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streamfortyseven's avatar

I just got booted off of Facebook seven days ago - a concocted "security incident" and a request to retract/recant about 40 posts - comments - I'd made over the past three months deviating from the Official Narrative - that’s part of the “process” they wanted me to go through to “unlock” the account. No dice. And I’m not the only person they’ve done this to, they took a $175 billion hit to their equity capital because of this practice, they’ve dumped a lot more people than just me. I've been posting on here on Substack since September, putting links on my facebook page, so that's not the loss, but the real loss is contacts. I downloaded my account a few months back, so I can parse through that, but that leaves about 150 or so new ones. That's the way social media holds people in its iron grip - it makes real contact very difficult, and contact mediated by their platform very easy, so it becomes addictive. And their control and ability to nudge and coerce and shape becomes absolute, they can and do manipulate who sees your posts - and the posts you see.... it can be a very effective means of psychological warfare. And the only way to stop it is to get rid of facebook entirely, let it crash to the ground, and try to reconstruct contacts in real life, and that's the task I have ahead of me. I seem to have a fair number of contacts on my phone - and in other places, though. If you’re on facebook, please spread the word. I’m leaving the account “locked”, and I’m not coming back - facebook is an Outrage Machine and a Time Suck and an addiction, and I’m going to break it…

And more: As for being cut off by facebook, at first it was fury, then amputation, it was a physical pain... and I found that interesting and figured out that such a thing was in fact poisonous. And further reflection - it was a waste of time - a hole down which time went, and then, obviously a means for the people/algorithms which run it, to create psychological effects - that's nothing new, it's been reported before, but I had had moments of realization that it was being done to me, it was constantly sundering connections, especially to people nearby, and favoring one set of people for a while, then another set. And since I know people with rather widely disparate opinions, including some with whom I argue, sometimes I'd see only posts/comments from people I argue with - so that's the Outrage Machine part. It's a manipulated, artificial environment - and there's no need for it. I can only wonder what havoc will be wreaked in people's lives with the VR/Meta environment - and I'll leave *that one* well alone, like foxglove a beautiful flower but deadly poison. https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/facebook-and-i-are-no-more-booted

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William Hunter Duncan's avatar

I have not participated in society much in my adult life, precisely because I am repulsed by the casual violence of so many people, like drone bombs on wedding parties, microplastics filling up the oceans, the extermination of species, the destruction of the working class and the aggregation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is just the cost of Progress. I have spent a significant part of my life trying to warn people about the rise and fall of empires, but that mostly alienated me, and so I mostly stopped, as I have watched our civilization roll inevitably down that hill toward that cliff, society growing more delusional every day, disintegrating, breaking apart little by little. My 19 year old niece told me once during her senior year, as we were talking about the madness of the world, "everything you said would happen has come true." Maybe I caught one?

Curiously, loneliness has not been a problem for me in this pandemic. It has made me start writing again, while I plan to break away from my civilization even more thoroughly. When it tips over that cliff I intend to watch it calmly, to be there for the survivors.

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