UPDATE: 01/23/2025: I deleted Instagram, too.
This week Meta announced new moderation policies that specifically allow anti-LGBQT rhetoric that was previously disallowed. It’s even worse than it sounds: The new policies specifically state, for example, that you still can’t call specific groups of people “mentally ill” — UNLESS you’re talking about LGBQT people.
Meta says it forbids insults on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads regarding “Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity.” But the guidelines immediately qualify that restriction by saying (emphasis mine):
We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
On top of everything, Meta uses the word “transgenderism,” which GLAAD describes as a “hateful term.” According to GLAAD:
The current usage of “transgenderism” arises from anti-trans extremists who seek to delegitimize and dehumanize trans people by implying that being trans is an ideology rather than an identity.
In short, Meta’s new “moderation” policy looks to me like an immoral, inexcusable instruction book for harassment, describing in detail how bigots can harass LGBQT people and not get banned.
So I deleted my Threads account.
Threads was already an annoying social network. Its insistence on forcing users into an algorithmic “For You” feed made it hard to see and be seen by folks I was following and followed by; its ability to thread posts, ironically, was terrible; and its monetization of posting encouraged a constant deluge of tedious “story time” clickbait posting. So it wasn’t a great personal loss to let it go; in fact, not having one more social network I feel obligated to occasionally post on frees up a little mental and psychic space in my head that feels good to get back.
I’d already deleted Facebook years ago due to some other horrible thing the company had done, so that leaves Instagram as my last Meta service. I already find Instagram clunky and anti-intuitive to post on, but it’s the only place I can find a bunch of friends and acquaintances who don’t really post anywhere else.
But in the fullness of time, I imagine I’ll delete Instagram as well.
For now, I’m on Bluesky, which as I’ve said many times isn’t perfect. But it’s absolutely the best of the bunch in my opinion. Please do feel free to follow me there. I’m also still on Mastodon.
Even more importantly, you can sign up for my Personal/Political newsletter. It’s free, and it’s a way to stay connected even if and when all of these social networks collapse.
