Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

AYCOFSM??

great band

in all seriousness though, no I am not, and I should have realized this the first time I told someone on USEnet I wished he was dead when I was 15

I'm a no too. ilx is as close as it gets for me

What’s our working definition of ‘social media’?

I know I have laid myself open to nothing but acronyms and emoticons and links to Chris Cillizza think-pieces.

lol

For me it would be Facebook and ILX, but that would extend to the other popular platforms people use--Twitter, Instagram, etc.

😎

j. is going to single-handedly kill this thread I worked very hard to conceptualize.

Voting something in-between.

was amateurist really popular? i think not

i mean that was his charm

such as it was

I tried to cozy up to him a few times early on but he was having none of it.

Maybe popular is the wrong word. I always felt like he was taken to be very thoughtful, but I couldn't get past the tone. Anyway, I don't want this to be about him--my point was that I sometimes share the thing that drove me up the wall.

I already know I will not join commercialized social media unless under compulsion of force majeure. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Tumblr, no TikTok, no Next Big Thing Everyone Uses, even if it turns my snoot into unicorns. It's bad enough being shadowed by Amazon & other retailers, and having an Android phone.

Thank you for existing, ILX and ilxors. This is a scene I can happily join without selling myself bit by bit. (see what I did there?)

I dont count ILX as "social media", nor most other forums, even Reddit. SM is more things like FB/Insta/Snapchat/Twitter.

So insofar as Ive always loved fora and blogging (Usenet, mailing lists, blogs/livejournal/ILX), I have always sat somewhere between bored despair and outright revulsion for the rest. I'm too old (SC/Insta), or I just Dont get it (Twitter).

I log on to twitter the most because I can refrain from posting and can be anonymous and it really feels like something I can make my own very easily, also it feels like a social leveler

then instagram where I can look at my friends' posts.

I can't bear to go into my facebook account these days, I’ve been thinking about why that happened, there was nothing particularly egregious about it in my experience, I guess I’m just embarrassed to share my experiences with people I barely know

it’s much better on ilx with people I don’t at all know tbh

I love some of tiktok

I can’t sh0t any of them successfully but I try now and then. I’ve been on a discord kick for a few weeks now, it’s ok I guess.

(xposts) Age is definitely part of it (I'm 58). I think back to arguments in fanzines...You had a month to temper your response. I remember one in particular, having to do, of all things, with Celine Dion (between two other people), and I thought, wow, that's a pretty nasty exchange. It would be a shadow of an echo of a blip today.

i'm basically just wishing happy birthdays on facebook. If I posted a photo more often I'd be more in line with the majority of major social media platform users. OP describing power users/vocal minority i think

i was pretty sure this thread was going to be about the 1975

OK, I guess I'll be the pro-social media guy.

I'm reasonably active on Twitter; I use it to post links to shit I've written, or when I have a new episode of my podcast going up, and then I engage with the people I follow. (I have many more followers than people I follow - basically, I'm on there to have conversations with people I think are interesting, and anyone who follows me is the audience for those conversations, is how I think about it.) I post a lot of jokes, making fun of bands and politicians and stupid news stories and whatnot.

On Instagram, I mostly post pictures of whatever I'm reading or listening to.

On Facebook, I post some of the same shit I post on Twitter, and I comment on a few friends' posts, but that's about it. I'm also part of a FB group which has occasionally yielded professional opportunities.

For about the last decade, I have also been the social media person for my employer or for clients. I actually find "speaking" in a professional (or academic) "voice" on Twitter, FB, Instagram and even LinkedIn to be interesting, and it can be a creative challenge at times.

social media was more or less fine before it was public facing. the combination of 1. real name/identity linked to account and 2. assumption that random people you've never met will (and should be) exposed to your content turned me away from it probably forever

twitter becoming a personal brand machine for people who don't need personal brands + a supposed networking tool for many has ruined a lot of the social world for me. i can't force my brain to adjust to it and if i had it my way i would live on an island where it doesn't exist. jobs requiring people to have a professional twitter presence is obviously very bad. i don't hesitate to say it's a general evil and i don't trust people who claim it's a social good.

facebook is sort of the same. i loved it when it felt like the posts i made were for my friends. then it blew up, suddenly you're adding everyone in your family and people you barely know and even though you aren't expected to open it up to complete strangers, it still becomes a performance where you must create a version of yourself for everyone you know. i stopped posting on it when that shift happened, it lost its intimacy.

uperson you have a much more neutral approach to this than I've been able to manage

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts. it's ridiculous i know but I didn't want to be in the spotlight like that

I think that encapsulates my aversion to facebook

i listed where I actually worked for a year and posted once innocently about a raise I got. somehow, it got back to my boss as someone squealed on me for posting that.

