It was one of those casual, off the cuff, slightly-hyperbolic-for-effect remarks that are the currency of any conversational banter between friends.
Someone had posted a funny image, a screenshot of a tweet that concluded “80% of Israelis need psychiatric analysis”. Everyone was joking: “Only 80%?!”, “Who wouldn't need a shrink with prices this high?” One person, predictably, took offense, and I countered with: “Have you been to Israel? They’re all quite mad!”
Bear in mind that I live in Jerusalem, a city who’s principle charm is that everyone here is quite mad in their own way, yet somehow, on the whole, everyone rubs along. As the Cheshire Cat said…
No matter. The verdict was swift and brutal. One minute I was gaily emoji laughing with the rest of them, the next, a cold metal shutter had dropped with an almost audible ‘clang’ as the screen flashed up: YOUR COMMENT GOES AGAINST OUR COMMUNITY STANDARDS. Sentence: seven day ban, and — a new feature — my posts will be “deprioritized on other people’s feeds” for 28 days.
It was a seven day ban because I’d already picked up a three day ban a week earlier, for some equally off-the-cuff remark; I can’t remember what now.
There was a time when picking up a FB ban was a badge of honour, proof that you were willing to push the envelope a little, could perhaps even lay claim to being considered an ‘edge-lord’. Those happy days are long gone. Now you can cop a ban for sneezing in an insufficiently gender-inclusive way.
And that, I think, may sound the death toll for social media, at least among people who value real conversation and connection.
The aim here is obvious and familiar, yet no less disheartening for that: what Facebook are attempting to do is create a society in which no-one has open, robust conversation at all. It’s engineering a social space in which state-approved narratives and bland platitudes are the only available topics of discussion. We’ll all be allowed to marvel at how tractor production is up 1000% this quarter, admire the Dear Leader for his magnanimity, and, in the UK, comment on the weather, but that will be it. In short, they want enforced conformity.
The philosophical objections to this are well-stomped grounds by now.
I could quote Orwell: “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Or Solzhenitsyn: “Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable [...] There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.”
Or Lenny Bruce: “If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.”
But my objection to all of this isn’t nearly as lofty. My objection is simply this: it’s boring.
I won’t win any literary prizes for saying so, but forced conformity is simply no fun. And that, I suspect, may hold the key to Facebook’s ultimate downfall.
Anyone with an ounce of spirit has resolved to jack in Facebook at some point over the last few years on principle. Most of us have any number of alternative accounts on various platforms: MeWe, VK, Minds, Gab, Parler, the list goes on — in fact, I’ve just googled ‘social media platforms’ and found there are well over 100 to choose from by now (see you on WT.Social, anyone? No? How about Triller?).
I’d like to pretend that people make good decisions based on ideological principles. We’d be in a much better place as a society if decent, moral people had both the courage of their convictions and the willpower to stick with them. As it is, the only people I can think of who make real sacrifices in their daily lives for purely ideological reasons are vegans. It can’t be a coincidence that they’re also the worst advertisement for living according to ideology I can think of.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have seen neither a yoga mat, nor a raw lentil, nor the login details to our alternative social media platforms since around 10pm on January 1st, when we promised ourselves we’d absolutely definitely start tomorrow. You remember, it was right before we fell into bed, phone in hand, to post our ‘morning after’ pics on — you guessed it — Facebook.
The only other platform to enjoy this sort of pull on its audience is Twitter, and it’s no coincidence that both were early runners in the field. By getting in early on the social media trend they captured their audience early. Consequently, it’s where the conversations happened, and where they still happen — because that’s where all the people are.
Despite our best intentions, and our heartfelt commitment to opposing fascism whenever it’s easy and convenient to do so, we all go back to Facebook, ultimately, because it’s fun, and it does offer a sense of community.
But that’s where Facebook has potentially undone itself, because while we won’t leave Facebook on ideological grounds, we will if it becomes dreadfully dull. The fun, the conversations, and the community, are what draw us in. Strip those out, and you may as well be on Gab or Gettr.
Or better yet, in a pub with real people. Like this one:
And here again, in addition to the censorship, Facebook is shooting itself in the foot with its mad drive to cajole and control.
At it’s best, in the early days, Facebook offered something genuinely appealing: a community of like-minded souls to connect with. Before social media came along, our friends were people we happened to share geographical ties with first, and shared interests with second.
I was in my early 20s when Facebook came on the scene. Before, I was friends with people I went to school or uni with, or had met at a summer job (geography), and who knew the lyrics to Good Riddance by GreenDay (vaguely shared interests). After Facebook, I was friends with people who agreed with both Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution and Hayek’s of socialist economies, and who, while broadly sympathetic to Ayn Rand’s writings on Objectivism, had reservations over her treatment of those truly deserving of charity (wildly niche shared interests). These friends came from everywhere — America, Australia, New Zealand, Penge.
Over the 15 years or so in which I’ve had a Facebook account I’ve made some genuinely good friends, people with whom I’ve shared highs and lows, who have supported me in tough times or in new endeavours, and who I’ve supported in turn. To this day, many of these good friends are people I’ve never met in person. There is a reason we all logged on so readily, and it wasn’t just because Facebook minions are good at making the site addictive. It offered genuine community.
But over the years, the endless algorithmic-tinkering-in-a-drive-for-‘engagement’ has eroded that community spirit. At first, the bans on right wing thought provoked the sort of ebullient camaraderie which is inevitable when an ‘us v’s them’ scenario is provoked. But it got tiring. We began to feel hectored. People started to self-censor, or to be on a ban more often than not, or to simply log off and never return. Some attempted to avoid censorship by having multiple accounts under different names, rendering it impossible to keep track of who was who. The excitement turned over to cynicism and world-weariness.
And worse, social media’s engagement bread and butter — dogmatic discord — caused rifts to occur within friendship groups. People grew increasingly short-tempered and suspicious of any divergence from their own opinion, more willing to hit the defriend button on a quick-draw. Triumphant posts on ‘culls’ became more frequent, as did the extremely tiresome “If you believe X, UNFRIEND ME NOW!!!” (unfriend me yourself, you lazy sod).
We need to reconnect, but it’s not going to happen under Big Tech. The answer isn’t in Elon Musk or Donald Trump’s new social media platforms either. Each new site that springs up is more fractured and dysfunctional than the last, offering nothing but refuge for people who are trying to recapture the early community feel that was there in the beginning, but can’t be recreated from splintered faction groups.
Because we don’t need ever more niche echo-chambers. We need a bit of dissent. We need robust, banter-laden conversations with people who we don’t necessarily agree with in a space in which we can’t get silenced for sharing our thoughts. We need what we had before social media came along at all, we just didn’t know it at the time: real people with opinions that differ from our own, who we learn to rub along with in real settings.
We need each other.
We need to get down the pub.
See you there?
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