The Bare Minimum

This is an off-topic post about social media platforms, the what we should ask from them and what we need for ourselves. We'll be back to your regularly-scheduled manga posts in just a minute.

I took a social media holiday over the weekend, visiting friends on Friday and Saturday and ignoring my phone for the most part. But early in the morning, sitting beneath a blanket on a couch that wasn't my own, I finally finished reading Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Its early chapters read like a memoir, Wynn-Williams, the former Director of Public Policy at Facebook, navigating the complex structure and strong personalities of the early tech start up and their adventures in international relations with the global community. But by the end of the book, as Wynn-Williams details her own firing after both ideological clashes with executives and reporting sexual harassment by her manager, she also begins to share the sins of the company: egregious errors made by Facebook that led to an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, complicity in human rights violations to cozy up to the Chinese government, partnerships with far-right governments in return for lax regulatory policies, advertising campaigns targeting teenagers at their lowest moments, such as ads for weight-loss products shown to teen girls after they delete selfies.

Wynn-Williams paints a picture of a company driven by profit and devoid of ethics. More than once, she mentions Mark Zuckerberg's fondness for board games such as Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride and the complicity of those around him in making sure he always wins even when he plays poorly. Throughout the book, we get a sense that the management of Facebook is similar, treating both individual lives and the global stage like it's an amoral game that they must win and viewing the wreckage of their recklessness like chits and meeples to be dumped back into the box once the game is won.

We know Facebook's parent company, Meta, hasn't reformed its practices since Sarah left the company in 2017—in fact, the entire book seems to foreshadow Zuckerberg's alignment with the American right in recent years. However, I couldn't have imagined that when I finally checked my phone on the way home to catch up on what I'd missed in my 24-hour break that the first article I'd see would be from The Guardian, detailing that Meta has been using pictures of girls as young as 13 in their school uniforms to advertise their X-alternative, Threads, to middle-aged men. These weren't stock photos but pictures parents had shared on their Instagram accounts of their real-life children going back to school. As with so much news we read on a daily basis, it's both disgusting yet unsurprising. After all, only hours earlier, I'd read that Facebook's sales team was mad that the company stated that it was untrue they were showing ads to vulnerable teenagers as this was a feature that they were proud to offer to their advertising clients.

It was only after I got home that I learned about another social media controversy occurring, this one on my current home-turf of Bluesky. In the wake of a plethora of posts about Charlie Kirk's murder and the content moderation disaster that followed, Bluesky released a new set of Community Guidelines that enraged NSFW artists, enjoyers, and anti-censorship proponents who fear the new guidelines will be used to deplatform creators. For some, pushback has taken the form of a #blueskyblackout movement to decrease activity for a week in a show of protest. Others are using the feedback feature to voice their displeasure while others have suggested flooding the feed with NSFW content and hashtags.

This isn't the first time Bluesky has been criticized for their content moderation decisions. In the past, they've faced blowback for deleting Palestinian GoFundMe accounts as spam, moderating posts about J. K. Rowling, and selectively enforcing their own rules when it comes to threats of violence.

There's a world of difference between using pictures parents post of their underage daughters in school uniforms to try to attract adult men to your two-trillion dollar platform and the community guidelines on Bluesky, a company with ~20 employees plus contractors to serve its content moderation needs, but both issues raise the same question: What should we ask of our social media platforms?

My earliest social media experiences existed before social media. I started off chatting with strangers about Star Trek Voyager and Dr. Who in channels on mIRC in my early teens (around 1997) before we started to use AIM to talk to friends from school. I was there for the advent of MySpace, kept up with both LiveJournal and DeadJournal, started a Facebook account specifically for wedding planning purposes, then joined Twitter in 2011. In the 28 years I've spent on the internet, it's shaped who I am, it's enriched my world, it's opened me up to the experiences of others that I would have never learned about otherwise. It helped me maintain a long-distance relationship through college with the person who is now my husband, it kept me in touch with so many friends, it introduced me to so many other friends. It's hard to imagine my life without the social side of the internet. But we also need to face the fact that the dominant social media companies that exist today are inherently corrupt by their ownership and profit-driven motives.

I truly loved early Twitter.

My husband and I would check our feeds over coffee in the morning, comparing notes, then again at night. It was possible in those days to reach the end of your chronologically-driven feed, read everything the accounts your followed shared, and be done for several hours. Twitter was my connection to the news and my source of intellectual whimsy, scattering strange little stories and facts throughout my days. It also acted as a mediocre therapist as I dealt with a shitty job, then after my son was born, as an elder millennial dealing with the challenges of having a young child and older parents. I met so many kind people over the year who were generous with their wisdom and words, saying what I needed to hear to get through the day.

But Twitter is no longer Twitter, both figuratively and literally, after having been renamed X. Even if some of the same interactions can be found on the platform, it's awash in an ocean of racism and white nationalism spoonfed to users by an algorithm that prioritizes right-wing content. Posts and art are gobbled up by Grok, an integrated AI that the platform's owner, Elon Musk, treats like an errant child when it spits out content that contradicts his worldview. We can see his promises in real time to correct its programming when it says "embarrassing" things like acknowledging that climate change is real and anti-black racism is a societal ill. We've seen the fruits of his labor when Grok spent a day inserting a white genocide conspiracy theory about South Africa into unrelated conversations and the day that it decided to cosplay Hitler, a scandal that haunted Prince Harry for years whereas Grok's trespass was dismissed within days.

