[Edit 2: I think anyone commenting should identify how much they use Facebook in their comment lol]
On the list of people I describe in the subject, I place myself first. If you’re here to defend yourself by showing me your receipts, congratulations, you win, I just saved us who knows how much time. I’m typing this out in an attempt to describe phenomena, not persuade you of anything in particular, other than, this is a thing I see happening a lot; too much would be my take.
I’m just gonna grab [a] most egregious example, but I would like to talk about this, not as a horrific fail, but as an exemplar; at the moment I believe that most people categorize it as the former.
[edit: there really is no “most” egregious example, and I just thought of a much worse one, and unlike Facebook I am fully guilty of this one: I own and drive a car, a lot, and boy am I ignoring some real world consequences there.]
That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified.
To more easily conceptualize this, it’s much the same as me needing a shovel, and having a neighbour that I happen to know murdered someone with their shovel, but has not been arrested for it, and right when I need the shovel, they walk over with their bloodstained shovel and offer to let me use it for my non-murder task. And I just go “Wow how convenient that you happened to be here with that bright-red shovel just now, I think I’ll use this one one of yours with the little spatters of brain on it, instead of walking over to my shed and getting my own shovel out!”
We are talking about murder here, Facebook was used to foment mass murder and in a world that made sense, Zuckerberg would be handed over to the ICC years ago, along with Henry Kissinger and a number of others who instead hang out at the Nobel Peace Prize club where Barack makes a mean Mai Tai.
The problems that people use Facebook to constructively solve is connections to family and close friends, event and interest group organizing, the marketplace, and for the avid user it constitutes a daily journal.
These problems could each be solved using something else that is also just as gratis. It might be a small amount of effort more, but then you maybe don’t ever have to touch the remains of a human life that once existed and now does not, due to this particular device being used to end that life.
But it seems that it’s more convenient, easy, zero effort, to simply ignore the gore.
That’s what I see on the internet. I don’t think anyone has ever accepted a bloodstained shovel and set to digging a ditch with it who didn’t also feel that their life was next if they didn’t, but as long as there’s no visible bloodstains, as long as it’s just a few articles and podcasts from known radical leftists, eh, look at little Jimmy’s recital, isn’t he cute?
FFS. There is no point lecturing people from on high. Talk about it, sure. Information is good. But moralising will do nothing useful. Point your fingers at bad systems, not the people who are just trying to live their lives under mostly quite difficult circumstances. Improve the environment in which people are forced to make difficult trade-offs. Don’t bully them for facing difficult trade-offs and not being obsessed about exactly the same things you are. It will not do you, or anyone else, any good. The problems are structural, fight the structures.
Isn’t it difficult to initiate change to big companies without user pushback? What impetus do they have to change when their user base accepts what they are given? Sure, regulators and legislators should do something, but they aren’t going to do it on their own. People need to do their part, and mass exodus is something the media reports on. I’m not asking anyone to abandon these places entirely, especially if their communication with certain people relies on it, but anyone can move away from them to some extent. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not with doing. Also, in no way am I saying that it is the users sole responsibility to bring down or hold these companies accountable, but it usually takes some grassroots to get something started.
People need to do a lot of things. Very few people have the time to do everything they’d like to do, let alone everything you’d like them to do.
Attack the systems that trap us, not the people who are trapped by them. This is not hard.
How do you think we should attack the system? Isn’t boycotting exactly that?
Of course it is. But attacking other people for not joining your boycott is attacking other people, not the system. Like I said, talk about why you boycott X but don’t sneer at or lecture anyone who is not also boycotting X.
This is not hard.
If you’re taking about OP, I get what you’re saying. It’s a lot to get mad at the ignorant or the struggling because of something that isn’t being widely reported. Many people are “ignoring” something that they don know whether to believe, if they even know about it at all. I do stand firm, however, that once you know about an atrocity that a company has committed, continuing to use it either indicates you don’t care or (if the atrocities are ongoing) are complicit in their activities.
Because everyone has enough time on their hands, right? Capitalism doesn’t keep them scrabbling for rent money and food and too busy to know what’s going on with their family, let alone the wider world. They’ve got all the time in the world. That’s why you’re a vegan riding a handmade wooden bicycle and handwoven clothes, living off grid, never using anything with a combustion engine, or any consumer electronics you can’t make for yourself from scratch, or a corporate ISP, and not growing your own food because farming is more sustainable, so you get what you can’t forage direct from the farm gates.
I mean, I’m guessing you’re not. But if you are, it’s because you’re wealthy enough to make those choices. Most people are not, as well you know. And those who can make some of those choices can pretty much never make all or even most of them. And it is not up to you to decide which choices they should make, or berate them for not making the choices you yourself made.
It is about power, not individuals. Alienating the people you need onside is downright fucking daft.
we are on the internet talking about people using social networks. vast majority of internet users have email addressees through thier ISPs, most popular tool used is a smart phone meaning they very often have phone numbers, SMS, and a number of other comm options.
however I do agree to a certain degree, there are some services that try to gate through centralized socials though I have yet to see any of those be the kinds of social support services that people using state-issued hardware and connections would be forced to. Show me some and Ill let the EFF know.
Exactly. Other people care about different things for equally good reasons. Unless you are doing absolutely everything that other people might want to focus their energies on, you’re a fucking hypocrite. And if you are doing even a tiny fraction of those things successfully, you’re a rich kid playing at life and berating everyone else for not having been born lucky.
Quit it. Please.
im not sure where you are seeing this, unless you are speaking generally.
if this is directed at me, I would say its this tone I get from people that would inspire me to look down and potentially lecture.
as i am often told, its not what you are saying, its how you are saying it.
Yeah, they really come off as an angry jerk when they’re telling us not to be jerks.
ive projected my online anger before too. on lemmy there are going to be a lot of
“i dont like this about the internet”
wit replies that say
“well dont use the billionaires toy, drive your own internet instead”
which regardless of how its presented i expect can feel like an onslaught if you are trying to understand and still feel connected in some way to those networks.
Ive never really depended on them for connection and have always considered it extremely rude to expect me to communicate with you using systems like these. Its not just a game of “come talk to me here” its “you can only talk to me if you click 3 agreements, hand over your personal info to a large corp and accept multiple trackers on your browser”
thats quite an ask for messages I can send via email if its REALLY that important.