Isn't the problem with Facebook really a problem with us?

Also, why is complaining about it mostly a liberal fetish?

Yawn. Another day, another figure steps out of the shadows to tell us how evil Facebook Inc is. And the media loves it because it's a simple story to tell. A bad corporation that everybody's heard of causes harm and turns a blind eye because that's literally how they make money.

Having started out as a website for rating the attractiveness of girls' faces, to distract and please mostly boys, Facebook (Insta, Twitter etc) now pleases and distracts several billion people in a similar way. Which is by dangling bits of content which they've previously signalled pleases and distracts them.

There's always a poster person in these dramas and this one is Frances Haugen. She's a darling of, well, mostly a certain type. We'll come back to this.

Woah. Hold on.

You're seeing a generalised impatience I tend to develop for orthodox narratives leaking through here, so let's back up a bit.

Like many of the perspectives I now question, the anti-Facebook stance is personally familiar from the days when I shared it. In a way, I feel kind of qualified to talk a bit about this due to my onetime antipathy toward the supposed manipulation of people by digital evil-doers. I was part of bien pensant Twitter when all the Cambridge Analytica hysteria was revving up and I often blathered on about how everyone should #DeleteFacebook.

In truth, I now realise, this was mostly projection of frustration about being on the losing side in the cultural and political tremors that ushered in Brexit and Trump. I was shocked to discover that there were so many people around who don't think like me. And that these unwashed masses have votes that count as equal to mine. Thereby sometimes winning things that I didn't think they should win.

Similarly I used to think Twitter was a terrible place because it featured lots of high profile shouters pitching ideologies that I didn't share. I was always joining in with the choruses condemning 'harmful' content. Today I still think that Twitter is a terrible place but I wonder what 'harmful' content really means. I now suspect it just means mean-spirited stuff that lots of us don't like, but that many other people do like.

In passing, here, I also suspect that this is why the academic Leftish invests so much intellectual effort in developing word salads to define as 'harmful' sentiments that their in-groups just don't like. And thereby describe the words used to articulate those sentiments as 'actual violence'. More to come on this, another time.

Anyway, something happened to make me question these popular ideas about other people's dangerous ideas and harmful content. I had some therapy and started doing daily meditation.

My head was in the shed, with a constant background hum of depression and anxiety and a set of living circumstances I'd unthinkingly engineered that were sub-optimal. What happened, over the course of six months discussing my First World woes with 'Alyson'¹ was two things.

One was that I realised that how I felt was a choice. (This is not a claim of universal truth. There are obvious exceptions involving physical chemical/neurological misfiring, terrible life circumstances etc. But I didn’t have any of those. I was just not thinking well).

The other was that I was wasting a shocking amount of time grazing content on social media that was adding to the depression and anxiety by sparking incessant anger, frustration and contempt for others.

I was lucky. There were lots of easily accessible things I'd not been doing, while busy being shouty on Twitter, so I did those things instead. One was building something out of heavy stones,  outside, in the rain and cool autumn air. I started making music and cooking more imaginatively. Yet another thing was getting a Fitbit and becoming more active (losing 2 stones of weight in the process).²

Wtf has this to do with Facebook and the latest recent insider revelations of how uncaring it is about how miserable many of its users are.

One immediate and obvious thing (it seems) to me is that you get the content that you tell the platforms is your favourite stuff. If people are being made angry, fearful, unhappy, discontented with their own lives and so on by the content they're served in their Twitter or Facebook feeds it's largely because that's what they chose to see.

There's a lot of discussion about 'algorithms' that seems to position these ineffably complex sets of rules (whose very architects frequently admit that they don't understand) as out of control. As if we are 'victims' of algorithms, bearing down on us all the time with terrible stuff just to make our lives worse.

One of the reasons I question this is that my own FB feed is lovely. Despite the monstrous edifice that is claimed to be 'destroying democracy' and 'faith in science' or 'social cohesion' controlling what I see, I have been able to shape my experience of FB so that it only enhances my day.

My previous FB account saw me subjected to death threats³. I ended up deleting it, in a fit of anti-FB pique.

Did Facebook do some ingenious tweak of the algorithm or did something else change?

What changed was me. I noticed which content triggered negative feelings and which users were most likely to push it in front of my idly grazing face and made sure not to follow them. Instead of having all my friends on FB I had them on WhatsApp or SMS only. I joined FB groups for people making or appreciating music. I have just one British friend on FB now and the only bit of content I've seen in the past 12 months that annoyed me was a simplistic opinion from a young nurse on the UK not being able to 'afford' migrants that he had taken issue with.

(Incidentally, looking through this hapless nurse's replies was the moment when I also realised that social media is at least as much a performance space as it is an information or social space. But more on that another time.)

What seems to be going on with all the hand-wringing about big platforms that suck attention using every means available to them (ie exploit our weakness) and reward the shittiest content with the highest exposure is a determined avoidance of two issues.  One is that we love to be addicted and we love to feel feelings (whether or not they're nice feelings). And the second issue here is that this means it's a demand side problem while everyone is treating it as a supply side problem. This is not the first time I've noticed this.⁴

There seems to be an assumption that people must be saved from being 'radicalised' on YouTube and spoken to meanly on Twitter or presented with certain messages on Facebook. By changing those platforms rather than ourselves.

Sure, it's easier to regulate a business than to educate several billion people who use the internet, but I just want to see someone acknowledge that the problem is us.

I do not doubt for a moment that the structure of large-scale user-generated content platforms, engineered to spur addiction and reward the least healthy emotional responses, is awful in some abstract way. But I keep thinking that rather than causing problems - for individuals and 'society' - user-generated content that's hyper-networked at scale is really just surfacing something that already exists. Regulate the overt expression of a thing all you want but the thing remains.

