They style it “social media” – which is like styling what the government forces you to hand over to Social Security a “contribution.”
In fact, “social media” is the antithesis of both. It is anti-social, for openers, as it disconnects and alienates the individual from society, as in the form of other (real) people. In favor of “Tweeting” – a thing anyone not an 11-year-old girl ought to be embarrassed to admit they do.
These “Tweets” are inherently diminishing – in terms of intelligent conversation – because they make the latter all-but-impossible by restricting how much you’re allowed to say as well as what you are allowed to say. Try to imagine having an intelligible conversation with someone about anything more complicated than whether you or they like chocolate ice cream if that conversation were limited to no more than the number of “characters” in the sentence you just read.
It’s a stunted form of communication not far removed from the manner in which Koko the gorilla communicates. And far more degrading, as humans are capable of a broader range of communication than Koko.
But then, the idea is to reduce humans to the intellectual level of gorillas – gorillas not as advanced as Koko.
By stifling how much can be said – and about what – our range of expression is compressed to what is, quite rightly, styled a “Tweet.” 
These “Tweets” are not merely necessarily degrading as such, they are also strictly monitored and controlled by the “social media” platforms – that are in fact publishers, though selectively and without any meaningful accountability. If you “Tweet” – it makes my teeth ache to even type this word – anything the arbiters of what is allowed do not like, it is disallowed. Worse than that – which has at least the merit of being above-board (as in you know it is being disallowed).
The “social media” platforms have refined to a high (that is low) art the “shadow banning” of those who “Tweet” unorthodoxies, particularly if true. The “Tweet” seems to appear, but no one other than the person who “Tweeted” it sees it. Eventually, the person who posted the Tweet” sees what is happening – because nothing happens. It is like a water spigot that is turned on – and off – by the hidden hand of powers unseen.
Your payoff is that the “social media” platforms have data-mined everything you’ve “Tweeted” and used it to make money while paying you none. 
Only a fool continues attempting to play a game when he’s not even allowed on the field. Or can be put in the “penalty box” arbitrarily, randomly – as for example when one receives a “violation” notice from Gooo-guhl advising you have breached some rule which they will not disclose, so as to make it literally impossible for you to have the slightest idea what the specifics of the “violation” were.
There is only one solution to this kind of game. It is to stop playing it.
Instead of “Tweeting” like Koko the gorilla – and feeling your IQ lower in tandem with your self-respect – converse at length with other human beings on sites that allow it, as much of it as you like – and about whatever you like. 
I mean all sites that do not restrict how much you’re allowed to say – and about what. This site is one of them, of course – and I hope you will use it to connect and converse as adults, with other humans who have the bandwidth to express themselves better than Koko the gorilla.
Sites such as this one are smaller than the “social media” sites, of course. But then so are small towns.
Which are more . .. sociable? In which of the two do you feel as though you have more . . . connection?
As to reality. 
It is also about more than that, in a smaller kind-of-way. The way forward is the antithesis of centralization. It is decentralization. Of everything. The same principle that underlies saying sayonara to “social media” in favor of sociability – with real human beings – underlies saying sayonara to the inhuman-scale mega-corporations that are adulterating our food with poisons and charging us more for less of it, that are in bed with the government to use government to force us to buy what they cannot persuade us to buy; that want to herd and pen us like cattle.
The way out of that pen is to stampede – and head for greener pastures.
If you’re reading this, you’ve just found one.
. . .
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I agree almost all social media is infantile and embarassing but Twitter really isn’t, I joined last year to find out what is really happpening with the Ukraine war and it’s good for that. What mainstream outlet reports anything close to the truth? You can also see stuff like the carnage blacks are inflicting on society (it’s depressing) you won’t find anywhere else. There is some intelligent commentary there. At least for now. But yeah the rest of the socials are junk.
Also the Libs of Tiktok twitter account will blow your mind with the psychos in our public schools. And it looks like Tucker Carlson is ldoing a new show there.
Completely off topic but this is what the globalist zoo has descended into (European version) https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/tv/8091730/eurovision-2023-live-results-uk-liverpool/
Europe has entered madness. I assume this show is widely watched.