I then changed my profile to say my job was selling drugs

haven't had it happen since

I miss the days (2008) when Twitter was an amazing thing that beamed the thoughts of kristin hersh and kay hanley to my phone

98% of my Facebook "friends" are actually professional connections - other writers, music industry people, musicians, etc. The other 2% are a couple of my relatives, with whom I never engage, and one or two people I went to high school with. Every once in a great while, my brother will comment on something I post. But otherwise, it might as well be a LinkedIn page, with dumb jokes.

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts.

Did the same three or four years ago--uncomfortable, and also, the worst, cognizant of who posted and who didn't. (Probably got that from died-just-as-Facebook-was-invented grandmother; she used to always keep an exact count of how many Christmas cards she got each year.) I continue to post birthday wishes myself with most people I've actually met, with a secret system that indicates how I actually feel about you.

"from my"

the creepy thing about birthdate on FB is I've had friends die and their family members didn't know how to convert their profile into a Tribute page, so casual acquaintances who didn't know they died would write "happy birthday" posts on their wall. I don't mean the "remembering you today, my angel" type posts, but like they actually thought they were saying it to a living person.

it's also creepy to see FB accounts up 10+ years after the person died, and yet...someone my age that I didn't even know died of a heart attack in 2010 (she was a friend of a friend), profile is still there, still not a tribute page, page preserved in amber from 10 years ago.

Twitter is basically my newspaper, I'm on it a lot to know what's going on and be entertained, but I have no drive to cultivate my own online personality or brand.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past.
And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

I think it already has. See also "i have an account but i don't even use it"

kristin hersh still beams thoughts at me!

i still have a facebook profile because i need it for work, but have stripped it of everything but my name. (xp lol) should probably change my photo now that neil peart has died

started using twitter because of work and have become pretty attached, but if i missed something, it's gone; i'm not a completist. the politics/trump stuff can become draining, but that's my fault for not better pruning my follows/filters

i'm on no others, which, i'm told, is where the real shit happens now. it's fine; i'm pretty old

85% of my relationships started one way or another on FB, usually because I'd start a convo online and then wouldn't feel so awkward talking to the person in public.

xp -- true! if only it was just that (these were the days when tweets were sent as SMS messages to your phone)

(at least in my circles, a lot of people have migrated to Discord, which feels kind of like a happy public vs. private medium)

jill hennessy liked one of my tweets so can't nobody tell me nothin about social media, forever

Yah the kids in my house are all on discord. It seems to be akin to a cross between a forum and a sort of IRC?

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

the highlight of my Twitter career was zinging Prodigy of Mobb Deep and having him laugh at it

RIP

we've probably all been retweeted by Lil B at some point?

he linked back to the ILX thread ten years ago!

also Ripper Owens was upset that I dismissively mentioned his blip of a career in Judas Priest in less than illustrious terms

I have two girls, 11 & 16 years old. Their levels of screen time, content, and internet access have increased as they have gotten older.

Regarding social media, there’s practically none until 16 which is when they get a smartphone. They have/had ipads before that but with parental restrictions appropriate to their age and a lot of oversight. Open access to youtube but only on a desktop in a shared space.

When my oldest was 15 I let her get on Pinterest which I kept an eye on. When she turned 16 and got a smartphone all the training wheels came off and she now has open access to whatever. They didn’t work to circumvent these restrictions because we’re very open to the type of content they seek out and we engage with them and their interests.

The computers/social media aspect of parenting hasn’t been a serious struggle, and big part of that is specific to us. My kids are not tech focused; they’re too lazy to figure out workarounds. Neither are gamers. They have in-person social lives.

That’s what works for us and it should not be enforced by the state.

but the social media companies who determine your feeds do not

Right, that's why I don't use their feeds for news.

