Anti-Social Media

I was watching a documentary recently which contained a phrase which has stuck with me.

It was along the lines of "there are only two industries where customers are termed users – drugs and social media".

They have a lot in common. They are both addictive and dangerous.

Both are corrupting almost every aspect of our lives but social media tech giants have a broader agenda than just enslaving you.

They have a deliberate plan to influence the information you are allowed to watch, hear and read.

By doing that, they can shape public opinion, influence elections and make or break businesses.

It’s a lot of power for a few companies to have. It’s too much power for some billionaire tech oligarchs with political agendas to have.

Consider this for a moment.

During the US Presidential election campaign, Facebook and Twitter effectively banned any mention of the scandal engulfing the Biden family over the Hunter Biden laptop.

The contents of this laptop implicated the democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in a slew of corruption allegations.

Twitter even blocked the account of the newspaper that broke the story.

These damning allegations and the evidence to support them are growing steadily worse and they should have played a prominent role in the election…but many voters, who get their information from social media, weren’t allowed to know of them.

Talk about election interference. But it’s not just the companies whose actions need to be questioned.

I regret that many of the users of these platforms are sewer rats themselves. People who purport to have credible careers seem liberated to say the most outrageous things online.

Yesterday on Twitter, I exposed some award winning, Greens voting Melbourne photographer in a web of lies.

He has since deleted the tweets and blocked me from following his account. It’s no skin off my nose but the fact that he was prepared to simply make things up for some perceived social media status gain says a lot about him.

This person seems quite well credentialed but still felt the need to invent and publish a total lie. You can check out his website here or Twitter profile here

Another troll closed his account when I pointed out that as a government staffer, screaming abuse under a fake name at someone who was critical of his bosses Covid shutdown actions wasn’t what he should be doing.

That’s your tax dollars at work.

But the concern is much broader than just sock puppets and losers yelling into cyberspace.

Social media is using you. You are the user and you are the product they are peddling. Everything you do on their systems is tracked and recorded. That data is analysed and sold. It’s used to determine what you can see and say online.

At one point, early in the creation of Google, the company had a motto ‘don’t be evil’.  That mantra is no longer there as Google, twitter and facebook are in an arms race to control as much of our digital lives as they can.

Their platforms are not about empowering you. They are about using you to empower them. In doing so, they are diminishing the standards and societal expectations that have been the basis of our communities for generations.

It’s time for action to be taken against these anti-social media networks.

The best thing for your well being would be to abandon them but in the absence of that, the government needs to hold them accountable to the same standards  as every other media outlet in the country.