“social media” alienates the individual from society … in favor of “Tweeting” — eric
Disinfo bad, porn good …
‘A new internal review of Twitter has found the site is becoming a major platform for NSFW content.
‘Over the last two years, mainstream topics on the app decreased. Only two topics of interest have seen growth: cryptocurrency and adult content.
‘Adult content now makes up 13 percent of tweets. Twitter is the only major social media platform that allows nudity on its site.’
https://tinyurl.com/4s5n5hcm
Dang … I feel like a chump, visiting Twatter only for weather and financial commentary.
Where are they hiding the cheesecake?
Brevity is the soul of wit.
There is or was Terry Schiavo’s blog.
KoKo can likely carry on a more intelligent conversation then most of today’s college grads I have had the displeasure to meet.
Like, I mean like, ya know, like really?
Drove 175 miles yesterday to enjoy a steak dinner with my brother, celebrating his 50th a couple days late. Ate a filet, drank a few drinks. Hopped in the car and drove home, legally intoxicated no doubt, drove 80 or so at night listening to a Thomas Sowell lecture on youtube.
That’s about a social as I get.
The censors are always watching. Had something pulled on IG in about ten minutes.
One man’s signal is another man’s noise. Big social media is like being in a single’s bar. The crowd noise is overwhelming. The band is over-amplified to make up for the crowd noise, causing the crowd to get even louder, causing a positive feedback loop. So if you want to have a conversation you either have to leave and go someplace quiet or scream at the person sitting next to you.
The point where Twitter got stupid was when “retweeting” became the normal behavior. Along with the mainstream media groups posting links to their stories and opinion pieces, their algorithms starting dumping crap into my timeline I didn’t ask for, had no interest in and was basically designed to piss me off to keep my scrolling. The last straw was when everything in my timeline was retweets from people I didn’t know about content that I had no interest in. Since I only followed a few people it was trivial to delete from my life.
The Central Scrutinizer is aware of everything, at all times. Always has been, always will be, even on platforms like this. Its all collected, catalogued, and saved for some later date when they may want to get you to confess, to whatever. To think otherwise is delusional.
Never had any social media until last oct when I set up a Twitter account. Was going through some painful times and was just angry and bored. I knew in my heart that the whole schtick about Elon and free speech was just that, but I still felt the need to see it with my own eyes, sort of a FAFO for myself. Pointing out that its OK to be white, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the shit shots cause people to die suddenly, that Izrihell is right about borders, Islam right about women, and the truth about the juice got my volume turned way down.
I finally hit bottom when I unrelentingly attacked AZ Governess Clamy Kate and her legitimacy to Govern. The Twitt-wits accused me of bullying, suspending me on multiple occasions. The upside of that is realizing how utterly feckless and insecure they are in their beliefs. They know deep down their whole ideology is shit and cant be defended against logic or reason.
Trading clever snipets back and forth with sodomites obviously has no redeeming value, Sometimes I could drop a bread crumb or two into a thread, sharing EP autos, Makow.com, or a few others out there still worth some time and consideration.
Yesterday, my wife, daughter, and MIL decided they wanted a Twitter so they could hear Tucker Carlson again. So thats that, sort of like a bell ringing at the top of a market. Time to nuke my Twitter account and move on. Plus its outside time now, with much kayaking, shooting, fishing, and gardening to be done. Going to head to Alaska for the summer soon. Hopefully able to avoid the smoke from the inextinguishable dumpster fire this country has become.
I miss letters. I got out of the habit of writing them because of social media. But one of my most precious belongings which is stored with my jewelry is a full page letter written in pencil from my husband decades ago before we even began dating. It is still a very well written letter and reminds me of our lives when we were young. We did not miss a thing without social media. When you were far away from your loved ones you missed them until you got to see them again. Which you took great pains to do. Life was good for us all back then.
“The way forward is the antithesis of centralization. It is decentralization.” YES!
“..And I hope you will use it to connect and converse as adults, with other humans who have the bandwidth to express themselves better than Koko the gorilla.”
