Delete Facebook. Get into Minds.
Tl;dr
if you don’t’ want to be told what to think, you need to get off of Facebook and go for alternative social media. That doesn’t mean hang out with right wing nut-jobs. It means follow your own path. Set your own boundaries. Take back control of your information, mind, and beliefs.
For me, I’ve chosen to do that at Minds. Its an open social media platform without the censorship (for better and worse) that you can control, rather than it controlling you.
Also, unlike Facebook, you can make money from your data, rather than making billions for someone else.
Take a look here:
https://www.minds.com/register?referrer=cogijl
Long form
I was one of the early-joiners of Facebook. Going to university in 2005, myself and many of my UMBC friends remember getting our profiles back before non-college students were even allowed on the platform. However, I wasn’t motivated by the shift in Facebook’s demographics to leave however.
My first thought to leave Facebook was in 2014, when Facebook unethically manipulated the emotional states of over half a million people. Nobody knows that sort of effects this had regarding those who were possibly prone to self-harm, and pushed over an edge for the sake of Facebook’s “science”. It seems like Facebook didn’t care.
I put up with it. I have no excuse as to why. Likely just the social pressure of living overseas and having many connections on the platform (at the time well over 1000 for some reason). Going into 2016, I realized that we could also experiment on the platform, so I did my own kind of social experiment, feeding information from my conservative friends, and defending their positions (some of which I didn’t agree with) to “intellectual” friends of mine I know through graduate school. The result was that I unequivocally proved to myself that intellectuals are, in the modern world, anything but. You cannot question the ideology that the far left intelligentsia is pushing. To give it a name, it is a neo-Marxist approach to culture: a cultural Marxism if you will. Generally, it is rooted in critical race theory, but also an ignorance of how power really works, and a regurgitation of how power is said to work by other academics and professors who have never had to deal with real power since they have permanent positions in cultural bubbles and incomes nearing the 1% level that they purport to despise.
However, in 2020, with the onset of the pandemic, just watching how millions of people had their emotions and opinions manipulated in sync was both a thing to instill awe and fear. It was, in the true sense of the word, awesome. Seeing how tens if not hundreds of millions of users could be — in effect — programmed by Facebooks algorithms in what was obviously the largest platform for social engineering outside of Communist states. The ability for anyone to say anything they wanted was fascinating, so long as it was in line with the current zeitgeist of the censors — a reflection of an upper middle-class intelligentsia and university education in the humanities (well exposed as a worthless hoax and exercise in self-flagellation and yet also self-pleasuring through virtue signaling). The other side of this coin was how, with the change of just 1 or 2 words, to flip the script on this ideology and show how this left-wing authoritarianism of social media was the same as the right win authoritarianism that they said they were fighting was saddening and disheartening.
Today, Facebook uses a mixture of censorship and “fact checking” to perpetuate an ideology and control the information that users see, limiting your ability to gather information and make your own choices in a more organic way. It also has made several deliberate choices to influence and suppress peaceful political movements and larger social debates, while also pushing and tolerating violent aspects of its own support ideology. In the long run, this will not be a positive force for the world, and so I can’t in good conscious continue to participate actively on that platform.
And for those reasons….
