WITH THE SOUND ON THE GROUND [483]

Gatekeepers don’t remove gates until the opportunity for profit arises from selling off the gate.

The decision by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday 7th January, to remove much of the rules and moderation policies regarding content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, speaks both of an attempt to see off anticipated regulatory problems with an incoming US presidency that scorns any perceived impediment on “free speech”, and of a decision to save the cost of running the old system by letting end users police themselves through a “community notes” system, already used at Twitter/X for similar reasons.

Social media is a digital simulacrum of a town square that creates a Speaker’s Corner for each entrant, the unspoken price of admission being the intentional harvesting of the data created from any utterance or exchange for profit. I concluded this after having gone through Meta’s settings on both Facebook and Instagram to deny their ability to do anything with data created from my having used their services, or with data they have received from other websites that may have also interacted with me. Meta already cannot use my data to train artificial intelligence engines, because I had already been asked this, and I already said no – why let lazy people use my work to take a shortcut?

I couldn’t care less about any perception of Meta becoming anti-LGBTQ+ regarding what they are now allowing people to say, as people who feel the need to say certain things in the name of debate usually don’t have any trouble saying those things. Worst of all is having someone so identifiable in charge of a public “space”, like Zuckerberg. Perhaps decentralised social media, like Bluesky or Mastodon, is the nearest you can get to a real-life public space.

That’s one thing about rules: we wouldn’t think we’d need them unless we needed them, would we? Society has rules, and the Internet stopped being a “Wild West” when we integrated it into our normal lives. Social media will either need to rejoin society, or be subsumed by it – I have covered this subject too many times to say otherwise.

I wrote this in June 2020: “There will come a time when social media will end – sites will either be legislated out of existence, or people will get bored and wander off. Either extremism and fake news will be dealt with, or people will just have to learn how to speak to each other properly – which they have increasingly been doing via by video conferencing services, like Zoom, FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, instead of social media. This is much healthier than measuring your influence and wealth by how many followers you have. If you really need to let people know what you think about something, get a blog, or ask Google to resurrect GeoCities.”

I also wrote this in January 2022: “If everyone uses social media, we are essentially all in the media business and, therefore, we all should receive media training to fully understand the uses and effects of media, so that we can use it most effectively and mindfully. I think this would press home the importance of acting professionally in the public space created by a media that requires us to act intimately in order to receive the content required to run it. Organisations specialising in media training offer communication skills, interview technique, provide experience in dealing with PR and media relations, and provide “key message development” for the messages you want to get across.”

From May 2017: “In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ published three years before ‘Nineteen Eight-Four,’ [George] Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five ‘than say something outright barbarous.’ These days, the point that makes is more like using social media to immediately say what you feel, without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.”

WE’VE GOT THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE [457]

You do not have to accept the internet pushing information to you that you don’t want to see. It has taken me long enough to act on this advice, but taking a few seconds to complete small actions have, and will, make using the internet, and social media in particular, more serene.

This began only around a year ago, when I stopped clicking “Accept All” to cookies on websites. Reading the disclaimers on cookie notifications reveals scores of companies listed that use data generated by your interaction, anonymised or not, for whatever use they need, even if just for counting your having accessed the page, or how long you stayed there. 

Choosing “Reject All”, or taking the time to scroll through and deselecting options on personalised content and advertising performance, gave me peace of mind that, down the line, I might get fewer phishing scam e-mails for services I know I don’t use. The phrase “legitimate interest” comes up a lot: “Some vendors are not asking for your consent, but are using your personal data on the basis of their legitimate interest” – following that by stating said interest would be helpful, especially if some sites rely on information about advertising to help them stay in business.

Having taken care of the wider internet, social media remained problematic. Usually, the best thing to do would be to avoid the “For You” tab now prevalent on many such sites, keeping to accounts you already follow, but algorithms may still throw up a surprise that finally fits your interests, like YouTube recommending the “third episode” of “Turn-On” I spoke about recently.

The “For You” section on the other sites I use are as follows: Threads has people moaning about Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Apple computer products; Mastodon’s equivalent “Local” tab doesn’t display anything written in English; Instagram has brutalist architecture; and Twitter – I’m still not calling it “X” – is a cesspit of rage, telling people what they can and cannot believe, or be.