Absolutely. Although I don’t agree with everyone here on everything, I find EP Autos patrons to usually be, at least, thoughtful and intelligent.
Look at the commentary on many sites. You’ll get little or no punctuation or capitalization, and that really does tell you something. Even if you can get past the all-lower-case run-on sentences, often times sites are filled with nothing but people all telling each other what morons they are. And they’re often right.
As I’ve said before, EP Autos must be a fashionable site. It’s drawn the finest people!
A soon-to-be-featured meme on your [leftist] social media feed:
‘The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.’ — Amendment XIV (1868)
As a debt ceiling crisis begins to bite, Bidenites are preparing the ground for an executive order by Dementia Joe, freeing the republic from the cruel chains of Republican-imposed austerity.
“Joe” may even cite the alleged Jan 6 insurrection as a contemporary justification, since ‘attorney general’ Meritless Beria Garland is still in the process of rounding up and persecuting the next thousand doomed defendants.
Amendment XIV, which freed the slaves, also can free the US fedgov to spend as freely as it wilt, forevermore.
That is, unless decent Americans successfully resist the ghastly, depraved scourge of butt-bonk Bidenism, angling to blow away the last rusty guardrails against Molotov cocktail-fueled social chaos and hyperinflation.
Ka chuck, Blam. Only possible response to something that blatant.
From what I understand the Confederate States had to ratify the 14th at gunpoint ‘before’ they were allowed to be forced back into the Union. Since they were not ‘in the Union’ their ratification was and still is meaningless.
Like the fictional game, Global Thermonuclear War — “The only way to win, is not to play.”
Hi Alan,
I have come to believe – deeply – that it’s so. Our energies are wasted trying to persuade the unpersuadable. The time has come to focus on the salvageable and begin the process of rebuilding.
I’ve never had personal social media accounts of any kind. I once had an FB page for my business to announce market dates and new products and other marketing type stuff. It wasn’t tied to anyone’s name specifically so they shut it down after a few years after constantly clamoring for drivers licenses and the like.
Years ago, I did have a free blog through an Apple account for a few years until that too was shut down by being no longer supported. I used it to document my escape from the matrix. It resonated with a few people who wanted to do the same but just couldn’t for whatever reason. However, the amount of hate this blog generated toward me among family and friends was a doozie. People really got the knives out. Subsequent email communications cemented the estrangements. This was approximately 2012, which made it much easier to stand firm in 2020 as the weak hands had been shaken out. To quote the Dead song “Deal”, “if I told you all that went down, it would burn off both of your ears.”
> It is to stop playing it.
AMEN!! I’ve been saying that to my friends since I left Facebook — so many years ago, I forget (around 2016, pretty sure). I used a simple principle.
If I go to your (or anyone’s house) and calmly state an opinion you don’t like, e.g., “the corona hoax is a scam put on by murderous governments”, and then you slap duct tape on my mouth, throw me out, and tell me I can’t come back for a month!
Well guess what? I won’t ever come back. In a case like that, we’re clearly incompatible. Why in hell would I degrade and humiliate myself and go back??
Or even better, if you literally recorded and wrote down every single thing I said at your house, recorded the times and what I was wearing and looking at, etc, etc, and provided that to anyone. We’re through. Never mind providing it to the swine! Anyone!
It just doesn’t make any sense to use any of the major social media platforms. The only one that I’m on is Rumble at the moment. And that may change too. They’re better than the establishment platforms but the recording and tracking still bothers me!
I can’t agree enough that we all need to stop this online life. Decentralize our very lives! Just like the old days. Write a letter to distant folk or get on the phone and TALK! Visit your local friends regularly and distant friends occasionally.
Just like the old days!! We had very decent lives back in the 70s and 80s without any of this shit. All of this shit is poison fashioned into various honey pots. We don’t need it!!
Exactly why I loved old-skool forums, but hate and refuse to use any form of ‘social media’. It is the absolute read more
I never understood social media. The few times that I scrolled through a Twitter hashtag or read a newspaper through Facebook it always seemed to be full of hateful angry people (or maybe just bots).
