These things have replaced existing connections you used to have via other channels. You can not step away without severing them now, it is no longer a matter of personal choice.
You can absolutely step away from them and it’s not even hard. Call, text or email your friends and family. It’s far more intimate and frankly more satisfying. You lose the ability to broadcast a curated persona, but honestly in the grand scheme of things that’s better for both you and the rest of humanity.
You _will_ miss out of valuable personal communication if you choose to go this route. It's not just about an online curated persona.
Oh come now, isn’t this a little dramatic?
If I was forcing them to use one app I want in order to stay in touch you’d have a point, but isn’t that also functionally what you’re saying we should have to deal with? Meeting someone all the way, only on ONE mode of communication they demand?
This also doesn’t address how niche this situation is. There can’t be that many people who can only talk to their family on Facebook messenger. This can’t possibly be a major issue.
That'll vary from person to person, but my personal experience with this was that this was a mistake I now regret. I incidentally also avoided whatsapp and other facebook-owned apps, which certainly didn't help. And some people are probably naturally great at collecting other contact details and keeping in touch via phone and email; I'm not.
I stand behind the principle, mind you; I just think I should have placed day-to-day human beings I needlessly lost contact with above that principle. I still encourage contacts to avoid facebook, but that's it. But to each their own, for sure.
I'm simply saying this because in a forum such as this one that likes to focus on the abstract and principled it's easy to overlook the plain and quotidian daily existence we all have too; we shouldn't.
I hear this now and then and it puzzles me. All my personal online and business communication is through email, with some friends and groups on WhatsApp and Telegram. People sometimes talk to me on Twitter but, if I want to talk to them, I steer them to email. I seems really risky, as we see in so many incidents reported here, to actually rely on platforms like Twitter for maintaining connections.
Lets not confuse ourselves though - the vast majority of America does not feel the way you and I do. My kiddos swim team is on facebook, thats how we track and sign up for service, and if we lose our access we are excluded. Asking everyone on the team to move to email is a nonstarter.
This also implies only talking to people you already know, no opportunities to join or start communities.
And that’s still besides the point: just imagine that your email account is cancelled tomorrow because they don’t like something you said in a mailing list.
“only talking to people you already know”
Far from it. For example, the contact information for an author on a scientific paper often includes an email address.
Who only communicates with colleagues over Twitter?
Half my family isn’t even on Facebook and virtually none of us even use it anymore. If that’s the only way to keep up with family then don’t act like a complete jerk online, or you know don’t harass people, and you’ll be fine. Same as regular society.
Contrary to popular belief, it actually takes a lot to simply get banned. Yeah there are cases like the post above, but the reason it is even here is because it is noteworthy.
If the civil rights movement was being organized on facebook today with the culture and beliefs of the 1950's as our users, I am very confident MLK would have been banned from every service.
... and someone, somewhere, would say 'don't act like a complete jerk online, or you know don't harass people, and you'll be fine'.
I don't mean this pointed at you, I completely get the feeling, but I think ignoring history and the current in/out groups is likely to lead to conclusions that are not realistic.
Look, I will be the first to say we need to rein in social media companies. Their ability to shrug and say “oh well!” with no repercussions as their vaunted algorithms (mis)handle the impossibly large scale of their businesses is wrong. No other industry gets away with so much except maybe religious groups and oil/gas.
That being said, we should not conflate it with the incorrect and frankly dishonest cries of “censorship” by the right.
Related note: I think you’ll find this Twitter bot very interesting: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10/status/154978628117712896...
I knew a guy who was having serious financial trouble, and couldn’t afford to keep a phone line active. He relied on Facebook to stay in contact with his wife and son because he at least had access to WiFi.
You can make a similar argument about phones. People can just reach each other via mail, or physically visit each other…but this doesn’t exactly constitute a healthy state of interaction.
Use email you say! Almost every big email provider requires verification via phone or another email address these days.
It’s legitimately getting harder and harder to communicate in these other ways.
> Who only communicates with colleagues over Twitter?
I don’t use Twitter much these days, but for a period of time, it was by far the easiest way to get/stay in touch with the communities I was organizing. I did dev advocacy, and if I ran a meet up somewhere, I didn’t want to just hand my phone number to a room full of people, but did want the option to stay in contact.
Could I have found another solution? Yeah sure. But at the time, this seems pretty reasonable, and Twitter wasn’t yet banning people for inane things.
If I lost that account now, it’d sever an entire community. Could I work around that? Sure.
But downplaying the significance of these things seems short sighted.
I rarely touch social media these days for many other reasons, but that is definitely an isolating choice to make in 2022.
It's really not that difficult.
Ever create a new facebook account? Even as a flesh and blood human being? Lots of folks have tried to do this for oculus and a great number of them were banned. It made the news on HNN. Facebook is fixing this bug now, and the other sites are trying to do the same.
Eventually, when the big tech companies have 'fixed the bug' and your ban is - in fact - permanent and for life. . . what then?
"Don't do bad things" - a simple question... if the 50's/60's civil rights movement was done today on facebook, would MLK have been banned from twitter/facebook/instagram? I think he would be.
If you know a way to fix this, let me know. I think we - as humans - need to fix this sooner rather than later.
If it does require you to do so then run away from that platform very fast.
Yeah, a Million Man Meme is going to be so effective ... BLM & Antfi seem to have no problems organising themselves anyway and apparently they are practically terrorists according to the alt-right.
If you want a way to "fix it" then vote for someone who will bring in regulation to crack down on the powers that tech companies have.
And if you don't want to do that because you're a libertarian fan of light touch regulation of business, then you probably need to have word with yourself.