I’ve been off most social media for years now. Recently I’ve come off WhatsApp too - if only because those ‘funny’ pictures that get shared around are just extremist memes that have been insufficiently considered by the sharer. Besides, Mrs 45RPM kindly shares the bad news with me, with a sigh and a “you’ll never guess…”. No. I won’t. And I probably don’t want to either.

Social media really is the cancer of the world, gnawing away at critical thinking and destroying mental health - and, ultimately, freedom and democracies.

Can't help but agree. I was never on any of the classic social media, so I can't comment about getting off it, but I'm not burdened down by excess information.

If I want to research something, I do; I don't let random people push me into doom-scrolling (indeed, I'm of an age that believes the _oldest_ post on a subject should be at the top of the page, with addenda below). I use search engines to search for specific information, not random meme-of-the-day. And I try my best to get my news from a number of sources, with human editors I trust not algorithms feeding me something they think I'll be desperate to see. I can't name any 'celebs'; I don't know what the video-series-du-jour is; and I don't suffer influenzas trying to shill products.

In a world where everybody is shouting, it's very peaceful. They don't put adverts (as a rule) in printed books...

Thumbs up for a printed world. The Register Luddites Book Club anyone? I’ve just finished In Memoriam by Alice Wynn (excellent, highly recommended) and I’m reading Juice by Tim Winton now (which is good, but also feels like the end result of an unmitigated diet of social media and extremism.)

Thumbs Up for the printed word.

Although my tastes no longer match my physical abilities and holding the hardback can be a strain (damn you, Peter F. Hamilton!). Which is frustrating, as a book is so much more pleasurable to use than an e-reader, let alone using a big glowing tablet when the colour images are important.

Hang on, got to change my specs to just check - yeah, I see you now, off my lawn!

I hear you.

I dropped out when I lost my job in 2011 (the Two Towers incident). The Luxembourg market shrunk like a prune and I was left on the side.

Between trying to find a new job and watching the news on TV, I chose finding a new job.

The news is nothing but sadness, catastrophes and no education whatsoever. Oh, so Dow Jones is down by 4% ? Why ? Fuck you, that's why.

Reporters never, ever, give explainations. They're just there to scare you, to tell you how things are going wrong.

Meanwhile, the rest of us soldier on. I found a new job, even if it took three years. I'm back in the saddle, and doing not too bad.

But I'll be damned if I watch the news again. There's nothing but despair there.

My wife, on the other hand, spends a good part of her day on various news channels. Well, she's retired. She filters the bad news to me and that's largely enough for me.

This was not a problem with BBS, usenet, or forums, which are by design split into small communities. It only started to became a problem when everyone started carrying an always-connected device. Social networks realised their users had no escape and designed apps to constantly push and notify users of whatever gets the most engagement, even if it's a total lie or outrage bait. Then chat apps became a problem because of people hitting the share button and spamming contacts and groups with lies and outrage bait from social networks.

There's no solution that the market can offer to stop this - social networks actively ignore the mental health issues caused by their apps. So really we're hoping for the EU to legislate against targeting engagement and making anything more than a chronological timeline of people or subjects the user actively chooses to follow illegal. Also it'll probably have to legislate a minimum time between notifications.

If cigarettes cannot be advertised and only sold behind the counter with huge health warnings on them, I don't see why social media networks can't have restrictions too.

Endless September.

One of these may help --->

Ignorance out-numbers knowledge. This becomes everyone's problem in a democracy. Banning anything but the most extreme hate simply feeds conspiracy theorists' paranoia.

I think one piece of the solution is to teach lying, deception and fraud in schools. Hopefully when equipped with such tools people will be better able to spot it when they see it. I hope that will reduce the amplification and distribution of fake news.

By itself that is not enough but perhaps with other measures it will be possible to take away the market for fake news and reduce the incentive to mass produce it. If that ever works perhaps it will reduce the subset of real news that is only there as a response to fake news.

"I think one piece of the solution is to teach lying, deception and fraud in schools. "

Absolutely but can you imagine the howls of outrage from the usual suspects if schools tried to teach young people how to spot their bullshit and dismiss it as worthless?

