RT @sivavaid@twitter.com Quitting Facebook lets Google and Twitter off the hook. It lets AT&T off the hook. It lets Comcast off the hook. And it does nothing to hurt Facebook. Facebook does not care about one among 2.2 billion users. Act as a citizen, not a Facebook user. Demand regulation.
I honestly think all of these arguments come from people who for some reason can't bring themselves to leave Facebook. Yes, large structural change is needed, but you should also close your account. The site has one purpose: collect and sell your data and show you ads. That's it.
Does your own household recycling matter? No. We do it anyway and hope that as a society we'll all do it. Does your boycotting of corporations that support evil politicians matter alone? No. We do it anyway and hope many will join us. Boycotts work as a tactic. Boycott Facebook.
Most importantly, stop putting institutional events on Facebook, stop using it at universities, stop making participation in Facebook mandatory through your institutional, organization, and activist roles. You can be online, and social, and connected without supporting Facebook.
@omanreagan I'm a librarian at a university library. Frustratingly the library is trying to increase it's use of social media to connect with students because "that's where they are". They have recently added Instagram to compliment existing FB and Twitter. The uni itself and many depts have their own FB or other social media sites. However, moodle is the learning management system and the uni's website is still it's main platform. Social media is still just a sideshow for now.
@nick0515 @omanreagan I agree that this is a challenge! Asking employees to spend work time contributing to one of those platforms is giving the platform free labour, but it is also a way to reach one audience. And the only way to learn if you can do something useful on a platform is to try it. Then there are the library catalogues which try to imitate Google's one-click search, throwing away all the nuanced tools which librarians have spent 4000 years developing ...
