Category: Social Media

Thoughts on socia media, which has addicted many and alienated others.

Nothing to See but a Performance

It’s rather comical on both sides of the recent kerfuffle about Australia’s performative banning of under 16-year-olds from having social media accounts.

There are a number of things that just don’t make sense.

(1) There is apparently no punishment for having an account if you’re under 16.

(2) The social media platform companies are ostensibly risking multimillion dollar fines for not complying with this law. It is pretty obvious that what will happen is that people like Zuckerberg will be called to testify somewhere and they’ll say “We spent all this money, trying to comply, so we’re doing our best.” Does anybody believe that there is actually a desire to lose all those customers, which means to lose all that behavioral information?

(3) As I input this note, there are countless young people making new anonymous social media accounts—backed up by new anonymous email accounts—in which they say they are 16 or older or somehow fake being 16 or older. There are reports of that already happening. There is a will to do that and they will find a way to do that.

There will also be a market for social media accounts that can be repurposed to get around this performative restriction.

(4) The vast majority of social media accounts are essentially anonymous to start with. I’ve never made a social media account where I had to prove my identity.

The platform owners don’t care. All they care about is your behavioral information, which they vacuum up and used to sell advertising, meaning they have no incentive to actually kill accounts or prevent accounts from being made by people under 16.

(5) Social media companies already use countless people in the third world to monitor for murderers, rapes, and other atrocities in posts on their platforms. Are those people going to be diverted to the task of verifying that account owners are 16 years or older?

Even if social media wanted to comply (they don’t) I can’t believe that people in developed economies are going to enlisted at reasonable salaries to do all this monitoring, which is a level of diligence on the part of tech bro billionaires that they have never shown in trying to figure out even who it is that has hold of currently active accounts, let alone their ages. It is a lawless land and that’s just fine with them because it’s a very profitable land.

(6) The banning of children under 16 from social media is purely performative and might actually serve as a diversion from concerns about what social media is doing to people 16 and older. In that sense, it could actually be welcomed by social media owners. They will fail at doing what would actually be necessary—because it’s inevitable that they fail—and then they’ll look like they’ve done their part, and the remaining social media users are still targets for all the evil things that go on in social media, including, but not unlimited to, behavior manipulation by the platform owners, deep fakes, and much worse.

What is it with the Microsoft thugs that own and run LinkedIn?

I trashed my account of about five years standing in October and LinkedIn sent me a “we’re sorry to see you go” email. Fine. I don’t need any emails from them, so I trashed the email alias on my company server that I had used as a contact address for that LinkedIn account.

Just today, probably seeing that email to the above-noted address is bouncing, these cyberlouts sent me a “You’re on a roll on LinkedIn” (subject line) email at a gmail address (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea big fucking culpa) I had once used as an address for LinkedIn things with an account I haven’t had for ten years, with a notification bell and number-of-notifications count, trying to get me to sign in (and revive?) the account.

If you click on it, a page pops us trying to get me to sign into that long-gone LinkedIn account.

To add insult to injury, the email telling me that I’m “on a roll” itself has two introductions to a cumstain trying to sell akiya, of all things, to unsuspecting foreigners, intended targets surely including, but not limited to, self-proclaimed digital nomad hipsters who look forward to interacting with their peers, not realizing that it will be very difficult to find peers in Hachinohe or some other venue that has these lovely properties. Let the nomad beware. But I digress.

I am not thrilled, not excited, and not honored to get this shit sent to me, to borrow the phony formulaic openers self-proclaimed “founders” on LinkedIn often open with.

They have an Unsubscribe link to click on, but I suspect that clicking on it would just notify LinkedIn that there’s “somebody home.” I’ll let this sit for a while. The annoying thing is that this is not an alias address that can be conveniently trashed, but any email from them can be automatically trashed, and I will think of other ways they should be rewarded.

It’s good that the distance of cyberspace provides the Microsoft people avoidance of accountability and protection from people who would do them physical harm.

Have not much to say? Create content instead.

Not so many years ago, before problems were reinvented as issues, services as solutions, and jobs as roles, people who had something to say would sometimes write those things.

These days, people increasingly identify as “content creators,” but some of this trendy content creation strikes me as aiming to obviate the need to have something to say. Just create “content” instead; it’ll make you “stand out.” And some of the people identifying as content creators don’t seem to have much to say, or to write, or to “create.”

The American Translators Association a short while ago promoted a webinar aimed at helping translators write translation content. Well, at least their choice of the verb write is refreshing. For members, it was just USD 45 for the hour-long webinar.

The webinar was billed as helping translators find what topics to write about. Don’t they know? Is that really necessary? We are often told to write about what we know. Does that mean…?

Perhaps it is aimed at translators who have so much to say they cannot decide what to write about, or perhaps it’s for those who have nothing to say. I’ll let you guess which.

This “translation content” is described as giving you visibility and as being good for marketing. Perhaps, but it sounds like participants are going to be told things they should have been able to figure out on their own. Perhaps more importantly, just who is the “translation content” intended for?

It was only USD 45 for the hour-long webinar, but with no indicated limit on the number of participants, if you get my drift. Perhaps ATA should run a webinar for USD 45 to teach participants how to run webinars for USD 45. That might be a better strategy than creating…uh, writing content.