I can’t access my Facebook account.
Some hacker got in and changed my username, email and password. Facebook has since disabled the account so I can’t do a password reset or use any other recovery remedy. I submitted it for review, but the bots decided that I was dubious operator and refuse to look into it any further.
I’m sad.
Half of my blog traffic, and the accompanying engagements that came via Facebook are gone. I’m also losing the community I shared with other Jeep builders who’ve provided a level of support that you wouldn’t believe. Every time I’ve had a problem with the most amazing vehicle ever, there was someone standing by with a world of knowledge, happy to share.
On a positive note, I’ll no longer be arguing ad-nauseum about politics with friends who don’t want to fact check anything. To them, Liberals and pro-LGBTQ folk are destroying America.
Facebook has become their platform – a place to spread political hate speech – and I feel a responsibility to engage. Fact-check-a-phobia is ripping our country apart, according to this blogger – and these folks don’t have anybody to challenge their one-sided perspective.
That makes me a hero, right?
Hardly. Facebook wasn’t a healthy place for me.
I’ve spent hours ruminating over all of the different arguments I could make – how I’m right and the people who don’t think like I do are wrong – scouring the internet for data, research, and opinion in support of my perspective.
Just before my account was shut down, I engaged a friend who claimed that the LGBTQ agenda posed a significant threat to children. I pointed out that guns kill more children than Gay people do, and asked why he wasn’t equally incensed about that.
“Why are there no anti-gun posts on your social media feed?” I asked.
Now that I’m in a permanent time out, I can’t think of a more smart-ass way to engage someone. If I’m trying to help folks consider the world in a different way, or bring some level of peace, like the namesake of this blog suggests, why accuse my friend of such high-level hypocrisy?
What am I after? And why spend so much time perseverating over arguments that, with one exception, never go anywhere?
About a year ago, I tried a different tack.
I contacted a friend who is decidedly anti-liberal and invited him into a discussion where I would tell him what I think he believes and why, and he would correct me and fill in whatever I missed. The goal was for me to be able to articulate and defend his perspective. He would then do the same for me.
There would be no debate about who was right and who was wrong.
It was a great idea.
It was also really hard work, and we both early on threw in the towel. It turned out that neither of us wanted to engage a social media conversation where there was no winner.
Why?
My guess at this point is that we were/are patrons of a cultural phenomenon that’s been brewing for awhile, one that has ramped up significantly in the last 10 years or so, now sitting squarely in the command center of our country’s political division.
We need to be right, and will do just about anything to convince ourselves that the people who don’t think like we do are wrong.
“I see it far more in the USA than any other country that I’ve been to so far. The need to always be right, the need to feel superior over others, the need to be better than others.” ~ Jay Stephan
Along with this comes a refusal to listen to any perspective that doesn’t jive with ours.
A righteous person would listen, take time to understand, move forward with compassion, and probably have more face-to-face conversations – at least a zoom meeting – but that’s not what we’re after.
Today, us Americans are less interested in truth, and by proxy more susceptible to bullshit, than we’ve ever been.
We shouldn’t blame this on social media. Facebook doesn’t divide countries, people divide countries. These new-fangled gadgets might have hastened our departure, but we’re the idiots behind the wheel.
Moving forward, I’ll no longer be ruffling feathers on social media. I’m now on Instagram, posting videos of my chickens and enjoying the relative peace that’s come from a little extra head space.
I still feel a responsibility to engage political conversations, especially with those who have taken to hate speech. But I’ll need some time to remind myself of the ways of Jesus, and the cultural forces that get in the way. I’ll also need some time to think about why being right is so important to me and so many others, and how I might do my small part in bringing something more righteous into these conversations.
Recently I engaged in a Facebook debate with a friend over his opinions of why a certain Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode constituted bad writing. It was my favorite episode so far, and to say that I was seeing red was a little understating the issue. In fact, I had so much trouble seeing straight that I had to edit my response to his several times, and the end result was still incoherent. This wasn’t even politics; he and I agree on politics. Why do we do this to ourselves? It didn’t help that his initial post on the subject took a very hostile and belligerent tone, which may have set me off. But again, why do we do this to ourselves, and each other?
I’ve been reading a book called Stolen Focus. I’m not done with it, but so far it’s been quite an eye-opener. We may be the idiots behind the wheel, but social media like Facebook are definitely not blameless in our state of affairs (and I don’t think that’s what you were saying, btw – I’m still working on my coffee and can’t come up with a better way to put it right now).
I tried to quit Facebook once, going so far as to deactivate my account. But since then I’ve not only reactivated it, but I have pages for my two blogs, a page for a website I’m maintaining, and I’m also the only admin on a group related to fibromyalgia and chronic pain. I’m in too deep to quit, even though I want to.
But it’s not just Facebook, either. You might have better luck staying sane on Instagram; the few times I log into my account there, I notice that it’s possible to follow some very intelligent accounts. But my personal opinion is that unless it’s Mastodon, the potential for crazy is still there in any type of social media.
Having said that, I remember being a journalism major in college and arguing that even though it’s impossible to have such a thing as an unbiased source of journalism, the remedy to that is to get your news from more than one source and just be aware that the potential for bias exists anytime humans are behind something. Maybe the solution here is similar: limited exposure and awareness of just what these things can do to us if we let them. I realize I’m ending up in a different place than you did. Just tossing out some stuff to think about.
Either way, good luck to all of us.
I should’ve checked in with you before I wrote this 😀 good thoughts. I agree about social media playing some role, I’ll need to spend a bit more time ruminating on how it works. I started a new Facebook account, mainly for the Jeep stuff and for marketplace. Hopefully I won’t get sucked into anything.
Thanx for your thoughts!