I know a lot of people who have quit Facebook over the last several years, and there’s no single reason for it. Some were pissed off about how the platform was used in the 2016 election, others had privacy concerns or serious qualms about how their data was being used, a few just hated some update of the interface, and a few others have quit more recently due to some feature or another of Zuckerberg’s attitude. I even know a couple of folks who just couldn’t take the Trumpy posts of their relatives and had to shut the whole thing down.
I’ve stuck around Facebook because it helps me promote my writing, but I’d quit it in a second if a equivalent alternative came along. There’s a breaking point for everyone, and I could be nearing mine. I really do think Facebook is in danger of getting itself branded as the “racist” social media platform. It’s partly because they can’t figure out how to police fake news and, contrary to the president’s assertions, conservatives dominate the dissemination of racist bullshit on Facebook. But it’s mainly their tolerance of Donald Trump. He is so unbelievably racist that allowing him to post is basically indistinguishable from allowing the KKK to post. He should be banned from every forum, and not solely for his racist commentary. He posts nothing but lies, and he’s abusive and insulting too.
I don’t think the time is far off where I’ll have to conclude that sharing any forum with Trump is a form of complicity that I can’t stomach, and when enough people feel that way, Facebook will either have to respond or earn the racist moniker themselves. We’ll see how they respond to having a slice of their own workforce take the day off in protest.
“It’s partly because they can’t figure out how to police fake news”
CAN’T or WON’T?
Zuckerberg seems to indicate it’s the latter.
I’ve been off Facebook for a decade. I’ve tried to get my older, quite liberal clients to quit it, but they just can’t think of an easier way “to share pictures with family and friends” (is the refrain I hear), no matter how much I patiently and empathetically and non-condescendingly explain how their participation provides money (via ads) to a service that is actively harming our democracy.
Well they could aways use Instagram….ooops…wait a minute…never mind.
Let’s add as an potential answer to the “CAN’T or WON’T?” question you pose the likelihood that THEY DON’T WANT TO BECAUSE THEY WANT THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY TO CONTINUE:
https://theweek.com/speedreads/917673/civil-rights-leaders-rip-mark-zuckerberg-after-incomprehensible-meeting-about-trumps-facebook-posts
‘DID NOT DEMONSTRATE UNDERSTANDING’
Civil rights leaders rip Mark Zuckerberg after ‘incomprehensible’ meeting about Trump’s Facebook posts
A group of civil rights leaders say they’re “disappointed” and “stunned” following a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his recent decisions on posts by President Trump.
Zuckerberg hosted a call with civil rights leaders on Monday as the company faces growing controversy and an employee walkout over its a hands-off approach to Trump’s posts, including one in which he wrote “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in reference to the Minneapolis protests over George Floyd’s death. Facebook also didn’t touch a post by Trump about mail-in voting that Twitter fact-checked.
After the meeting, leaders from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Color of Change released a statement blasting Zuckerberg, per Axios, saying they’re “disappointed and stunned by Mark’s incomprehensible explanations for allowing the Trump posts to remain up.”
I have pretty much been on radio silence on Facebook for about the last year, and it mostly has to do with all of my family, the vast majority of whom are die-hard Trump cultists. There is just no other way to describe it. I suffered through the Obama years with them, trying diligently to address all their crazy conspiracy theories and their weak attempts at subtle racism. I didn’t get into many actual flame throwing arguments (okay, maybe a few), but if the conversation went on long enough in a fact based way, it would eventually devolve into some kind of straw man thing where they would simply tire of addressing my points; as I was demanding, you know, ACTUAL EVIDENCE from them.
Then Trump came along, and I was served up with, “We had to suffer through your Obama, so now you have to just suck it up and do the same with OUR PRESIDENT.” That didn’t really dissuade me from continuing to point out all of the awful things he was doing. But the breaking point for me, as far as whether or not to continue to be active on Facebook, was the separation of families at the border and the kids in cages. With that issue, I saw things coming from my family which simply horrified me. It wasn’t about politics for me at that point, it became a moral argument. And when I took it down the road of being a moral question, I was just stunned at their inhumanity. Nothing had prepared me for some of the views I heard from them on this. And that became my breaking point. I have a cousin who is every bit as liberal as me, and she essentially decided to stop addressing anything political on Facebook with her immediate family, simply because there were walls going up between her and her mom which she wasn’t sure could be repaired if things continued the way they were. To this day, her page has zero politics and she will not address anything posted by her Trump supporting family. She has been cowed into silence. As for me, I just realized that I don’t have the emotional energy to expend on these people, as they are just lost to me. They’re never coming back. They are so deeply embedded in the cult that they will ride this to very end, and still be praising and admiring Trump no matter what he says or does. I still love them, and always will. But I will never be able erase from my memory the awfulness that I saw in them. It is a stain that will never go away for me.
Your situation is so sad, and you are brave to share it. I hope it improves. I suspect many others are in similar situations, amplifying and compounding the sadness throughout the country.
I use it for family and friends, mostly pictures. I do have a small group who post political stuff but it is mostly democrats and people who despise Trump. I don’t see much right wing stuff and what I do I scroll on by. About a year ago there was one right wing nut who kept agitating us and I kept taking him to task. He ultimately blocked me. Good outcome.
I quit quite sometime ago when it was evident that Zuckerberg is NOT going to change – no matter what happens to Democracy in US. It’s his greed over anything else.