New Years Resolution: I DELETED* my social media accounts 🗑

* With an asterisk.

I like social media but not what I’ve been seeing lately. I particularly like Instagram and Facebook for scrolling through and looking at pictures of beautiful and interesting things like beautiful landscapes, harvesting of game, farming and off-grid living. But I don’t like how the majority of my social media feeds lately have become about:

CONDEMN THAT HORRIBLE PERSON WHO FRIED THEIR NEIGHBORS’ CAT
AND EAT IT WITH FRENCH FRIES AT MOTHER-IN-LAWS HOUSE

MAN DIDN’T WEAR MASK – KILLED 100 PEOPLE WITH COVID VIRUS
WITHOUT ANY SYMPATHY TO VICTIMS – ARREST HIM !!!

BIDEN’S PENIS WAS MEASURED ON LIVE TELEVISION
AND IT’S PROVEN LONGER THEN TRUMP’s DICK – DAILY KOS

I came to the realization that the reason I am seeing such posts, is because I have such awfully political Facebook friends and follow the wrong channels on Instagram. Not that I blame my real-world friends that much — many of them truly are good people in person — but they share things, and the Facebook algorithm pushes forward on the most controversial and most political feeds that grab attention. I came to the realization that I probably need to dump these friends and start over without friends but only following pages/groups that are explicitly non-political.

So today, representing the new year, I decided to start over. Delete all my social media accounts with all their legacy connections and feeds. I have no more friends on Facebook – I am only following non-political pages and groups – like farms, pickup truck, redneck/rural, off-grid, outdoors pages. No more politicians, no more state or local government agencies, no more news reporters or pages. I will follow the local divisions National Weather Service, but I am refusing to follow town or state leaders on my personal accounts.

I also fully locked down and made my new accounts private, and will no longer be posting on social media in an automated fashion (Twitter) or by hand (Instagram or Facebook). I find that the nature of these platforms is triggering to me, it encourages me to be extra argumentative and mean-spirited with people. Also, it’s not possible on Instagram or Facebook to moderate comments, and one of my real-world friends comments, which I deleted and he re-posted when I was offline in the Adirondacks could have got me in trouble with work. He’s a nice guy, does a lot of great things for our little town, but he’s been on seriously bad my Facebook shitlist (or block list) from time to time.

In contrast, with the blog, I have full control both over content, layout, and comments. I can disable comments on any post at any time, and to have your comment appear, I have to to approve it first. The potential controversy of a post doesn’t move it up on my blog feed, things are controlled either by date order, or how I choose to lay it out. I also had basically given up on Twitter for a while, due to clutter, and now that I’ve closed out my current public account for a new private one for monitoring certain accounts — I retired the blog feed too.

I think getting rid of the politics and the alarmist, shouting posts on my social media will make me a lot happier. Banning myself from posting on social media, will make me happier and allow me to focus on the medium where I have actual control — my blog.