Further meditations on Meta and where to go from here

Since I wrote Tuesday's newsletter, more and more disappointing news has oozed out of Meta. Here are some details being reported about changes to their moderation strategy, their corporate structure, and internal affairs:

• Inside Meta’s dehumanizing new speech policies for trans people Casey Newton, Platformer: "'A trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it,' reads a new guideline telling moderators what is now allowed on Facebook and Instagram"
• Exclusive: Meta kills DEI programs Mike Allen and Sara Fischer, Axios
• Facebook Deletes Internal Employee Criticism of New Board Member Dana White Jason Koebler, 404 Media
• Meta Deletes Trans and Nonbinary Messenger Themes Jason Koebler, 404 Media: "Amid a series of changes that allows users to target LGBTQ+ people, Meta has deleted product features it initially championed."

The announcements toward the beginning of this week may have felt like the end of a long walk toward the fascistic right, but it is evident now that the boots are falling in line, and the march is only just beginning.

Today, I want to meditate on the broader themes these changes exemplify, why they are happening, and what, if anything, a person alive on the internet today can do.

There is no such thing as "left wing extremism"

Here are things that do exist:

• Ultra-nationalist armed militias interested in the assassination, ritual disenfranchisement, and subjugation of non-white, non-male, non-Christian people. They have names like "The Oath Keepers" or "American Patriots Three Percent (AP3)" or "The Proud Boys." They wish to carry out extra-judicial vigilante violence on Democrats, and align themselves with Donald Trump.
• A network of incredibly well funded propaganda machines engaged in decades long disinformation campaigns that target low information citizens to stoke fear and aggression toward immigrants, people of color, and queer people while fattening the wallets of grifters. They have names like Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, Sinclair Broadcasting.
• An online constellation of influencers who use disinformation, appeals to "traditional masculinity," and just generally poor virtues to further promote themselves, unregulated capitalism, untested health supplements, you name it. They have names like Jake Paul, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk.

For all three of these things there is no functional left wing equivalent. The social media profit incentive doesn't generate the type of feedback loop that it does for these people.

If you are reading this and nodding along you can skip to the horizontal divider below, but if not I ask you to imagine you are sitting across from me at a table and I am saying these things directly to you and as kindly and thoughtfully as is possible.

There is no radical American left wing equivalent to the organized and well resourced far right.

And in cases where there even might be, they do not have the funding or scale of the organizations and individuals listed above. There are no left wing anti-fascist militias who receive tips and training from current duty American police officers, as is the case with the armed militias. To the extent that the organizations above do, MSNBC or another supposedly left leaning media outlet do not coordinate with elected and public officials in the Democratic Party in order to further "extreme" leftist views like universal healthcare, improvements to social security, or, uh, civil rights. The existing, limited roster of self described leftist online influencers are not funded directly by ideological institutions with powerful megadonors such as Turning Point USA, PragerU, The Heritage Foundation, or The Federalist Society.

And where these left wing organizations do exist, they often divert their focus from marketing their ideas toward actually attempting to get things done. Lets leave alone the federal Democratic Party for a moment in this discussion and think more about things like The Innocence Project, which seeks to provide legal aid to the wrongfully convicted. Or the ACLU, or Lambda Legal. Where they might spend their time lobbying and chattering in the ears of Democratic politicians, they do not hold the sway for the left that organizations like The Federalist Society, who hand picked Neil Gorsuch for Donald Trump, have for the right.

Now, there are a couple things complicating the neatness of such a bold statement as titles this section. For one, there are people who consider themselves leftists who do and say things that come across as "extreme." But lets take a leftist utopian idea, a borderless planet, for example. An extremist means of arriving at this world may involve violence against heads of state, or localized demonstrations at border control facilities. But I ask you to genuinely consider just how mind bogglingly distant we actually are from this topic coming up in typical legislative debate, how probably never in your life have you seen this topic discussed on the six o'clock news, and what the public reaction today would be to a couple people bombing a border patrol site in Maine. The most, most extreme views for a more egalitarian, sustainable world have nowhere near the cultural capital or legislative power that mass deportation, strict gender traditionalism, or capitalist deregulation have.

