I want to begin this by saying the obvious. I am well aware that what social media does is perfectly within their right to do. They are private corporations, and they have no obligation to treat anyone evenhandedly. They can allow whatever they want to allow, and banish whatever they don’t like. And if I don’t like it, that’s tough.
But, you know, I don’t like it. At all.
I suppose this was an inevitability, since the original ideas were bought out, co-opted, and corporatized. But what was once a vibrant place for the exchange of ideas has become monolithic, right-leaning, and in many ways, poisonous to the culture. FOX “News” now has powerful partners in the propaganda business, operating out of the Kremlin. And as a result, I suspect we’re looking at a country so wrecked that we’ve passed the point of no return.
I’m sure most of you heard about Rose McGowan’s Twitter lockout, and the weak explanation from Twitter that she’d inadvertently left a phone number showing on an email she’d screencapped and uploaded to her feed. Those of us who have used Twitter for years rolled our eyes collectively and said “bullshit.” Twitter hasn’t seemed to care about an endless number of abusive doxers who will use the names and phone numbers of those they seek to undermine as banner pictures. It almost seems, in fact, like Twitter arbitrarily enforces its supposed rules when you look at how many people have had their accounts suspended for saying bad words here and there (and I know of what I speak; I’ve lost 6 accounts, and I never doxed anyone, nor would I retweet a dox.) People of a certain political persuasion will be kicked off Twitter left and right, as we saw with Rose McGowan. However, bullies, cowards, and predators (like Ted Nugent, Jimmy Woods, and Donald J. Trump) can say the most disgusting things about others (and in the case of Trump, threaten to kill people) and their accounts never have any issues. Never ever.
Most of the people who read this know about a Peaceful Christian Trading Card page I had on Facebook until yesterday. It got yanked, supposedly for “hate speech”, though every card featured men and women who had either committed vile crimes, or were awaiting trial for said crimes. Every card was factual, and I pulled cards for mistakes as simple as a wrong year of birth, let alone wrong biographical information. As Facebook didn’t bother to show me what was supposed hate speech, I do not have any expectation that the page will ever be allowed again. The joke is on them; I have already built a new repository for the cards, and new cards will be produced, and they will be shared out. Just not on a Facebook server anymore (they’ll be shared from their repository.) And they still won’t be hate speech.
Social media has now suffered what the print and broadcast media already succumbed to. Conservatives can’t govern. They can’t win wars. They can’t keep it in their pants. They can’t tell the truth. They can’t stop stealing. But what they CAN do with great efficiency is to organize herds of screaming babies to shout down anyone who dares to contradict whatever lunacy they’re shopping on any given day. That’s why Rose McGowan goes down on Twitter, and Jimmy Woods continues to post some incredibly vile shit. That’s why I can’t have a Trading Card page anymore, but Russian disinformation is still available all over Facebook (and shared endlessly by the teabilly hordes.) Social media is proving itself to be every bit as spineless as our mainstream broadcast and print medias proved themselves to be. As a result, it’s turned into a bad place for honest people. Good people are being shut down, shut up, and frozen out. Honest conservatives often suffer the same fate that liberals do, because the screaming hordes can’t tolerate an honest conservative any more than they can abide a liberal. Social media is becoming a great place for misogynists, religious bigots, and racists to spew their hate unabashedly. I don’t think that this can be denied anymore.
So here, in 2017, I find myself going full circle. I started out as a blogger because I had no place to speak my mind. I gradually let that go in favor of social media. But social media has sent me back to where I came from. And unless and until those in charge of moderating social media actually start acting upon real offenses, rather than attacking whoever the screaming hordes demand they go after, I’m probably going to be in My(own)Space a lot more as time goes on.