I’ve written about my love/hate relationship with Facebook before. Looking back, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since I wrote that post and here I am once again feeling the same sort of frustration that I felt back then although for somewhat different reasons.
With over 3 billion active users, Facebook continues to be the world’s most popular social media platform, but it’s driving me crazy! I originally joined to connect with people who were important to me. I miss the days when my feed was filled with their photos and status updates. Now every time I look at Facebook, I see endless posts about the horrors happening south of our border, the vocal minority who want our province to separate from Canada, and the latest well-known evangelical Christian to admit to sexual sin, as well as numerous AI generated stories that may or may not contain elements of truth. I swear that my blood pressure climbs every time I scroll! Apparently, social media algorithms think these are the things I want to see, but they are not! I read local, national, and world news on several sites of my own choosing every day. I don’t need to see it on social media.
In the past, I found that I could clean up my newsfeed by hiding or blocking the sources of posts that I didn’t want to see. I’m still trying to do that, but it doesn’t seem to work as well as it once did. For every source that I block, several more appear. There seems to be no end of them!
So what’s the answer? What would happen if I just stepped away? Would I lose friendships? Would I miss something important? I know that I would lose the one connection that I still have with a number of acquaintances around the world and I would miss that, but is it worth it? That’s the decision that I’m struggling with. As long as I didn’t completely delete my Facebook account, I’d still be able to use Messenger to chat with those that I’m more closely connected with and I do want to continue linking my blog posts to Facebook as that’s where many of you find them and comment on them.
There are, of course, numerous other social media platforms, but none of them gobble up the time or cause me the frustration that Facebook does. I do have an Instagram account, but I mainly use it to look at what a few others have posted and seldom post anything myself. I also use WhatsApp to chat with a limited number of individuals and, although I’m no longer part of the professional world, I do have a LinkedIn account.
How would you describe your relationship with social media? Do you find it as frustrating as I do? How do you handle that?
For now, I’m going to continue attempting to curate my Facebook feed by unfollowing or blocking sites that frustrate me and I’m also going to try to set limits on how much time I spend on social media. Perhaps that will help.
Following Augustine 
I too find facebook getting very in your face. If I look at something one day, the next I am getting ad after ad of what I looked at. Is that not being watched? I don’t like that at all. I don’t put anything personal on facebook either. If I want you to know it, I will pm you with that information. To many people put way too much out there. Gone are the days of privacy I guess. I do however like facebook of messanger for keeping in touch with those that are far away and would miss keeping in touch with them as snail mail is getting way too expensive and takes way too long anymore as we are in the mode of get it done now and not use to waiting anymore. As with everything, there is always the good and the bad we need to learn to balance.
That’s very true, Verna. It seems that each new thing that comes along has both good and bad applications. I don’t want to hide my head in the sand and ignore new technologies, but I want to use them in positive ways while trying to avoid the negative.
I opened a Facebook account at one time due to being part of a small group that only could connect in that manner. Somewhere along the line it stopped working for me – I know I was logging in correctly, but Facebook was telling me there is no account. Well, there is as my husband has an account and he can see mine. I never posted anything except for in this group I was in. I tried looking into the issue with Facebook and got nowhere, so for all intents and purposes I have no account. I know I’m probably missing out and yet I don’t care. I do have a Pinterest account and also Instagram. I’ve never posted on Instagram. I only have it so I can access accounts that I want to follow. I do comment sometimes, but no posts. It can be frustrating. Here’s my frustration with Pinterest: you can no longer leave yourself notes on a recipe – notes about tweaks you made, etc. Gone. That is very annoying as I had numerous recipes with my specific notes. For keeping up with people I want to stay in contact with I email them or text them.
Forgot! Above is from Jeannine.