Another complicating aspect of this is the national Democratic Party. Frankly, the Dems are feckless, whiny losers who continue to bring a foam Minecraft pick axe to the Javelin missile fight. They aren't just bad at fighting, the don't even know the fight they are in. They think the country is in a fight for politics that works, tangible improvements to peoples' lives, and popular ideas winning out. It has been true for decades (but never more true than the last Trump decade) that the fight is in messaging, propaganda, and providing a sense of purpose for your voters. You cannot move people when you don't even talk about your successes and accept every failure on its face. You cannot move people when you complain about the Supreme Court or the filibuster and then, when fully capable of reforming them, do nothing. There are a few reasons the ostensibly "left" party in the US does not bow to radical ideas, but the end result is that standing for bodily autonomy, affordable education, and freedom of expression get maligned as extreme by the other party. So all in all, a reason there is not a thriving left wing propaganda machine like there is on the right is that the Democrats don't seem all that interested in making one happen.

Just to say: I am not a professional journalist or political analyst. I am writing in broad strokes and from a somewhat emotionally driven place today. Anyway.

All of the above background tells you a lot about the current state of social media, and the flywheel it creates for our basest, most problematic ideas. Simply, propaganda rates. Anger sells. It draws the eyes, and the eyes draw the advertisers. And if the advertisers are less interested in the sort of "progressive" ideas that have pink washed America's Boards of Directors, then why worry what content "The McRib is Back" shows up next to? Currently, the right wing has a monopoly on propaganda.

Which leaves us with a series of nigh unanswerable questions about what we are to do about all of this. The answer, on a macro level, generally lies in labor and community organizing. But what are you, an individual person, supposed to do? Should you keep using these sites even though they abet the worst people? If the outside world increasingly pulls people apart, and a happy, vestigial part of these sites is that they bring people together, how can you cut them out of your life?

I like using Facebook and Instagram

As much as the company that operates these sites angers me, there are things I like about using these platforms.

In the case of Facebook, I enjoy having an online archive of things I did and said as an adolescent. I no longer post images or thoughts to Facebook, but I still go on to see what's up. I enjoy sending ridiculous screenshots of posts in my hometown "Mommies" group to my friends. I like perusing Facebook Marketplace. I like having sports news aggregated for me on my feed.

In the case of Instagram, I mostly enjoy tapping through stories my friends post. I enjoy keeping tabs on what people in my community are talking about and how they feel about it. I like having a space to curate an image. I like being able to support the work my friends do.

And if you use these sites, or Whatsapp, I'm willing to bet that you can identify actual, pro-social things you enjoy about using them.

We arrive at a problem of scale, though. When Zuck said a few months ago that creators and publishers "overestimate" the value they have for training AI, he was not kidding and he is correct. This also means that no individual user, especially not one without a lot of followers or serious engagement means that much to the bottom line of the site. Thus, leaving these platforms in protest might actually hurt you more than it hurts them.

To get a critical mass of people, even just the 100 or so people closest to you, onto a new place with all the stuff you like and without all the baggage is basically a non-starter.

So what are we even supposed to do? If we individually leave the platforms, we risk losing connective tissue with people we actually care about while not making a broader difference to the bottom line of the company. If we go somewhere else like Bluesky the features are not currently as robust for keeping up with people on your social graph. Say we concede that we need to do better in our offline lives to find community and engage with loved ones, and that "should" replace what we have on Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. Sure! Not many would disagree with this. But that doesn't happen overnight, and is not always within the realm of possibility economically or geographically.

These platforms provided an excellent place for people of all stripes to find community, gain a sense of self, and be entertained. But at the same time, they have cannibalized the trust and goodwill that brings people to such places to begin with.

So here's what I am planning to do, and maybe it'll prompt some ideas in your mind about how to approach your use of Meta products and social media in general.

I am going to:

• write newsletters informing people in my community about companies who do bad things. Check!
• download a copy of all of my data on Facebook and Instagram. This can be easily done on both platforms, here and here. If I choose to deactivate those accounts, I can rest assured that I have a copy.
• research alternative ways of connecting with a broader network that are more bottom up (i.e. group texts and shared photo albums).
• support platforms actively disrupting the advertiser-led business model of social media. Bluesky and Letterboxd are two examples of this.
• engage offline with community spaces and organizations.
• support independent, creator-owned, subscriber-supported media and entertainment outlets.

In making these things a daily practice, I hope to reduce my reliance on these platforms.

That's all I've got for today. I wish I had a more pleasing way to tie this all together. I desperately want to lay out one grand unifying theory of how we serve the social media companies and they don't serve us. But for now I just have this. Let me know what you think and feel free to share this with friends. If nothing else, I hope you seek out more information on these topics, and I hope to see you making our online world a better place alongside me.