Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part I - That Sinking Feeling
When you realise you made an error and things you adopted more than 15 years ago became utterly bad
I AM a recovering addict of Social Control Media (me as a person, not this site). I started in 2009 in Identi.ca (now StatusNet or GNU Social) after Tony Manco from Portugal had pressured me to, assuring me it would prove handy. I stopped around 2020 (passive usage) and quit altogether 3 years ago [1, 2]. Having posted in Mastodon or Pleroma, I saw one kind of disaster in the free speech sense [1, 2] (just like Gab, with opposite polarity) and I was apparently the first person ever to attract legal threats to Diaspora*, simply because I had stated the truth about some technical matter (I outlasted this and later published that legal threat in my blog). That came from a Trump lawyer almost at the same time Trump blocked me in Twitter.
As a former Social Control Media user, I feel like a rehabilitated smoker. Would I have done it again? Probably not. But I just didn't know (and perhaps nobody truly knew) what a monster Social Control Media would become.
Today's series (we are doing 3 series in parallel this month) takes a look at how much worse Social Control Media is still becoming - to the point where we compare a likely "market leader" (for video strips/reels) to fentanyl. We still call it "Fentanylware".
I would absolutely never touch any Social Control Media ever again, even if somebody paid me to.
Speaking of "Fentanylware", Ryan told me this morning that: "The other social control ["media"] adds tiktok-ish things. Twitter has them. Mandy [Ryan's husband] is always on that stupid Twitter thing. I got off Facebook many years ago now. Trump (the first time) was passing a regulation to spy on it in a new way to dig for dirt. It didn't sit well with me. It's become unofficial policy with most government agencies you ask for something, be it an immigration benefit, welfare, a gun permit, Social Security, they go look and see if you have any social control profiles. They just scroll down it and see what kind of nasty dirt they can come up with. The problem is they are looking specifically for things that don't put you in the best light. They always want to know what's on your mind Roy. Early Warning."
It's not just companies and governments doing that. It's also people who in your social and professional life who do not like you and try to quote you out of context on something.
We actually sued a despicable narcissist [1, 2] who creates imposter accounts in IRC (hijacking other people's identities) and thinks that us quoting what he wrote in public to social control media (sometimes with a screenshot as proof) is a "privacy violation". Sorry, maniac, it doesn't work that way.
If you advertise to the entire world that you have TB, for instance, then it's no longer a secret.
Our original plan was to make this one long and detailed article, but we now have more material that people can easily absorb in a few minutes. Today in the UK it will be sunny (we'll run at around 5pm, there's still light), so why hurry? If you want to share with us some personal experiences, based on time spent in Social Control Media, please contact us in IRC or E-mail. █