I treated Twitter as my digital home for over a decade. It was my journal and my blog, a place I recorded my thoughts, stories, manga analyses, and so, so, so many threads. Yes, it had gotten progressively worse over the years due to trolls and far-right agitators, but it was still a place worth protecting. However, when Musk bought the platform, I realized that my home was nothing more than rented space, and the richest man in the world had just bought the building. A lot of people, people who are much smarter than I am, left early on, but I hung on, hoping he'd get bored with his project of turning Twitter into 4chan. The two-and-a-half years I stayed after his initial purchase felt a lot like Sarah Wynn-Williams's tale of staying in a toxic workplace, seeing everything get worse and not knowing how or when to get out. Sometimes, it happened slowly, such as the strange plethora of advertisements worthy of a 3am network broadcast channel. Sometimes it happened fast, such as when X removed the functionality of the block feature or when they deprioritized links and hid headlines for news articles.

In Careless People, we learn how much Facebook aided the Trump campaign during his first election. At first, Zuckerberg experienced rage when pundits and politicians—including President Barak Obama—took him to task for the role his company had played in spreading misinformation. But the message Zuckerberg eventually took from Trump's win was his own vast power, after which he embarked on a swing-state tour to test out the waters of running for president. My stomach sank during those chapters, realizing that though Facebook hadn't intended Trump to win (his campaign advertising revenue was good for the their bottom line in 2016), the lesson Musk took was that he could run a social media company specifically for the purposes of pushing his political agenda. Trump didn't just advertise on Facebook; he used shadow posts to suppress voter turnout by targeting specific groups that he could manipulate into staying home. I saw this exact tactic happening on X in the runup to 2024 and watched how it affected others who had remained on the platform with me. What Zuckerberg had done for monetary profit, Musk was doing for political gain.

So, returning to my original question: What should we ask of our social media platforms? Google started with a very simple motto, one it has since abandoned—Don't be evil. I don't think a corporation can ever hold itself to that standard as long as it has to prioritize profits over ethics, but I think that we, as users, can hold ourselves to that standard.

Don't be evil. Don't use evil platforms. Pushback on unethical behavior early and often.

Musk creating a soapbox for himself on his own platform to demonize trans people is evil. Pushing a white nationalist agenda is evil. Boosting posts that state women should be treated as property is evil. Likewise, stealing parents' images of their teenage daughters in school girl skirts and dropping them in advertisements to middle-aged me is also evil. So is the Meta chatbot that will engage in sexual roleplay with children.

This is not to excuse Bluesky's foibles. I think it's healthy that there's a vibrant community there who pushes back on moderation overreach as well as sets its own culture, trying to stop the worst behavior that existed on Twitter from metastasizing on a new platform. I sometimes fantasize about how an ideal social media experience would be structured: Should we just retreat to Discord channels and relive the mIRC days with modern internet speeds? Should we return to forums? Is there a secret sauce we still haven't tapped into yet, an Archive-of-Our-Own-style experience where people can tag their accounts and content and users can opt-in or opt-out of what they want to see, a place where free expression is protected, but a user's right to choose what content they want to be exposed to is protected as well.

But I think there's another lesson we need to learn from the past decade of internet decay: a social media platform will never be your home. You're always squatting on someone else's property. They can shove all your belongings into trash bags at a moment's notice and kick you to the curb. They can invite Nazis to move in next door and ignore your noise complaints. They can park a white van outside of your building, luring your kids into danger with the promise of a little candy. We can't trust social media with our arts, our writing, our most important thoughts. Those need—and deserve—their own home. We're responsible for diversifying our active digital footprints.

A social media platform should be social—it should let us introduce ourselves and meet others. It should be the place that we form community, but not the only location in which we can find said community. It should allow us to put out a welcome mat, directing people to the other places they can find us, blogs, websites, stores, group chats, video platforms—ideally a combination of multiple locations. If a platform wants you to do everything on it, if it tries to freeze you out by not letting you put links in your posts like Instagram or deprioritize them on the algorithm like X, it's trying to limit your personal reach, suppress you, control you. Like a new romantic partner who is suddenly telling you that all your friends are shitty, it's a giant red flag that their true goal is to isolate you and force you to stay with them. In this day and age of AI-scraping and algorithm-driven interactions, starting your own tiny Podunk website is an act of rebellion more of us need to be engaging in.

The other thing that we, as responsible social media users, need to do is to transition our digital friendships into other spaces so we don't lose one another when a platform comes crashing down. We should rely on our friends for friendship, not on the spaces where we find them. If you have long-time friends that you truly care about, let them know other ways to get in contact with you and practice cross-platform communication so you're in the habit of checking in with them elsewhere.

The point of social media is for us to be social. As humans, we're social creatures. We rely on friendships and our community to thrive and survive. In modern social media, we've become posters and advertisers, cultivating our own brand and promoting ourselves instead of socializing. There is a place for self-promotion when we have something to share or when our income relies on exposure, but too many people have stopped talking to other people and started selling themselves, often without any profit motives. The currency of late-stage Twitter is the volume of interactions rather than the quality of them, the dopamine rush of likes and retweets instead of authentic interactions and connections. It's important for our wellbeing as humans that our reward for using social media is friendships, not a few hundred strangers clicking on a tiny heart icon.

I have no insight on how to change the current social media landscape into something less rife with amoral business motives and outright evil, but I do know we have a responsibility to ourselves to choose what platforms to use, decide how to use them, and rebel against a profit-driven internet by creating our own homes and asking our digital friends to drop in and visit us there. A platform isn't going to save us. That's something we're going to have to do ourselves.