social media

From IndieWeb

social media is the marketing term for silos and silo posts, ironically more anti-social than social, and encouraging of extreme opposition rather than medium perspectives, typically with like/repost counts UIs that incentivize inflammatory posts rather than considered thoughts & dialog.

How to

How to decentralize social media

  1. Get Started with decentralizing yourself first, to both understand the current challenges, and the benefits for doing so
  2. Participate in IndieWeb discussions for how to help others decentralize their own social media
  3. Keep iterating until you yourself are free of social media, and we have more people on the IndieWeb than social media, at which point momentum takes over.

Examples

See: silo#Popular_Silos

Specific Pages

See the following pages for more specific aspects of social media:

Brainstorming

Possible Future

Four pane comic showing evolution of posting your opinion on the web from writing HTML, posting on Social Media, neural cable, lastly a 'uni-mind' collective via 2019-03-11: Comic by Joey Alison Sayers: Posting Your Opinions Online: A Timeline (@thenib)

Criticism

Amplifies Misinformation

  • 2023-10-15 Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.

    the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.

    Their research, published in Science, found that misinformation is ’70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth,’ and that the fake news ‘reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.'

    Emphasis added.

Harmful To Democracy

Increases Polarization

Harms Productivity

  • ~2015(?) Neal Stephenson - Social Media

    Though I never became a heavy poster on social media, I did reach a point last year when I was checking Twitter and my personal Facebook every few minutes. When I found myself manually refreshing the Facebook window in the hopes of dredging up posts I hadn't seen yet, I decided it was time to think a little harder about the effect that this was having on my ability to get things done.

May Harm Career

May Harm Business

  • 2019-04-26 How a social media network could bring down your business

    According to a report by the University of Surrey, commissioned by IT security firm Bromium, cyber criminals are currently generating at least $3.25bn in revenue every year through their aggressive exploitation of social media.

Normalizes Surveillance Capitalism

  • 2018-03-17 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/975147858096742405
    • "Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as "surveillance companies." Their rebranding as "social media" is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense." @Snowden March 17, 2018

Used For Behavior Modification

Encourages Inauthentic Representation

Used For Border Screening

Government Shutdowns of Social Media

Entries here are encouraged more thoroughly than documented in Wikipedia: Social Media: Censorship by governments

Sri Lanka 2019

Liberia 2019

See Also