Everyone knows that Twitter is a hyper addictive app and I confirmed this was personally true on Apple’s Screen Time. It’s always embarrassing looking at Screen Time because you learn how much time gets wasted away. Aside from learning that hours upon hours of doing the Twitter death scroll was taking way too much of my precious downtime, I also want to point out that I was very annoyed with all the x-rated fake accounts that would suddenly pop up when you clicked on a user profile. I’ve read that this might be a post-Elon-Musk phenomenon, but I don’t know for sure. Let’s just say that if I didn’t delete all the new fake followers, I would probably have about 100 by the end of my four month trial. In actuality, I had only around seven followers because I kept deleting the fake accounts.
Somewhat equally important was coming to the slow and painful realization that content overload is not the answer to government-sponsored disinformation/misinformation/no-information campaigns waged by mainstream media. That sounds like Trump-voter gibberish, but who knew, they were right all along! I’ve written plenty about confirmation bias in the past and thankfully I’m happy to admit when I’m wrong. I think a lot of the people in the western world probably feel a little duped after all the shady reporting over the past five months.
Judging by the lack of traffic for my content, I want to make myself happy and say that I’m horrible at promoting it across all the different apps that serve as the latest popular digital medium on which to spread information. I’ve come to the unsatisfying conclusion that I don’t have the energy nor desire to expend the time it takes to copy and paste links everywhere. It’s an all-consuming process that literally has cannibalistic characteristics. The more time you spend on these services, the more time it takes to manage each of them. The more time it takes to manage your various accounts, the more time you have to spend on them doing exactly that. It’s a death spiral into a life that is not worth living because you pretty much become beholden to algorithms running your life and to a certain extent, it is a very lonely, servile and somewhat performative existence in which you might be communicating with bots without even realizing it. It’s actually very sad and painful now that I think about it.
In other words, there are better ways to spend time and I would much rather financially support curated and highly reputable content providers across a wider spectrum of opinions as opposed to donating my time & precious data to large social media companies that don’t give a shit about me, my time or society at large. This is already known, but it’s always worth repeating: what happens on social media is that you get pigeonholed into large bubbles and very quickly, the central goal becomes engagement, not providing a service that leaves its consumers well-informed.
Every hour we spend zombieishly feeding on an endless stream of content is done at a very severe and presumably incalculable cost—whether it is at the expense of our mental health or consuming time time we could be physically spending with our family and friends or something less obvious like being unable to manage our time more properly consuming information that we want *and* choose to consume as opposed to what a mysterious algorithm feeds us whenever we desire to snort a digital line of cocainent.
X Has A Huge Fake Accounts Problem
I don’t know how bad it is because that will take some snooping around with data that I don’t have access to, but if I were to guess I wouldn’t be surprised if 25% of all Twitter/X accounts are fake—maybe even a third!?! Who knows, hopefully someone can figure it out. I wasn’t looking for new followers or anything, but I would notice (initially) flattering likes, retweets and new followers—more than 50% of these were by fake accounts, mostly by accounts featuring an always-lonely, yet scandalously-clad female looking for friends. The photo itself might be A.I. generated for all I know, but when you click once to see see the profile photo you get a quick window into the dark depths of the Internet’s anus, sometimes literally.
I apologize for the visceral analogy (all puns intended), but as expected, it’s very stinky, very dirty and X/Twitter is filled with it. I quickly realized that this is something that must be dealt with on a home-router level (short of banning x.com outright, I wasn’t really successful on this front on my overpriced Netgear router). I’m shocked that this doesn’t get pointed out more often, but then again, I haven’t really spent my time searching for people frustrated about this particular x-rated issue. The only reason I bring it up is because I’ve disconnected from it and currently in the process of giving a final review of my experience.
Overload of Information is Clearly Not The Answer
Social media, as we all know, is essentially information on crack. It’s not necessarily the information that is addictive, but rather than delivery mechanism of the medium. If you thought 20 minutes of evening news to cover everything that happened domestically and internationally was laughably too little time, social media is pretty much 20 hundredths of a second per news cycle. It’s no wonder people only have surface level information of everything. This line of thought always makes me think of Nicholas Carr’s highly prescient book “The Shallows.” The book was one of the reasons I stayed away from social media in the first place, but having been dragged into Twitter following the Palestine-Zionism war, I learned exactly what he was talking about. If any of this makes you curious, read the book. I want to give you a one-liner hook but my better half is telling me not to do it. Some books and ideas need to be slowly chewed and consumed, this is one of them. So much for not giving the hook…
The answer to the problem is to find credible news outlets. That is obviously easier said than done because profitable interests have taken truth and colonized every letter of the word. There is truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, etc. What flavor of truth do you want today? Hey, here’s an idea! Let’s allow a highly advanced algorithm that has been trained on very questionable data to decide for humanity! We’ll give you truth between 8-11:30AM, truth between 11:30A – 1:30PM, truth between the hours of 1:30P-4:25P, etc.. It’s amazing how we have incentivized some of the smartest minds on the planet!
As I stated in a previous post, finding sources and appropriate information is a painfully muddled process (initially) and will require time.
Ultimately, we must be the filter.
When I say we, I say that only in the context of properly training our inner filter. This training process unfortunately takes acquiring a certain level of knowledge on how to think. Sadly, if everything goes as planned with the current education system, a little less than 50% (I’m being very generous here) will forgo this training process and simply rely on automated systems to do 99.99% of the knowledge-base heavy lifting. I think it is safe to say that we as content consumers basically go into a state of “cognitive ease” and simply eat up what is delivered to us on our shiny digital plates.
At the risk of venturing outside the scope of this post, I will try to wind things down here with a list of reputable content providers that I am going to use for myself. I get tidbits of global news from paper delivery of the FT and then spend around 15 minutes going through a list of websites that quickly open in tabs. I choose one article—at most two—from either the news section or opinions section that I find interesting and forward them to my Kindle for one hour long news & opinion-reading session before bed. Trust me, this is way more than enough time to hold a decent conversation at your next dinner party.
<<Drum-roll>>…And here is the list of websites I’m currently using…
FT.com
The New Arab
LA Times
The Straits Times (Singapore)
Mondoweiss
NY Times
Middle East Eye
South China Morning Post
US Right To Know
The Grayzone
You get the idea…
Thanks to the two of you who will read this! Please show me some love by commenting below or sharing the post with friends.
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