Meta has been a shithole for quite some time now. Mark Zuckerberg has always been ethically and morally deficient, but now that Trump is going into a second presidental term he's sinking to new depths to pander to the philanderer in chief. Meta is doing away with fact checking, which is insane as Facebook has been a font of misinformation for ages. I probably could have accepted that. I never went to Facebook for news or information. But now they're throwing away the rules concerning hate speech as well, and that's just a bridge too far for me. In a story from CNN I saw that it will now be permissable to refer to women as household objects or property or to refer to transgender people as “it.”
That's not free speech. That's hate.
I'm too committed to my values to take my business to companies or organizations whose values don't align with mine. I don't shop at Walmart. I don't eat at McDonald's or Jimmy John's. So I'm not going to have a presence on platforms that allow misogyny, transphobia and or hateful attitudes.
It's no big deal that I'm getting rid of Threads. It is a poor substitute for Twitter and I barely look at it. Plus I find it very annoying how Meta is trying to push it down my throat. I'm certainly not going to miss that. Facebook itself is not that big a deal, but there are people on there where that is the only place I'm able to keep up with what's going on in their lives. But Instagram is going to hurt. That's where I'm most active and where I also interact with the most people. Plus, as a photographer, it's going to feel odd to not to have an account there. But I'd rather be true to my ideals than have an uneasy feeling every time I did something on any of these platforms. Tumblr and Bluesky will have to meet my needs for the time being and I intend on updating this blog more often now with these changes happening. It's going to be very different online for me going forward.