Just reading about the cuts at the BBC.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgmqrrlej5o

If the government was really interested in keeping up a strong information environment it might've been a good idea to try and put together a package to replace the shortfall in license fee money

xps thanks rob, that was enlightening

people absolutely DO need social media to get news

wow, you guys are clearly very intelligent and so I'll just say that it's fascinating to me that intelligent people can think this, when to me it seems so obvious that social media is a terrible source for news, and that it has actively eroded traditional media which - for all its flaws - is the only reliable source for news

I'm a parent of a kid about to step into all this stuff in the next few years. I haven't read all the discussion so far itt as it got derailed.

I have seen data from our local school kids about the things they have seen online that concern them (the kids themselves) that weren't even on their parents' lists of worries (real or imagined). Eating disorder and suicide content for starters. Bullying etc.

I see up close exactly what is pushed to my kids and what they think is worth clicking on, or giving credibility to.

the whole thing is a mess that needs careful navigation and engagement.

sorry for not navigating or engaging with this thread so far :)

xps CowArt I'm doing similar. phone will be for calls / text messages only. They have a tablet they use at home and I'm going to be 'educating' about what to trust, what's junk etc and what they can even access at age 11.

They both got flip phones at 10 which worked well. When the oldest was 12 she griped about not having a smart phone but around 15 she thought it was cool (she still wanted a smart phone).

.

_people absolutely DO need social media to get news_

wow, you guys are clearly very intelligent and so I'll just say that it's fascinating to me that intelligent people can think this, when to me it seems so obvious that social media is a terrible source for news, and that it has actively eroded traditional media which - for all its flaws - is the only reliable source for news

Maybe if traditional media actually did its job, people would trust it. To even suggest that a paper like the NYTimes is more reliable than more marginalized reporting and on the ground reporting is laughable. The Times and most major news outlets are in the bag for hypercapitalism, endless growth, the destruction of the social contract, and any number of other noxious and destructive views. And that’s not even getting to the manufacturing consent for genocide. I am equally shocked by people like you!! How was Ross Douthat’s friendly convo with JD Vance? Enlightening??

let's not conflate opinion columns and podcasts with news reporting.

the new york times publishes 100+ pieces of journalism every day, the majority of which are perfectly good, straightforward news reports that never make waves on social media because they aren't controversial or inflammatory in any way. yes, the paper employs some dunderheads and yes, it has some major blind spots and biases on certain subjects. but justifiable complaints about these things on social media have led some people to believe that the paper is unmitigated trash that can't be trusted for anything, and I really don't think that's true.

Yeah I'm still curious about people saying they get their news from social media only and whether they mean like someone talking in a video or a podcast. And if so presumably that person has to get the primary news report from a mainstream source, unless it's the kind of on the ground situation rob mentioned. So people want to consume news and opinion at the same time? Or some other reason?

Is rando Qanon pizza guy a marginalized source?

Only when banned from ILX

if so presumably that person has to get the primary news report from a mainstream source, unless it's the kind of on the ground situation rob mentioned.

Well, they probably have to get it from Reuters or AP, yes, same as the traditional press has to, by and large. But there's also a lot of good independent reporting being done - É Apenas Fumaça for instance is an online based publication in Portugal that regularly outscoops the trad press ans goes WAY deeper into investigative journalism than the trad papers can afford to. I don't instantly know of a UK equivalent, sadly.

I mainly get my news from here and Bluesky, but a lot of the sources are mainstream.

Social media really illustrates how schizophrenic it has always been to look through a newspaper. Yes you have your reporting on topics and countries with little interference on on page after page and then you see biased reporting, lies and inflammatory opinions from their thought leaders, who are only employed because that's the politics of the paper.

Often enough its the latter that is mostly picked on by people posting as worthy of comment/shooting down.

opinion is rampant in newspapers because of social media. the stuff that costs nothing generates as much attention as the stuff that someone has to leave a desk to do, or be sent away to do, or do months of research for.

Not "as much" - considerably more!

My memory is that this development was already a problem before social media but it's def made it worse yes.

yep for sure. don't disagree.

otm, one problem with the social media / newspapers comparison is how much the latter have changed due to the influence of the former. though I maintain there are obvious and crucial differences that make the comparison of limited use—if nothing else, very few people ever spent hours of every day reading the newspaper

btw what I thought was interesting about that Nature study on X was that the subjects' partisan affiliation didn't change. IOW, democrats on (algorithmic) X remained self-identified democrats, they just became more conservative democrats

i personally think reading as an activity lends itself to analysis more than listening or watching, but i have no evidence for this apart from it feels true for me. another factor that's hard to unpick.

The problem with social media and news is how easy it is for bad info to travel fast and wide.

