The Platform Problem

I'm doing my best to leave Meta behind. It's hard. That's what they're counting on.

The Platform Problem

Remember about a year and a half ago? I know it’s been a very long time.

In late 2023, Elon Musk was just starting his long process of absolutely annihilating the value of Twitter/X, and for some reason I am not willing to remember, he and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg got into a very public pissing match, during which Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cage fight.

As far as I can tell, Musk immediately backed out once he realized that Zuckerberg actually participates in martial arts and wouldn’t be as easy to bully as Musk had hoped.

The big thing I remember was how many people rallied behind Zuckerberg. It made a kind of sense: He had put Musk in his place, and Musk was a toxic, bigoted troll who was spending every waking moment making the internet a shittier and less welcoming place. There was a level of satisfaction watching him literally hide behind his mother while backing out of a fight he started.

Even in the moment, while enjoying Musk’s humiliation, I remember thinking it was weird that so many people were cheering on Zuckerberg — a guy who seems to be profoundly misogynist, and whose company has absolutely had an overall negative impact on the world.

In the moment, there were people who thought it was a little more complex than that. Meta, after all, was at least nominally a reasonably progressive company. They actually spent money on moderation (even if it was shitty), and they stood by their barebones, industry-standard diversity and inclusion policies while Musk was jumping on board with white supremacists and weird crypto and podcast bros who wanted to eliminate those for…reasons.

So…yeah. Zuckerberg had been key to throwing the 2016 election to Trump, but at least he was doing the absolute bare minimum of not being a very public bigot. So…cheer for him? I guess?

But really, it was performative and dumb. It was like the left-wing equivalent of paying $9 for eggs to “own the libs.” A year and change later, most committed left-wing activists I know are working to leave Meta behind as the platform becomes increasingly hostile to…well, everybody who isn’t Mark Zuckerberg or Donald Trump. So, how did we get here?

Following the November election, a number of big corporations have gone all-in on appealing to Trump’s vanity. I’ll stop short of saying companies like Amazon and Meta are “supporting” Trump, but they’re coming very, very close to it. At a minimum, they’re letting the far right shape the narrative in a way that I find really distasteful and irresponsible.

To that end, Zuckerberg announced that they were loosening their content moderation standards to basically nonexistent, laying off a bunch of people, and leaving fact-checking in the hands of the community, a la Musk’s “Community Notes” model on X.

There are some great use cases for Community Notes, and certainly it’s funny as hell when you see some fool arguing in bad faith get “noted” into oblivion — let’s be honest, it’s usually Musk himself — but the notes model is not a replacement for moderation.

Content moderation is a difficult, stressful job. The people who do it full time spend their day looking at the absolute worst and most hateful of humanity, and they do it in order to keep your experience on the internet more pleasant and safe. It’s not something that can be done adequately by a bunch of opinionated people who just feel the need to “well, actually…” the rest of the world.

The death of expertise on the internet is actually something that’s a pretty serious problem, and something I have touched on before. One of my go-to examples is when Zach Roberts ends up in absurd arguments on Facebook with trolls who think they know better than him about “election fraud,” when in fact Zach spent almost 20 years working with Greg Palast, a journalist who has been investigating and reporting on voter suppression for decades now.

And, yes, Facebook itself has contributed to this issue in the past (not just because that’s where I saw those conversations happen). They’re doubling down on that now, and retreating from the idea that facts matter. That’s shitty and dangerous, and I don’t want to be a part of it. So I removed Facebook and Instagram from my phone, and I closed my Instagram account entirely.

Why am I still on Facebook?

Because Facebook is a platform with tentacles that go everywhere. My kids have a Meta Quest headset, and that can’t work without me having a Facebook account. I am sometimes required by my various employers to share something to Facebook, and I can’t do that — either to my business page or to theirs — if I don’t have an account. So I’m doing what I can to act as a person of conscience, within the bounds of the reality I live in. I’ll stop posting to Facebook, I’ll stop scrolling there, I’ll delete most of my photos and mark my existing content as private to make as small a footprint as I possibly can. I can’t just press “delete account,” because as a matter of practical reality, I need to have some level of access to the platform.

