I’ve had a few people ask me whether I plan on opening a Twitter or Facebook page. The short answer is no, but I thought I’d provide the long answer.
1. Both platforms facilitate abuse, especially of minorities
Twitter is almost unmoderated. I think its well documented tolerance of abuse is thoroughly proven.
Facebook moderation actually goes a step farther and allows abusers to make bad faith reports, resulting in such absurd outcomes as a trans artist being banned for quoting the abuse directed at in her inbox while the people sending the abuse are left active.
Given that my fans include Jihadists, TERFs (sorry, “gender critical” dingleberries), fundagelicals, MRAsshats, libertarians, capitalists, and a smattering of transphobes from across all ideologies, I have every reason to believe increasing my access on social media would simply result in a torrent of abuse and major headaches as I try to clean up after automated moderation.
2. Neither serves a function I care for
Twitter’s 140 character limit abhors me, because it is next to impossible to have anything other than snarky quips. Don’t get me wrong, I love snark. But I can just snark here, where I am able to moderate comments, and couch it in actual arguments.
Again, I have little reason to start conversations on Facebook when I can just start them here.
3. People use either tool to share my posts anyway
Self explanatory. Sometimes people like my shit enough to post it on social media. Yeah I’d get shares faster if I posted directly to Facebook. But then there’s the whole “access to abuse” thing again. I’m okay building exposure slowly if it means not having to filter nattering TERFs all the time.
4. Trolls are annoying
On here, you have to sign up. Then your first comment has to be approved, and my bullshit detector is pretty good. Then if you get obnoxious, or if you ping my trolldar, all that effort you spent signing up is wasted when I ban you.
On Twitter and Facebook, a troll has their account open already. With more editorial control, the website itself is a bottleneck for abusers.
5. The rest of the network is my editorial control
Facebook and Twitter can pull the plug on my content. But their editorial control is based on generating traffic, rather than convincing arguments or anything resembling an ethical compass. FTB is based off a mission statement, which makes me more confident my material wouldn’t be arbitrarily challenged.
6. I have a contact email anyway
If someone wants to engage in a way that wouldn’t work in the comments, they can just email me instead. Again, gmail allows me to filter bad faith actors. But for now it is predominantly used by readers giving reasonable feedback, as well as my back-and-forth with other outlets as I try to sell some investigative work I’m sitting on.
So, yeah, that’s why I won’t be on other forms of social media.
-Shiv
I thought I’d never have a FB page, until a certain group of activists I wanted to work with decided to organize via a private FB group. So I joined, but I never go to my main page, I never ‘friend’ anyone nor click on anything promoted by FB itself rather than material specific to the particular group. I agree I wouldn’t want to do any visible activism through FB, especially for topics as troll-drawing as the ones you deal with.
Right there with you. I think about activating my twitter account sometimes, but I can’t ever motivate myself to do it. I have enough to do already.
As for FB, I had one, back in the early days of it. After a couple of years of not using the damn thing, it took me half of forever to actually delete the damn thing. Never again.
Another individual here who has no so-called “social media [sic]” accounts (with a half of an exception), not only for essentially all the listed reasons, but at some others as well: Poor-to-foolhardy “security” and a consequence lack-of-privacy (at the least). Plus frequently-changing, large, and complex User Agreements, frequently with no plausible, much less useful, problem resolution mechanisms (an objection related to several of the OP’s points). And a distaste for the business model of many such sites: They use My content as an attractor for readers to view potentially-invasive advertising for whatevers I’m not keen on.
(And it really should be called something like “possibly social advertising vehicle” or somesuch.)
I score it thus:
Number of times I have learned something interesting or useful from Facebook or Twitter: 1
Number of times I have posted something interesting or useful on Twitter: 20 or 30
Number of times I have posted something interesting or useful on facebook: 0
So I think there is a sort of confirmation bias going on there! EVERYONE thinks they are
posting stuff that is more interesting than everyone ELSE thinks it is. It’s sort of a
text version of a Dunning-Kruger Effect. And the end result is: a ton of crap.
Twitter’s 140 character limit abhors me…
“Appalls”, maybe, or “repels”, or, “alienates” or “antagonizes”, or … or there’s some relationship between you and that limit that you’re not telling us, for which I personally feel relief.
Gotta give Twitcorp a little bit of credit as the only US social-media megabiz that refused to aid & abet Der Trump’s proposed Muslim registry – but I’m not signing up either.
@Pierce
Every so often my grammar brain has a glitch. That said, I’m keeping it. It sounds dramatic.
Now commissioning fanfiction for Twitter’s feud with Siobhan.
I think that Facebook actually tries to aid abuse of minorities. Their policies are such that bigots won’t be banned, and people who report bigots will be banned for filing false reports (despite the fact that their TOS bars hate speech; I presume it’s for legal reasons).
“Anything worth saying can be said in five minutes.”
– Andy Rooney
“Anything that can be said in less than 30 seconds probably isn’t worth saying.”
– me
At an average of five letters per word, 140 characters is 28 words. Beyond a quick message like, “Buy milk on the way home” or being an insulting troll, what is twitter for?
Memes, fandom discussion, art, and links to other media/content aggregation.
For example, I make a good amount of money off of fanart commissions, and twitter is a pretty great art hosting site, especially if you rely on fanbase interaction through commissions or streams.