In one way, this tends to manifest as just an argument about censorship. As the right keeps pointing out. This annoys me because I don't like agreeing with the right.

So I think that the near universal lionising of this latest 'whistleblower' is unhelpful and misjudged. It's also interesting to have widened my breadth of news and commentary and thereby noticed that the coverage of Haugen's explosion onto the scene has been so ... kind of PR-driven. Piece after piece in 'mainstream' media is reporting what she says as if it's simply 'PR puff'.

But think of the children!

My curiosity is piqued that the 'Facebook story has emerged following a concerted campaign to throttle so many perspectives that just happen to be anathema to one wing of society (people like me - educated and 'progressive' in some way). I still find it astonishing that so few people are concerned about the open pandering to those now in power (in the US) by Twitter and Facebook in removing Donald Trump from their platforms after more than 74 million people voted for him. Substantially more people than voted for any presidential candidate in American history apart from Joe Biden.

When liberals talk about FB and Twitter damaging democracy, weirdly (to me) they think that de-platforming an incredibly popular candidate is a step toward restoring it.

This bothers me even more than the terrible scenes of January 6th. Because there are laws to deal with that and laws to deal with Trump inciting it (which, despite what the right lamely denies he so obviously did).

This is where the emotions bound up with ideology make it really difficult to see clearly. If your feelings about Trump are sufficiently negative, you just aren't bothered by this influence from unaccountable business entities.

The vibe I'm getting from the Facebook Files furore is that it's part of an orchestrated grab to control the information space. Not in a conspiratorial way. Just a very open and obvious series of moves to threaten platforms to ensure that they play by the rules of one side.

That's the context into which Haugen steps, with her girls knowingly put in harm's way message. I find it implausible that the fact that she is now advised by a guy called Bill Burton - a comms guy for the Democrats - isn't significant here.

So, while you may have punched the air when Frances Haugen appeared, such is your dislike of FB, there may be more going on which is worth dropping back to survey a bit.

Other perspectives are available. I've been quite surprised by some of them. There's a good chance they didn't wend their way into your regular news outlets because they kind of spoil the story.

In this piece Glenn Greenwald (a commentator I don't always agree with) makes several observations that 2016/17 me (frightened and anxious about the apparent emergence of 'actual fascism' everywhere) would have discounted. But which now seem quite sober and considered. Based on reading across the media spectrum it seems clear that he's onto something when he says of FB that its problem is

"not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers"

If you're fine with that, imagine if the boot is ever on the other foot.

But that still leaves us with the problem of Instagram hurting girls and FB knowing but not caring about it.

The writer Kat Rosenfield observes in this piece that while Instagram use may fuel distress among young women in particular they also told the journalists of the Wall Street Journal compiling their 'Facebook Files' exposé that they  don't want to stop using Instagram.

Even more interesting is Jesse Singal's piece here (for paying subscribers to Singal-Minded only, sorry) in which he says of the leaked FB research:

"For folks with a bit of a background in social science, though, the research was seen as underwhelming at best, in large part because it was based on self-reports. (Also, even setting that aside, most of the kids in the research said they didn’t think Instagram was harming their mental health.)"

As all of this unfolds I begin to notice that it's a multi-headed hydra of an issue, rather than a simple story of profit over people.

There's a reasonable debate to be had over whether the 'toxic effects of social media' is really just another moral panic like all the ritual satanic sexual abuse that turned out not to have happened, back in the 80s.

There's also an interesting tributary about incentives for participants in a story like this. I have no doubt that Frances Haugen will do very well from here on. And if you want to delve into the incentives side of this a bit more, I recommend looking at how brilliantly the careers rocketed for some of the people behind the now largely discredited field of 'repressed memories' (which emerged from those scary stories about satanism).

If you're feeling particularly mischievous this (free-to-read) article, provocatively headlined 'The fakest "whistleblower" ever' surfaces another aspect of Haugen's agenda that I've seen mentioned nowhere else - the increasing fondness for public surveillance in the interests of 'national security'. Curiously, Haugen is also very much in favour of this.

Sorry if all this seems dispiriting, because it's not as clear cut as we all prefer things to be.

But back to my personal hypothesis, that the problem with social media is really about us rather than the platforms.

It was a relief to read this piece dissecting the FB research itself. This is the only commentary I've found which goes to the nub (as I see it), which is the question of how our social media habits and our mental well-being entwine.

Since I quit chit-chatting and bloviating on Twitter, 13 months ago now, I've felt like a different person.

But I still can't answer the burning question of which came first; feeling better enough to quit Twitter or feeling better because I quit Twitter.

All the same, I can confidently assert that Twitter is a better place without me and all my angry blather. So, in a way, this is some evidence in support of my hypothesis. The problem with Twitter wasn't really Twitter. It was me.

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1. If you haven’t ‘done’ therapy and you think you’d benefit*, let me know if you’d like to be put in touch with her. She and her colleagues have transformed the lives of several people in my orbit. *If you do think you’d benefit, I’d stake my house on you benefitting.

2. I have been accused of ‘privilege’ for being able to afford therapy and having nice material life circumstances, a charge against which I frankly have no response to make.

3. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. As an occasional contributor to The New European I’d suddenly become worth a hit job in Breitbart for a mean tweet about Brexit and old people. The willing of my death came from oldish (mostly women) Brexit-supporting people who descended on my FB business page to give me lots of one-star reviews. I laugh about it now.

4. See my old piece about fake news mistakenly treated as a supply-side problem here.