A lot of my friends use social media to stay in touch. Not being on social media would keep me out of the loop, which is not desirable. I try to restrict its usage as much as possible though.
Collect alternative methods of staying in touch with friends you care about before leaving social media (phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc.)
Yea. If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore, then I have bad news for you: they probably aren’t really your friends. When I ditched Facebook about 10 years ago, I lost contact with a whole bunch of people who weren't really part of my life anyway, they were simply "names I recognized."
My social life actually got better after dropping social media simply because I'm spending less time scrolling in front of a screen.
> If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore
That's a very binary view of the world that I don't share. But that's not a topic I want to get into.
Can you keep in touch with a certain group of friends through non-social media platforms? Absolutely. I do it daily, but that's not the point.
The point is that staying away from these social media platforms reduces your ability to have a social life. It's quite like saying that you decrease your chances of finding work without a driving license or cellphone number.
I could probably get away without social media today (modulo telegram/whatsapp). But at what point would I surrender? Most people of my generation use it, and it looks like newer generations will have even higher usages.
The article has precisely that prompt in one of the images.
The thing is, just like certain apps require certain permissions (camera app wants to access the camera, device files, etc..) I believe a lot of people will just accept these conditions without realizing they are completely optional.
But there's also strong education regarding system prompts. Users know when an app is asking for extra permissions (which this is basically the same of). Those people who care about what permissions apps have will know what to click.
Those who don't care, that's the most you can do.
Besides even Facebook estimate that only 10-30% will click allow. I'm not sure if you can ask for more at this point.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one.
> Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter...
I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.
- For one when a news article is incorrect it is very easy to hold accountable the source of that information. How many people keep track of who said what on the internet?
- Fake Information takes more time to respond to than true information. False news travels 6 times faster (..) than truthful news [0].
- Media has a cycle of information that is way slower and more curated (even if manipulative) which allows true information to be heard louder.
- It's becoming easier and easier to fake image, video, and audio in a way never seen before [1].
- It's way easier for platforms like FB and Twitter and YT to make you spiral down a rabbit hole of similar content. Sure, this did happen in the past, but the current level of detailed recommendations makes it really easy for people to lose context inside their bubble.
- People are not machines, if they hear a message many times by different sources that trigger the right emotional responses they will believe it to be true. Now group every point and compound it by a lot of consumption and ingest it into monkey-like brains :)
I am creating a new account just for this: Social Media is the source of a lot of misinformation and there is no way to fix it other than reducing its usage.
Social Media increases information availability and by its very nature will always spread false information as fast or faster than the truth.
This ideal that we can fight misinformation with more truth is absurd.