Twitter has always been a bit of a puzzle for me – I can choose to search for something someone said on Twitter, because the news is reporting it, and I will then be recommended similar stuff from then on. I cannot pretend to understand Twitter’s algorithm, even with its program having been posted to the technology development website GitHub, but suffice to say that, if you engage with something, you become stuck to it.

Fortunately, I have found a more straightforward workaround, although its location is a little buried. Going to “Settings and privacy”, then “Privacy and safety”, then “Content you see”, then finally “Interests”, you are presented with an almighty list of what Twitter thinks you want to see, gleaned from my fifteen years of using the site. 

Having taken the implied compliment that my interests are wide, I started wondering why it was recommending football to me, something I have never searched for. I have followed the broadcaster and music journalist Danny Baker for years because he writes entertainingly, and has stories to tell from across his career, but he also broadcasted about football for years, and writes about that as eloquently as he does about everything else. All that eyeball time has built up, along with any time any of the other people I follow talk about British politics, American politics, Dungeons & Dragons, protests both for and against transgender rights, Star Wars, and Star Trek.

Fortunately, I can start unticking some of these “interests”. Out goes the football, the politics, and “Good Morning Britain” (the current one, not the TV-am original). Why is Kanye West there, or Piers Morgan, or J.K. Rowling? I’m not American, so who is Herman Cain? Why the fixation on female news presenters like Fiona Bruce, Victoria Derbyshire and Susanna Reid?

So much of this speaks to the “Sturm und Drang” that is the background of Twitter, that my having gone past it appears to have been mistaken for my reading it. I have taken to muting some accounts to prevent some subjects appearing, usually those that provoke the most reactions in other people.

I have been unable to find similar lists for Meta’s websites like Facebook, Instagram or Threads, but the content I am being pushed on there appears to be benign enough for me not to worry about it, and only Twitter was causing concern. Now just need to make sure I keep an eye out for something that might snowballs on social media, or avoid clicking “Accept All” by accident.

EACH MORNING OUR KEY TO THE WORLD [447]

I only buy one physical newspaper each week...

Should I remain someone that consumes as much news as I do? I certainly read, watch and listen to enough news to ask that question, but I have started feeling like I need an answer.

My average weekday begins by turning on my phone as soon as I wake up – I have a separate alarm clock – to read the front pages of a list of news and social media websites: in order, BBC News, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, the LGBT+ sites PinkNews (UK) and The Advocate (US), CNN, The Times (of London), The Telegraph, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The New York Times. Having completed Wordle on the last of these sites, about twenty minutes will have passed, and I am now ready to get out of bed and face the day.

This choice of sites is deliberately meant to be a broad range, including places that don’t fit my own politics. The objective is to see what truly the most important stories are, which stories are more important to each site, notice any trends and, importantly for me, read anything interesting – I am always looking for subjects to talk about, and you can’t expect these to come to you. The only reason I don’t look at the “Daily Mail” website, apparently the most-read news website in English, is because their front page has too many stories on it to discern what is meant to be important.

Once out of bed, I will put on the television to watch “Breakfast” on BBC One while I get ready for work, and once I have left the house, the news bulletins interrupting Lauren Laverne’s breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music will be the next source of news, unless I am looking at other stories on my phone while listening. This will continue at various points throughout the day even after I get home – a house tradition is to watch the ITV Evening News after the regional stories have played, but upon its doubling in length to an hour in March 2022, the television is consciously switched to another channel at the half-hour mark, ending my news for the day, provided I have put my phone down.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have a problem if I didn’t feel the need to check my phone so much, but having realised it has become my main source of news, it has become unavoidable. Short hourly news bulletins have evaporated from the main television channels, and I avoid opinion-led discussions of the news on TV, preferring to make my own mind up.

The issue that means I consume too much news is defining what it means to be “informed”. Requiring a broad range of sources for news means my own requirements are very high. I wouldn’t choose one channel, site or bulletin to serve as my single source, but if I was to reduce the number of places I search for news, it would feel like reducing my horizons, or not challenging my opinions enough. It may well be that I am thinking about this now because I am reaching my upper limit.