Social media if you must

Remind yourself you do not need this

Well put: The 11th Reason to Delete your Social Media Account: the Algorithm will Find You. Elizabeth’s letter to herself is measured.

Purportedly, Social media and television use — but not video games — predict depression and anxiety in teens

[…] playing video games was not a predictor of either depression or anxiety, which may be because gaming has become more of a social activity. “Compared with their forerunners 15 to 20 years ago, the average video gamer is not socially isolated. It has been shown that more than 70% of gamers play their games with a friend, either physically together or online,” the researchers noted in their study.

The researchers also found some evidence that interacting with media that promoted upward social comparisons was associated with reductions in self-esteem, which in turn was associated with increases in depressive symptoms.

• Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s Social Media triptych

  • Nudging My Way Out Of The Intellectual Mosh Pit
  • Dear Self; We Need To Talk About Social Media
  • Internet Literacy Atrophy

• Why the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook has this provocative quote:

  “Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” a Facebook executive said in a recent interview with POLITICO reporters, when pressed why the pages of conservatives drive such high interactions. The person said the content speaks to “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by touching on such topics as “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear”.

  Obviously anger and fear are a popular theme upon which no political wing holds a monopoly, but I think you could slice this statement into a more contentful one. To follow up.

Pretend to be on social media but don’t actually bother

80% of my strategy is this. See faking being on social media.

If we do need to use it, it seems that we should schedule regular cold turkey breaks. Lambert et al. (2022) suggests multi-day cold-turkey.

Practice social surveillance hygiene to reduce harm

• Don’t use the facebook/whatever app. Alex Yumashev’s (uncited) tip for mobile devices:

  use Facebook in mobile Safari, with an adblocker, and delete the iOS native app — helps a lot AND saves you from tons of ads and 3rd party cookie tracking. Not to mention wonders for the battery.

  Wonder if that’s correct regarding the battery? Safari can be heavy.

• Access your social network using a quarantined single site browser. (I’m a fan of this)

• Firefox has a new smoother alternative: Multi user containers makes separate mini-browsers for each social app so they each live in their own little universe. There is a facebook-specific one.

• Logins. Don’t login with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Wechat etc. There might be better alternatives in the future (e.g. persona?). But don’t hold your breath. For now, don’t use centrally-tracked logins if you won’t want the vendor knowing about your connection to these sites. Make a new password for everything.

• Disable tracking in your browser using one of the extensions for that.

• Reconfigure Facebook settings to be less leaky: How to gain control over Facebook

• delete your facebook posts

You can also reduce the amount of crap that facebook shows you. Alex McClean, How to withdraw from Facebook:

• Click the Arrow in upper right
• Select “News feed preferences”
• Click “Unfollow people and groups to hide their posts”

var unfollowButtons =document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-pressed="false"]'); unfollowed = 0;for(var i=0;i<unfollowButtons.length;i++) {setTimeout(function(element){ element.click(); unfollowed ++;console.log('Total unfollowed ' + unfollowed + ' out of ' +unfollowButtons.length) }, i*2000, unfollowButtons[i]) }

Reduce distractions and upsells

Social media sites want to bombard you with extra stuff that it sounds like you should know about.

We can ameliorate social media addictiveness through browser tricks to manage distractions.

Roll your own social network

See DIY social networks.

Archive your social network

Minimise the dependence on that network for data storage by having your own backup of your social wossname.

There are GDPR extraction tools built-in, e.g. For Facebook. Timeliner and Perkeep are two different approaches to this.

Incoming

safebook is facebook without all the content. Soothing.

References