That is, of course, what they’re counting on. It’s why, as he was hemorrhaging users after the buyout of Twitter, Musk said he wanted to transform the microblogging site into an “everything app” where you could shop and watch movies. Facebook has created an ecosphere that is virtually impossible to fully leave, without depriving yourself of seemingly-unrelated opportunities. That way, even when you don’t want to be there, you’re still there. I haven’t deleted Messenger from my phone yet becuase, as I slowly move out of the Meta ecosphere, I still get periodic messages from people asking “Hey! What happened to your Instagram account?” I don’t think these people have my phone number or email. I think we all became so comfortable with these platforms that we have given them way too much real estate in our lives.

I don’t have a happy ending for that story. I am where I am. You can judge me for not fully committing to being totally disconnected from Meta, or you can think I’m overreacting by moving on in the first place. Either of those are valid opinions, I suppose, and everybody is just trying to do their best.

And on that note, I’m migrating my Substack blog to Medium.

Surprise! This Meta post got…meta.

I have had a version of this post in drafts for about a week, talking about my decision to leave Meta and the dangers of allowing bad actors to have access to our social lives and data online. I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance of comfort versus personal responsibility that you have to try to strike when you’re living in an increasingly corporatized world, where you know on some level that almost every company you interact with is evil.

Substack has been a really convenient place for me to host the Emerald City Video Podcast, as well as my own posts, where I found a home for some of my writing after being laid off last fall. The entire time, there has been a low buzz in the background — people expressing concern about Substack’s loose moderation and their willingness to allow hate speech to flourish on their platform.

I hadn’t really dug too deep into it, since there are a lot of people on Substack who I trust and respect. I figured they wouldn’t be on the site if its management was shitty, and I didn’t have time to apply for jobs, keep writing, and do my due diligence.

Then, Substack itself sent out a blog that was like firing red flags out of a t-shirt cannon. Praising Elon Musk as a pioneer for free speech, the blog (from Substack’s co-founder, Chris Best) reaffirmed Substack’s “commitment to free speech,” essentially underlining their policy that they aren’t concerned about what kind of content is monetized on Substack, provided they get their cut.

Meta doesn’t care about free speech. Substack doesn’t care about free speech. What they want is to use free speech as a kind of cudgel to beat off any criticism. The concept has been weaponized by the right in recent years, and policies and posts like the ones we’re seeing from rich, white tech bros are buying into that, and allowing those people to dictate the terms of the conversation. I just can’t be on board for that.

Since I have a handful of paid subscribers to my Substack, I’m going to leave it up. Once a month, I’ll make it a point to post a link to anything I post on Medium, Patreon, or wherever else I put stuff that isn’t owned by a big corporation.

(I won’t be posting any of my Screen Rant material there, for example, unless it’s a piece I’m especially proud of.)

But, at least for the time being, this is my last “new” post for Substack and will be simultaneously posted at Medium. Hopefully I don’t find out in a week that Medium also sucks, but that’s entirely possible, especially given how things are going right now in the “platform” space.

This is likely a middle step on the road to building my own, entirely native website again. It’s been years, because platforms had become so convenient and maintaining your own site is kind of a pain in the ass, but given the compromises you have to make in order to publish with them, I have to acknowledge that sometimes the cost of that convenience is too high for my liking. Greg Pak has been talking on Bluesky quite a bit recently about the joys and benefits of leaving platforms behind and building your own website again. I would love to think that the era of these middleman platforms is on the way out.

Buy my books:

Best Movie Ever: An Oral History of Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont’s Josie and the Pussycats https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/best-movie-ever-russ-burlingame/1140177148?ean=9798988311720

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A Legend In His Own Time: A Fast-Forward Guide to the Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of https://a.co/d/29phYM0 (with Kevin Allen

Getting the Fin Right: The Collected Savage Dragon Interviews vol. 1 (with Gavin Higginbotham)

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