This blog got its start when I left Facebook in 2018, with the last straw then being some sort of claim they made about “paid protestors funded by George Soros.” But I stayed on Instagram until now, despite it being owned by the same company, because it felt different.
No more.
I was already feeling like Instagram was starting to suck lately, becoming more and more like Facebook. Looking at my feed, it’s got WAY more ads than ever before. Some of them are very clearly tied to things I have browsed on my phone without interacting with any Meta apps, despite my having set every possible privacy option. Others are wildly irrelevant to me and my interests, including ads for some really questionable supplements and other things that I’ve repeatedly told it not to show me.
And the algorithm is very clearly emphasizing more commercial and influencer-ish accounts over regular people — so even the posts between the ads are more like ads. Even where the subject matter relates to things I’m interested in, a neverending barrage of promotional posts is just boring and tiring.
I miss the pre-2007 Livejournal days so much — where we could read/see posts in chronological order from accounts we followed.
Zuck and Meta have been in some news recently:
- Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (a few months after NYT wrote a puff piece about how Zuck is “done with politics”). Apple, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI all followed suit.
- Meta’s “President of Global Affairs” was replaced with W’s former chief of staff.
- It was revealed that Meta had been blocking searches for LGBTQ-related keywords as “sexually suggestive.”
- Meta brought Dana White onto their board — the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, personal friend of Trump, and assaulter of his own wife. Employees have questioned and protested this decision internally but those posts were deleted, and then posts questioning the deletions were also deleted.
- Meta is abandoning third-party fact checking in favor of “community notes” the way X does, in the name of “free speech.”
- Meta updated its “hateful content” policy with specific examples of what they now consider acceptable: some dehumanizing language specifically targetting women, trans people and LGBTQ people as well as claims about foreigners/immigrants relating to coronavirus. It also removed language that points out that hateful speech online can lead to real-world violence. This effort and list of examples was personally led by Zuckerburg and a few hand-picked consultants.
- This too is being protested by employees of Meta, and the criticism is also being deleted internally.
- Meta is moving their “trust and safety and content moderation teams” (what little they’re actually going to do) from California to Texas to “remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”
- Meta terminated its DEI (diversity, equity & inclusivity) program.
- Meta deleted trans and nonbinary pride themes for Messenger (originally added for Pride 2021 with much self-congratulatory language on their part).
- Zuck added in a comment, “Reducing the number of people whose accounts get mistakenly banned is good, people want to be able to discuss civic topics and make arguments that are in the mainstream of political discourse, etc. Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make our products better.”
So, I’m virtue signalling the hell off of Instagram. I downloaded all of my photos and videos (there’s an option buried in the account settings), made a post about why I’m leaving, deleted the app off my phone, and set a calendar reminder to delete the account.