Like most people I know who say they get their news from social media are typically reading Marisa Kaba and Judd Legum type sources, which is perfectly fine.

But internet sleuths, grifters, and outright liars also post outright nonsense on there, and in the hunger to catch updates as they happen, to be ahead of the curve, misinformation spreads fast and is much harder to correct.

Like every time someone shares harmful misinformation during an active shooting including misidentifying the shooter, or sharing guidance that contradicts what officials are sharing.

COVID was particularly bad for that as well, and while this happened largely because Trump's CDC was compromised and outright trying to downplay everything, the open warring on there between people who all called themselves experts led people to distrust actual experts and trust in the word of cranks and phonies.

On the other hand, shit like the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings had a lot of helpful on the ground information posted by witnesses that quickly contradicted the official narrative before it could gain a foothold, which was extremely valuable and important. So there's definitely a value in it which I don't want to dismiss.

The problem is that social media addiction has rewired our brains. It moves so fast and people feel so pressured to take a side quickly that it leads our brains to take shortcuts. Sharing articles without reading them, or assuming every morsel of news is valid without spending the extra few minutes to fact check or examine the source.

That problem existed before social media, the average person has always sucked at assessment, but the speed at which news moves, plus our subconscious desire to become a part of it as quickly has possible have made this problem much bigger.

I've been at parties when formerly astute friends will ask if anybody saw the latest news on xxx and it'll be some actual unsourced garbage from BlueSky or Twit but everyone at the gathering will begin talking about it like it's true because they respect the friend who brought it up.

So there's good and bad about getting news on social media but the bad often gets downplayed. I'll still use it to look for updates from sources I've already vetted and trust, or witnesses posting videos from unfolding situations, but everything else i tend to scrutinize heavily

It's also actively harmful if you have OCD like me to where you get into refresh cycles and feel like you can't disengage because every bit of reassurance paradoxically causes more doubt. I once sat in an empty bathtub for 3 hours doomscrolling without realizing how much time passed.

(Very much past that now thankfully)

In the past year I decided I don't want to consume news through social media anymore, for all the above reasons. At other times, it's felt like I was, yes, more informed but also somewhat dumber: more reactive, quick to take unnuanced positions, and unwilling to consider diverging opinions - in other words, more concerned with Being Right and Not Wrong), not to mention angrier and considerably more anxious, which for me translates to being more passive and resigned. Plugging into a news cycle that moves faster than I can think feels counter to being thoughtful, and being constantly overwhelmed feels counter to being engaged. It raises questions about what is information for? More often than not it feels like I'm volunteering myself be transformed into a machine for consuming "content", so I can spit out "discourse" and "engagement", to be mined more content.

When I think of how much time I spent last week compulsively checking my phone for, say, new comments about hardcore guys in banana suits, the idea of exponentially accelerating and multiplying that experience feels like a truly terrible idea for myself and those around me.

I don't like how it manipulates my time and attention. I will see something in a post and then get focused on that topic, looking up more information about it or trying to find something that I can post in response. Fifteen minutes go by, and I realize that I have let the feed determine what I am paying attention to instead of making more deliberate choices of my own.

I just added a community note explaining why a post was racist and a Zuckbot removed it saying my note calling out the racism was racism because their AI is so fucking stupid

Aww I'd read Nitsuh's article but I don't pay for the Times anymore. I go to the Guardian for world news, otherwise I dabble in BlueSky, but mostly I follow people on TT: Jessica Valenti, Jamelle Bouie, economist Kathryn Edwards, any electeds that I care about, StreetsblogNYC, Lina Khan, the Starbucks workers' union, Paola Ramos, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jonathan Katz, Imani Barbarin, Dean Spade, a lot of authors and academics and journalists...that kind of thing.

let's not conflate opinion columns and podcasts with news reporting.

the new york times publishes 100+ pieces of journalism every day, the majority of which are perfectly good, straightforward news reports that never make waves on social media because they aren't controversial or inflammatory in any way. yes, the paper employs some dunderheads and yes, it has some major blind spots and biases on certain subjects. but justifiable complaints about these things on social media have led some people to believe that the paper is unmitigated trash that can't be trusted for anything, and I really don't think that's true.

It hasn’t retracted the thoroughly disproven accounts of mass rape and baby murder from October 7; it hasn’t retracted its support for the second Iraq war and its reporting on non-existent WMDs; it hasn’t retracted its thoroughly disproven and biased reports on trans healthcare.

