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I originally wrote this post as part of my post on the speed of Gemini, but by the time I finished, I realized it was so unrelated that a separate post would probably be better. Here is the result.
Original post which triggered the secondary writeup below
Over the years I have managed to extricate myself from the clutches of social media. It started around the time that Apple had a new-at-the-time feature where you could see the aggregated hours and minutes spent in various app categories and specific apps. One day I opened this up and saw how many hours (I think it was 8-10?) I wasted on social media every single *week*. 8-10 hours? Of scrolling through anger-inducing clickbait? And nothing to show for it? That's a part-time job! I knew it was time to slow down. So I started with simply deleting the native applications off my phone, thinking that the inconvenience of the web app would cause me to use it less. In practice, I still ended up using them more than I thought, but it was an improvement nevertheless.
Some time later came the privacy problems, though I have always been a private person, this was when I really started thinking about privacy a bit more. Facebook, Twitter &co owns any data you put on them, which I had always realized, and consciously limited what went on them, massively. Fast forward to today and I am even much more aware of the privacy implications: metadata on pictures, chats, comments; I've even read that subsecond slowdowns in your scrolling, and even briefly scrolling back up to something, are noticed and captured for analyzation. It's been said that these companies know more about you than you do yourself, even if you 'share' very little. I like to think that at this point, most people know of the privacy implications of social media, if not to the full extent that I mention here.
'Oh, but it's worth it because I get ads for things I like.'
'I have nothing to hide, who cares?'
'Everyone is on $PLATFORM, I can't leave!'
Ok so that last one, I can understand to an extent. That even kept me on them, at least nominally, for longer than I would have liked. The first two, though? I personally find those attitudes mind boggling. You get ads for things you like because they have you profiled! They know everything about you! Regarding the second one, my only response is to paraphrase a modern-day champion, Edward Snowden:
Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Again, that is paraphrased but still captures Edward's point, at least the point that I takeaway from it: the practical, while still valuable, is superceded by the theoretical. The principle. Imagine living in the USSR and being tortured simply because you said something mean about some official. Is that the kind of place people want to live in? Have we as a culture become so blind to the implications that today has on tomorrow? Edward's comment about free speech leads to me to what finally got me off social media: censorship.
On social media today, only 'approved' opinions are allowed. You have a question? No, no, that is settled already. If you continue this line of thought you'll be convicted of wrongthink and thoughtcrime. I shall refrain from stating any specific topics here, but suffice it to say that if you don't toe Big Brother's Party Line then you are considered an undesirable. This doesn't sit well with me. As a private individual, I stayed pretty quiet anyway (kind of the opposite of here on Gemini, I'm noticing, part of the original point I was going to make about the conversational nature of Gemini, see link above), and so never was a *direct* victim of censorship, but the fact that it happens, and exponentially increasingly so in the past couple years, had pissed me off enough to just delete the damn accounts. Stop giving them my time and data.
Free speech, among other things, is requisite for a free people. Any infringement on that whatsoever, whether from governments or 'private businesses', and freedom is gone. Full stop. No exceptions. That is not to say that all speech is laudable, no no -- only that to stifle it is inherently despotic. Don't think so? Well imagine, if you will, that you are on the other side of the line. Your 'approved' opinion today is verboten tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes don't expect any sympathy from me when the repressive, censorious systems put in place at your request are used against you.