Finland [1]teaches this from primary school age . And it has to be done because we're dangerously close to having entire generations that believe any old crap and will happily destroy their own country from within.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news

"I think one piece of the solution is to teach lying, deception and fraud in schools. "

You may be unfamiliar with the various schools I attended, or some of those my kids attended.

Children, as it happens are the most horrible, tribal, poorly behaved creatures on earth, and they don't need additional teaching in lying, deception, fraud, extortion, bullying, harassment etc. State school playgrounds are where this teaching occurs, as the staff retreat to the staff room and mope over a copy of TES or the Graun, whilst a single duty teacher nurses a mug of coffee on the fringes of the mob and pretends to supervise several hundred children. Other important values taught in the playground include mocking differences, excluding those who don't fit, ridiculing those who excel academically, etc etc. One of my kids had such a bad experience that we moved him to a fee paying school, and the difference was unbelievable - all misbehaviour was wacked down with a no-messing approach, pupils were encouraged/made to do constructive things during breaks rather than indulge in the mob rule of the playground, the message was "you can all be good at something" and as a result achievement was celebrated, whether that was academically, musically, on the sports field. You might assert that was down to the demographic and the parenting, but having mixed with the parents for some years I can assure you that they were not inculcating positive values in their offspring any more than you average state school parents.

> I think one piece of the solution is to teach lying, deception and fraud in schools.

I've been taking the (wildly optimistic?) view that the OP meant to say teaching how to SPOT and unravel lies, deception and fraud. And call out the perpetrators.

Rather than how to better commit those acts themselves.[1]

[1] Ok, there is the argument that teaching how to spot the holes in frauds etc makes it easier for them to spot the holes they leave and fix them. OTOH if they see just how much real, hard, work it is to make a fraud compete against reality then fingers crossed they'll take the lazy route and stick to honesty ("oh what a tangled web we weave...")

"I think one piece of the solution is to teach lying, deception and fraud in schools."

Rather better would be to teach writing that stands up to tests: "Can you prove that?" "Have you checked that?" "Where did you get that information?"

Spending time doing that and testing fellow pupils is likely to be more effective at putting others' work through the critical thinking mill.

Everyone has an opinion and the 'net gives them a platform to scream it from, no matter how swivel eyed, how frothingly insane, indeed it seems the more extreme, the more insane the opinion the louder they are shouted with a disproportionately large audience.

It's enabled extremism to inject itself in the veins of the mainstream and has divided us instead of uniting us.

I wish it were possible to avoid the insanity but even here there are those who deliberately post gibberish to ruin the experience for others and distract, obfuscate and further an extremist narrative.

I'm sick of it.

A friend of mine pointed out that it isn’t the boggle eyed nonsense that’s the problem - left to its own devices it would sink to the bottom of the digital morass and never be seen again.

The problem is the algorithm that promotes the nonsense for the sake of engagement and clicks. What we need (but won’t get) are algorithms which promote genuine engagement between communities, ones that promote working together, rather than ones that enhance tribalism.

Sing together now, “come on everybody…”

The problem is that social media thrives on troll-feeding.

It's the kind of engagement that keeps people coming back over and over to the same page, so instead of shadowbanning the troll, they promote their posts.

Removing the fact-checkers provides even more "engagement", as people try to correct falsehoods themselves - if they don't, other people may believe the lies.

Mainstream media has the backstop of legal consequences for lying - when the Telegraph publishes something false, they have to publicly retract it or face court action and potential fines. Hence 'spin' rather than lies.

Social media has no such consequences, and the publisher even has an explicit shield.

It's a vicious cycle.

Agreed and it irks me that friends who are firmly in the groups who are being demonised by extremist groups still use social media sites which are diametrically opposed to their existence and wellbeing.

Social media lives or dies by engagement and if people were able to take a step back, see how they're being manipulated to further that the stats would tank.

Something so true it even made it into my quotes file:

Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.

-- Mike Tyson

The joy of missing out is an interesting concept. I like it, but I think I’d find it hard to embrace it.

