day in late August, maybe get persuaded to buy a wacky new tie, and then forget all about it - or at least when it is - again.
I don't get where people see this outrage content. Mine is just like cookie recipes and I'm in tons of groups with hundreds of "friends".
The difference is that Facebook will more aggressively push crap at you. Twitter feeds tend to rot over time.
Anyway, maybe you're using Facebook correctly, but clearly enough of the world isn't to cause problems. Do you expect all those folks to change, or is it easier to regulate Facebook itself?
Now, that's one post from one person. Yes, it's an outlier, but there was a ton of truly corrosive shit people were posting. I quickly found that for me, getting out of FB altogether was the best option. I deleted my account a while back and I don't miss it.
I get that people can actively curate their feed and use FB as a tool for communication, but for me, that's far too much effort and wasn't worth it. I'm actually quite sad -- the promise of what FB could be falls far short of what it is.
[0] https://www.startribune.com/500-gather-near-u-of-m-to-protes...
I'm sure a lot of people loved others who have had drug addictions, joined a cult, or were fed misinformation by a group of zealots. Sometimes being a friend means "in spite of" not "because of".
I'd say facebook is: older people sharing stuff about their life. Benign posts about traveling, maybe some light complaining about the neighborhood where they live getting too expensive, complaining about their job or sports or something like that etc.
Twitter is: younger people who are angry at the world and looking for a scapegoat. Everything is "here's why $outgroup is the core of all the problems in the world in 240 characters or less". Absolutely psychologically abusive garbage.
Reddit is like twitter, but more of an impotent rage. Lots of corporate pop culture references, but still with a strong dose of "here's why $outgroup is so bad!"
Looking at some of the parenting subs I'm on, some of the top posts are prompts for people to explain how terrible things in the world are.
Just really really toxic, awful things.
If I had to guess why: facebook is relatively private. The only things I see are either from people choose to follow explicitly, or from a tier-2 follow like a group (which I can filter if the group starts veering into toxicity).
Twitter is explicitly public. You see and interact with everything from everybody. There seems to be a strong ephasis on sharing other things from people I don't follow.
Reddit is the worst. Completely public, I never followed any of these people. Ignoring/blocking individuals would have almost no effect.
To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.
Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.
But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.
Certainly for some types of infectant such as weapons-grade dezinformatsiya...
Or at least, to achieve disinfection, that sunlight needs to be applied at intensities found on the surface of the sun vs at the surface of the earth.
This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?
Facebook seems to make that harder rather than easier.
I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with people's lives.
And who do you know who still sends Christmas cards? That was for those people that you never see IRL. Now they're FB friends.
There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've chosen to interact with don't bring these negative experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't bring it to them.
Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think most people already know you can refuse to follow and can mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.
It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.
To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.
If you are moderately famous, anything will be controversial.
You can say "water is good for you", and I can guarantee you that someone will reply with "actually, my friend drank too much water and died". Then, the drama would ensue.
> a bunch of niche hobby groups
Twitter may seem like more of a war zone, and that's possible, but you have to actually measure things. I suspect the dark corners of Facebook are darker than Twitter, because Facebook is more siloed.
That's probably a big part of it.
Also, not from the US. From Canada.
Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards" whatever)