This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is...an easy one to rush through. What are your thoughts on social media? Regular readers know my thoughts on social media.
When individuals use social media in a natural, un-manipulated way, they create their own experience--for better or for worse. Usually it's easy to make it "for better." If you've made it "for worse," e-die and come back with a new screen name. Claims that people's feelngs are terribly hurt by social media turn out to be pretexts for censorship, which is what makes social media less than a good thing.
When social media are manipulated so that individuals are not communicating naturally with each other, they lose their social value and become just one more channel for the greedhead corporations that ought to know we're not interested in their messages. If we wanted to see and hear what big corporations want us to see and hear, we'd be watching television.
So, allow any kind of censorship beyond the basic, individual-user-activated "screen out images of naked bodies," and a social media site is dead.
So, if social media companies want to monetize their sites, they have to stick firmly to their principles and tell the corporations, "By interacting with unfiltered individual content, you have a chance to communicate with people who aren't willing to watch television. If you want censorship, or if you think censorship is ever acceptable, do not use this site."
That's the only rule that has a chance of keeping social media alive.
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