There’s a real problem in how we’ve done away with gatekeepers, or rather, just added a lot more gatekeepers. None of us trust a single source to curate our news and knowledge for us. In some senses it’s empowering - each and every one can be an independent researcher - but in reality it’s both exhausting and a con: trusting to an algorithm doesn’t actually ensure greater transparency or variety than just reading a newspaper ever did.

JOMO (well done on your new coinage, sir), is a wonderful thing. Sure I missed out on a boring party where my photo got taken a plastered into a social media post, and yes I wasn’t the first to hear some tedious news. But, instead, I enriched my life with a tasty meal, I went for a bike ride, I read a book, I went to the theatre. And yes, I’m an antisocial (by millennial and younger standards) - but I’m fine with that. As an early model Gen X that’s who I’m supposed to be. Grumpy - but confident and not in need of the approbation of social media.

Starting with a new Facebook account these days, adding no friends and not even being from freedumb land it's incredible how quickly FB will start to push RFK and his magical fix everything horse paste from just looking at your local news sites. They are determined to instill fear and keep you there.

I think we're all (so far) in 100% agreement. I, too, try to avoid getting overloaded with information that is of no use to me. I dumped Facebook many years ago (I only signed up in the first place because that was where my daughters were posting family news - but I've told them that, if they want to let me have their news, they need to tell me directly); Twitter went a bit more recently, when EM took over and removed all attempts at keeping it sane. An early adopter of LinkedIn, I'm despairing of that, too, as any useful posts are being swamped by the narcissistic ones (the "look at what I've done/got" - such as a recent one where the poster is complaining that it costs him more to maintain his Aston Martin than it does for someone who owns an old Toyota), the bipartisan rants and arguments (basically between those who think Trump and Musk are a new joint messiah, and those who are able to reason for themselves), and adverts for products and services that are of absolutely no interest to me.

As for a previous poster, my wife trawls Facebook and passes on the tidbits she thinks I should know (most are not that interesting, but I feign fascination in the interest of maintaining our good marriage).

My sister is a classic example of someone who gathers it all and then obsesses about the problems - not so much glass half-full or half-empty, but can't find the glass. The last conversation I had with her late husband was about how he was struggling with her constant negative mood...

Trump and Musk are a new joint messiah,

I reckon one of them has to be the Baptist.

Bring on Salome, I am not particular which one ends up on the salver.

I have avoided pretty much all media for a decade or more after newsprint deteriorated into inaccurate, shallow and illiterate twaddle.

The sulphurous stench of so called social media was pretty evident from the outset.

Free to air broadcasting of current affairs has pretty much headed down the same gurgler as newsprint.

Public broadcaster's news sites are possibly the least worst but that's not a great recommendation coming off such a low base.

LinkedIn always has been its own unique pile of horse shit. Although it's largely free of the screaming loons who make up FB and Twatter, it associates your name with your employer, and so for the majority of white collar employees who make up the major part of the users, there's no debate no intriguing or challenging content, it's all just uncritical corporate bollocks.

We are convinced that the only model for a social media company, or any tech startup, is to be successful long enough to launch successfully on the stock market. When you need to juice your figures you need to promote engagement at any cost, even if that means platforming bigots and criminals.

There are other business models available that aren't predicated on this process. For example, if you don't aim for a floatation you can concentrate on being a business that provides value to it's users rather than it's owners. Then, providing a good service becomes valuable to the business rather than being a liability for the business.

If you're drowning in it is it really information? It's more like data with a strong addition of line noise. Information is what gets distilled from data.

I’m almost tempted to open a new account on El Reg to give this multiple upvotes. Very true. But you still have to settle for only one vote from me

Become an old git.

Looking at the TV ads that are trying to engender FOMO, all the people running through streets or piling up in front of a display window: "gawd, that just looks so exhausting".

I must buy a new shiny "device"? But I barely managed to convince this one to accept the certificates for my NextCloud. Not going through all that again!

And so on. Pah.

Now, I know this causes other issues - we have to get the young 'uns running around the playing fields to keep them fit.

So I'd like to introduce my new line of Rugger clothes: tartan slippers with cleats and a nice comfy cardigan with a reinforced seam to survive a *proper* scrum.