As you might have noticed, I stopped to post Caturday photos and nearly stopped to use Facebook as a publishing platform.
Finally, today, I will stop to use Facebook as the primary publishing platform and stop to comment, like and share postings.
There are several reasons for this, which I might explain in further postings with several examples:
- Market share and cultural and economical impact of Facebook (GAFA)
- Incapability of Facebook to control Fake News, Hate News and other discriminating content against majorities and minorities. Even reporting of obvious hate speech did not lead to deletion of content. I don’t want to be part of a hate speech platform.
- Endangerment of democracies by failing to control foreign troll factories and providing false statements (fake news) to users. The influence of troll factories to democratic elections is well-known and could be seen in the past (Brexit, Trump, nearly Le Pen, AfD, etc…). The non-journalistic presentation of the loudest communities leads to a false bias of the important facts and causes for unwanted states in society, environment and politics. Especially when they are boosted by troll factories and other destructive parties.
- Changes in timeline and other provisions of content against my interests. Facebook has the opinion that it knows the priorities of my interests better as myself.
- Change of usage of Facebook users: I see more content with: ‚Highlight users with @A which needs to give you a drink…‘ (Especially in Germany). No real sharing of opinions… more a competitions of highlighting and sharing links (coming back to fake news…). Out of 20 postings, usually only one is interesting to me
- etc…
I know, I will not change the world, but I’m more in confidence that I do not support the change of the world as it was happening last year and continues to happen this year.
What does it mean?
In future, I will use this blog (www.depon.net) as my primary publish platform. It is open, the content is under my control and everybody can extract the content by using an open protocol (RSS).
Each post will be automatically shared in Facebook and Twitter to keep me in contact with you. I know, that Facebook will penalize this by removing my content from your timeline. But that’s life. Unfortunately, open and non-commercial platforms will never reach as much people as the closed and proprietary ones.
I will continue to read Facebook and also use its messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and all other products which are currently in my use. I will not react, like, comment and share other content on Facebook.
I will try other social platforms, like Vero… In the hope to find a platform which is more focused to connect persons instead of gathering as much content as possible. (No, I don’t use Tinder).
What about Caturday? Here, I don’t have a final conclusion since sharing cat images which are mostly under copyright might put myself in legal problems.