It has, in other words, aided and abetted the murder of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. It is a bullhorn for Empire and US hegemony. The only reason to read it— which I do, daily, through a subscription I don’t pay for— is to know exactly what the enemy is thinking.

and for Connections

Wordle, sometimes, too

Aww I'd read Nitsuh's article but I don't pay for the Times anymore. I go to the Guardian for world news, otherwise I dabble in BlueSky, but mostly I follow people on TT: Jessica Valenti, Jamelle Bouie, economist Kathryn Edwards, any electeds that I care about, StreetsblogNYC, Lina Khan, the Starbucks workers' union, Paola Ramos, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jonathan Katz, Imani Barbarin, Dean Spade, a lot of authors and academics and journalists...that kind of thing.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Thursday, June 18, 2026 11:15 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this list rules btw

The only reason to read it— which I do, daily, through a subscription I don’t pay for— is to know exactly what the enemy is thinking.

definitely.

tho some of the recipes are quite good too. made a lovely carrot and miso soup just the other week.

oooh

Table otm, for every piece of half decent journalism NYT does to launder its rep, that doesn't right the wrongs of running damaging stuff, including lots of imperial propaganda to manufacture consent for bloodshed and looting in West Asia.

✅ Thanks for joining the movement. https://t.co/J2UNzD1GMv

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 18, 2026

modern slavery police state UAE, run by absolute monarchs in compliance with Kieth and Macron, two of the most despised arseholes in Western Europe. Both hated in their own countries and going increasingly authoritarian. Doing an absolutely cracking job of promoting democracy as the only system that promotes freedom, civil liberties and human rights, lads.

he's prob gone mad from posting on x

this is his brain on x

but mostly I follow people on TT

I like some of the people you follow, especially Jamelle Bouie, who I am glad is reaching people on YouTube and TikTok who do not read the NYT (or even realize that he works there). Personally, I have a deep reluctance to watch someone monologue for three minutes when I could read the same text in a fraction of the time. But that's me.

It strikes me, though, that a lot of the trusted journalists that people follow on social media are trusted mostly for their perspectives. They may do rigorous reporting but people follow them because people know what they believe (and agree with it). This was certainly true of me and the journalists I followed on Twitter. I felt well-informed by what they shared, but I think we have to acknowledge that it is different from following news that is presented in a more neutral way. (For instance, I can imagine someone who reads Time magazine every week feeling well-informed, too. They would certainly miss out on a lot, but they might also learn about things that aren't social media fodder.)

good posts, jaymc

I'm sure you know this jaymc, but "news presented in a neutral way", the key word there is "presented". Any newspaper (or website) will be making tons of decisions within its news reporting that cannot be neutral - starting by what is included or left out, but even after that there is the question of who you choose to have a soundbyte on the matter, what context you decide to squeeze into the (often limited) column space, etc.

This is why I think it's important for journalists to be upfront about their political allegiances, it allows the reader to account for bias (including bias you agree with!) and read with a critical eye. The illusion of neutrally presented "just the news" obfuscates things a lot.

yes that's true. but I still think there is value in "straight" news reporting, even though I freely acknowledge that there all kinds of hidden (and sometimes not-so-hidden) biases in "the view from nowhere." I worry about a world in which we're all just paying attention to commentators while there are fewer and fewer traditional reporters who can establish a factual baseline.

Yes that is a concern. And obviously making the reader aware of your own political leanings doesn't mean you can't then still do straight news reporting.

The biggest casualty isn't so much day-to-day reporting though, it is investigative journalism: hard and draining, takes a lot of time and resources, doesn't get the clicks like an opinion column does.

It's good for news and opinion to be separate imo.

Daniel otm also, big investigations so expensive but someone writing or podcasting some mad opinion they hold or whatever might cost nothing and generate more cash.

As with politics, often the best straight news reporting happens locally imo.

Maybe social media accelerated but cuts in investigations predates social media, right? Newspapers have been bleeding cash for a long time...

Yes I think that's right, the crisis predates social media but has been considerably worsened by it.

feel like the decline in investigative journalism has bled through to a general devaluing of truth-seeking/exposing in favour of political stenography which is stuck on a surface level analysis as the news continually moves on

The idea that the truth doesn't matter is fairly widespread, like is this true idk but could be and that's what's important when if isn't.

even*