I have yet to meet anyone who can offer insight on a subject in 150 letters or less.
I have never setup an online social media account. I don’t even have a webpage for my business. I enjoy this forum because it allows us to the opportunity to debate, discuss, and deliberate to our heart’s content. We all don’t see eye to eye and a few of us may have flicked off others of us in traffic without knowing it, but I have found the individuals that post here to be interesting, intelligent, and thought provoking. I thank Eric for maintaining this site for those of us that are outside the norm where topics can be thoroughly analyzed and dissected. I have learned a lot.
Well said, RG! Took the words out of my mouth. 150 characters…that’s barely enough to say something relevant as Ebay feedback! Other than my ersatz fake-name laptop only FB account so I can use Marketplace, I have never had any social media accounts either.
I want to either communicate with people on an individual basis…or, if on a group level, then at least in a linear format where one can go back and easily see all posts on a given subject from the beginning, and conveniently.
These social media things seem strictly intended for brief meaningless comments which are only relative for a number of minutes or hours at beast. It’s like a haven for the clueless social butterflies ya’d see in 7th grade, who’d make ya think to yourself that you need to find some adults to hang with, because these kids your own age are silly twits. Now those twits have Twitter….where they can regale each other with their four word catch-phrases for every occasion, as learned on TV, so they’ll be of the proper P.C. opinion, and can band together to shout-down any who dare to dissent bt positing actual reason, logic, thought or fact.
Yes. Whatever happened to the forums we had a few years ago. Talk about whatever. No moderation which did lead to some nonsense. Now FB try to follow anything it’s a mess. I only look at it fo family things now. Twitt well it’s hard to follow as well. Hope Tucker get more than a 150 characters for his rebirth on Twitter. This forum is what I like.
I like this forum as well, RG. I like the back-and-forth discussions amongst people who are not a bunch of Koolaid drinkers. Real thinkers, and gosh, we can usually have a discussion with those who do not exactly agree. What a novel concept. I got into a discussion once with an MD years back on universal health care. He was Asian, and he was all for it. I was not. Although we were on opposite ends of the spectrum, I enjoyed what he had to say, and I listened to why he believed in such, and it was a nice conversation between two mature adults without any chairs flying. Sigh, I miss those days, because sadly, they are long gone in this world that has lost its ever-loving-mind.
It is indeed antisocial media. Reducing one’s expression to comic book level. War and Peace, 1100 pages more or less. Tweet, 150 characters, more or less. Reducing human communication to grunts and rage, or compliance. I simply cannot comprehend the fascination of people communicating by sound bites.
This site is one of a very few where I’m the least bit concerned about any replies.
Bravo, Eric.
Gotta love the censorship, too! And it’s hilarious, because in their attempts to censor ideas and emotions (You can’t dislike…err…I mean “hate” anything or anyone…perish the thought!), their a-i Al-Gore-rhythms /30 year-old fidget-spinning doofus living in his mother’s basement will censor words which may have nothing to do with the idea being censored…while allowing the very idea to be posted as long as the wording is compliant/correct.
Witness Reddit, where people m,ust say “Dong Van Dyke” when referring to the actor Dick……but yet one can describe acts of buggery in explicit detail, with no censorship. Express disgust and disdain for buggery and or explicit descriptions of it…and THAT would be censored….even if you’re Dong read more
I’m not a Twitter addict, but all of the other (quite valid) criticisms aside, I do think the character-limit model is an interesting twist. Without it, Twitter would be just another receptacle for diarrhea of the keyboard.
It takes skill and thought to write with brevity. I used to enjoy the challenge of writing headlines and picture captions on the copydesk. At newspapers, at least in the old days, a headline’s specs were called out by the slot man, and it always had to fill the space precisely. Zero tolerance for over, and only a couple of characters for under. It was quite satisfying when, under deadline pressure, you came up with just the right handful of words to summarize a story, and perhaps even in a clever way.
“Twitter would be just another receptacle for diarrhea of the keyboard”
Which in my mind would be an improvement. Headlines are a perfect example of the shortcomings of limited expression. They most often have little or nothing to do with the content, and have only to do with telling those who won’t read the article what they should believe.
