Meta will disconnect Instagram and Messenger chat functions in mid-December

Don’t shoot the messenger.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of social media. There’s something wrong with the companies that run it. People who seek each other out to share joys and sorrows is very normal human behavior. Of course, online has a different form than offline, but there is nothing wrong with that. Social media doesn’t take anything away, they are extra.

The problem is with companies like Facebook that abuse our social side to profile us so that they can sell a lot of advertisements. The goal is not to have nice interactions with other users. Therefore, they tolerate some “wrong” behavior while others are severely punished and censored.

This is not to say that all problems are entirely the fault of those companies. Everywhere there are people there is manipulation, arguing, lying and stealing. In general, we can deal with this very well and if it doesn’t work out, we have the law and the police to set boundaries. It doesn’t work that way on social media, where the boundaries are mainly determined by the commercial interests of the operators. Fortunately, the EU is now starting to set boundaries itself.

Long before anyone had ever heard of Facebook or Twitter, the Internet was full of groups of people who communicated daily via websites, chats, mailing lists, RSS feeds, etc. Of course, there was also a lot of arguing, but that was very different from central managed social media of today. Part of the difference is that there used to be many more places for those kinds of interactions. If you didn’t like the group you could easily go to another group that was just as good. Today it is much more centralized. If it’s not nice then you can’t go somewhere else but you have to make the best of the situation and the whole world is watching. That puts everything in much more focus.

But none of those problems are inherent to social media. Some of it is normal human behavior. This is not without problems, but it is not new either. The problem is with monopolistic corporations trying to make money from our social interactions where humanity is only seen as something you can manipulate to make more money.