Is social media really a platform to deliver your message to your audience? I hope the answer is yes. That is what we have been told. You create an account, build an audience, post your thoughts, and the platform helps your message reach the people who are interested in it.
The reality is different!
Social media platforms are businesses, and their business is not making sure your message reaches the right person. Their business is collecting what matters to them: what you click, what you read, what you ignore, who you follow, what you search for, how long you stay, and how all of this can be correlated with everything else they know about you.
I understand it. They need to make money. If collecting data makes money, collect data. If keeping people engaged makes money, keep them engaged. I may not like the business model, but I understand it.
What I cannot accept is censorship and filtering.
What they call noise
Your message has to compete with everything else, and the platform decides what deserves attention and what does not. This becomes particularly important when the subject is sensitive: politics, healthcare, financial markets, or anything where people may have very different opinions.
Some people say censorship is necessary to protect us from misinformation. Maybe. But protected from what? And who decides?
If you already agree with the information being protected, censorship can look like protection. If you disagree with it, the same censorship looks very different.
Think about a newspaper. You submit something and the newspaper decides whether to publish it. At least the relationship is obvious. With social media, the platform gives you the impression that you have an audience. You don’t. You have access to an audience that the platform controls.
It is like renting a store in a shopping mall and discovering that the mall owner decides which customers are allowed to see your store. You may own the merchandise and have thousands of customers, but the landlord controls the door.
They know a lot about you
There is another thing I find interesting. These companies can spend enormous resources tracking users, correlating behavior, and building sophisticated profiles. Yet the same environment can still be full of advertisements designed to steal your credentials.
You see a familiar logo. You trust it. You click. You enter your username and password. Congratulations. You just lost your internet virginity.
The logo becomes part of the attack. The platform’s reputation becomes part of the attack. You are the one who pays the price.
I would expect platforms that know so much about me to be extremely serious about what they put in front of me. But apparently, tracking the person can sometimes be more valuable than protecting the person.
This is not a conspiracy
I am not saying social media is some giant conspiracy. It isn’t necessary to believe in one. You only need to understand incentives.
A business will naturally optimize for what makes the business successful. Collect data. Keep people engaged. Sell advertising. Reduce whatever creates problems for the business.
You don’t need five people sitting in a dark room planning all of this. The system can arrive at the same result simply because everyone is doing what makes economic sense.
That is much more interesting than a conspiracy, and much harder to fix.
I simply stay away
Fortunately, I have never been very active on social media. For me, it has mostly been a window. I can look around and see what is happening without becoming part of the drama.
My personal opinion is simple: the safest way to avoid the trap of social media is to stay away from it.
People say, “But you will miss something.” Will you? Probably not.
There is almost nothing on social media that cannot be found somewhere else. And there is something surprisingly refreshing about deleting an account and realizing that the world did not stop.
The noise becomes quieter. You have more space, more time, and more attention. You start noticing what is actually around you.
It is like walking out of a crowded room and discovering that you can finally hear yourself think 🙂