Then those are crappy headlines. As I said, it takes skill and thought. And a slot man who will throw it back at you and say “This sucks. Try again.”
What you say is certainly true, Roland (It takes skill to write with brevity. A skill which I certainly do not possess!)- But the thing is too, when one is writing to a varied or wide audience (as opposed to an individual or group of people who are connected by similar experience, philosophy, intelligence level, etc.) it is often necessary to educate one’s readers- often on the very subject which they may be supporting and which you may be countering- as many people are surprisingly ignorant of the very subjects which they espouse.
If I’m debating a scientist, merely mentioning Charles Lyell can make my point with two words. If I’m debating the average Joe; a college student, or high-school science teacher….it will often be necessary to write at least several paragraphs to clue them in as about Lyell, uniformitarianism, and why such was never ‘science’, and is now even discarded by those whom they cite.
Then again, with the attention-span of most people these days (Which socialist media, like Twitter, has helped reduce even more) few will attempt to even read anything longer than a sentence or two…….
Always thought that tweets were for twits. The so-called “Twitter Files” that were published by Matt Taibi prove that Big Brother has control of pretty much all information sources besides the MSM, which have been stenographers for govco for decades.
Thanks, Eric, for maintaining this site for sharing actual facts.
>Always thought that tweets were for twits.
Precisely. And not just “upper class” twits, either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxSM5y7Pfs
Not like they are hiding anything. With a corporate logo of a bird, the obvious message is that “Twitter” is for birdbrains. Those with more complicated thoughts had best go elsewhere.
Facebook put me in “jail” last year for posting something from a doctor that said Pfizer’s then new antiviral drug, Paxlovid, could have negative interactions with certain drugs people took. FB said the post “Violated their community standards on COVID misinformation”. However, it was just a few months later that the media (which gets tremendous advertising money from Pfizer and other pharma companies) admitted that Paxlovid CAN have negative interactions with certain drugs. However, I NEVER got an apology from Mark Zuckerberg OR Facebook.
Not only that, there are people who are downright nasty on social media, particularly to people who speak out against whatever “The Narrative Du Jour” is. I’ve been called names on FB by such people like RACIST or UNEDUCATED ANTI-VAXXER.
Hey that’s nothing, John B.
Last year I set up an ersatz FB account using an old laptop (I don’t want their crapola infecting my real computer) and my junk email address and a fictitious name, just so I could peruse FB Marketplace for vehicles…..
I got a message withion a few hours, having never even used to account, much less ever posting anything, saying that my activities violated community yada yada whatever… LOL. Managed to get it reinstated..then the same thing happened a few days later, again!
In addition to actual censorship, I think they just screw with people at random to keep them in fear and make them feel ‘grateful’ and act very gingerly in order to preserve their ‘valued and dear’ account….. (Ironically, my account is still active, and I am ready to start looking for a vehicle out west…but I never do it, ’cause i hate using FBM…I just want ot look at ads and just call people on the phone!!!)read less
‘Your payoff is that the “social media” platforms have data-mined everything you’ve “Tweeted” and used it to make money while paying you none.’ — eric
But wait, there’s more:
‘Someone inside the Twitter platform, an employee of Twitter, had made a decision to target me. As a result: (a) they had been doing this for a long time with a specific goal in mind; and (b) they created an elaborate trail of background activity and identity that was entirely fabricated.
‘Eventually, my assigned investigative unit admitted this. Once the federal investigators realized what took place they wanted to get rid of me – and my snark filled curiosity – with great urgency.
‘They also had an ‘oh shit’ moment, when they contemplated everything, including what they had revealed to me from the outset of my contact, now several months prior.
‘What I discovered in this experience was that DHS, and by extension DOJ/FBI and the January 6 investigators, had direct admin-level back doors into all social media platforms.‘ — Sundance, May 4, 2023
https://tinyurl.com/yuuvzhjb
Not only is Big Brother watching you on Twitter and Facebook, he’s a privileged admin on the platform … and might even post something incriminating on your behalf.