I don’t have the usual sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook, etc. at the bottom of my posts. Only Telegram and email.
This is a deliberate choice.
I’ve long sustained that Facebook is driving people apart, not together. It is making them more susceptible, less likely to socialize in traditional ways, and more entrenched in their own reality bubbles, insulated from the wider world.
I have also come to believe that pouring so much information into a website whose primary goal is not to be the custodian of friendships, creativity and thoughts but to market the information it collects about people is toxic, as evidenced in a recent whistle blower account about Facebook business practices and algorithms by a high-level Facebook employee. Not to mention unsafe, as it can be very easily brought down – the recent, hours-long outage of all Facebook services is an example of that.
The same discourse can be made about Twitter. We have seen the toxicity of tweets when used by a malevolent narcissist. 4 years of the former POTUS tweets provide all the evidence I need to prove my point.
For these two reasons, I’ve decided to not cater to either Facebook or Twitter, and I have deleted both my Twitter handle and my Facebook account.
I will only support sharing posts through Telegram, an app I’ve come to appreciate as being at least as safe as WhatsApp, and private, as all information is not stored forever, but is deleted automatically after 30 days by default. Of course, I will always support sharing by email, which has existed since the early days of the Internet.
I invite everybody to think about whether having a presence in social networks has a positive or negative impact in their lives and modify their online activities in consequence.
Thank you for your attention.