01/15/2025
Time rolls on. Another 11:11 has come and gone. Same with 4:20.
My thoughts as this morning becomes this afternoon? I’m a little bit worried. Seems like plenty of my network of “friends” here are basically freaking out about the big Zuke announcement that Meta — Facebook, Instagram and Threads — will no long employ fact-checking.
The fear and the assumption is that means that things will change radically and everything on the platform will now be dominated by the Right Wing folks who plan on instituting Project 2025, as we enter the fact-free Dark Ages of the Metaverse or something like that.
IMHO, that’s bull-pucky. In fact it’s the same as it ever was. (See comments.) Facebook in particular is a vast unwieldy world wide social network of users who have vastly different views and interests.
I’m not going to pretend how it all works, but your feed is customized to your particular interests. Everyone’s is. Your Facebook is totally different from mine. And your friends who tend to lean left or lean right from your opinions get totally different feeds.
It’s close to the same thing on television channels where people who mostly watch Fox News seem to live in a far different reality than those who watch MSNBC. And believe me, facts never got in the way of either side expressing their opinions as facts. Honesty is not really part of the story.
While I was typing that, a Threads banner popped down, a note from former-Senator Al Franken offering his take on what’s going on in Congress as they interrogate the latest member of Trump’s fantasy Cabinet. There’s no one telling him what to say or write or just to shut up. It’s a free country and you can say whatever you want
There is a civil war going on, and not too civil. The simple fact is that our country is just about evenly divided, left and right, red and blue, with purple in between. The war is mostly in words and there’s a battle raging for our culture. From my point of view, the left of center side, it looks like the left has been winning the Culture War for a long time.
The Right has a firm grip on Fox News, but nobody I know watches it. The Social Network leans left and ignores the right.
I think the MAGA True Believers would love it if the left gave up on Facebook and ceded that valuable territory to them.
As I see it, that’s what everyone abandoning their Facebook account to move over to Blue Sky is essentially saying that you give up and they win. We can’t give up.
Facebook is far from perfect, but it’s all we’ve got right now. If I want to communicate with my friends anyway that’s where they are.
I don’t think people realize that Blue Sky was not designed to be like Facebook at all, it’s more limited like Twitter, or X, which is of course even more horrible.
I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn Facebook into another branch of Truth Social. Do you?
Anyway I wish people would stop talking so much about how they’re gonna change the world by leaving Facebook. It’s just not the truth and that’s an important commodity in this day and age.
Peace, out…
