Thank you Elon Musk. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg
An Open Letter They'll Never See.
About 5 months ago or so, I wrote a very long article about living in a world of evil rulers. I touched on food, cable “news”, and social media. Basically, no matter what these outlets and mediums try to tell you, when all is said and done, they do not have your best interest at heart. If anything, it is in their best interest in terms of pure profit to keep you as unhealthy as possible.
They want you to be addicted to sodium and sugar.
They want you to be addicted to bad news and fearmongering.
They want you addicted to FOMO (fear of missing out) and addicted to scrolling and engaging with things that make you angry.
Of course, none of this is healthy for us, and at the end of the day these capitalist ventures profit from unhealthy habits. But I am here to do something I never thought I would do, let alone in the year of our lord 2025. I am here to thank Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for finally saying some of the quiet parts out loud.
No, seriously. Thank you, Elon Musk, and thank you Mark Zuckerberg.
In case you are unaware of what’s been happening since last week, Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and others, has basically turned its platforms into a free for all of misinformation. Tell all the lies you want, “community notes” is all that can happen to you, if it happens at all.
They have also taken off the protections against online abuse, especially when it pertains to communities that are often the subject of said abuse. So, in plain English, on Meta platforms you can be as racist, sexist, bigoted and hateful as you want really. They don’t care anymore. In fact, they might pay you to do so, especially if your content garners enough attention and clicks.
Meta has also said it wants to promote “civic engagement” by allowing news to be promoted on its platforms moving forward. They say, “this is what the people wanted”. I’m sorry. But I can’t imagine that most of Meta’s users want MORE cable “news” clips polluting their feeds. I want to see what my cousins are up to, not what they are screaming about on CNN or Fox News.
But again, all of this gets down to what Meta is about. Long gone are the days where Facebook was about connecting you to old friends or college colleagues. You can still do that of course, and it is still viable to find niche communities, potential places to live, products to sell, dating…(though I have not ventured there yet haha). But all these bells and whistles don’t get at the core of what Meta and other social media companies make money off of. They make money off your data, eyeballs, and time. So, the angrier you are, the more likely you are to doom scroll, work yourself into an anxious frenzy, and perhaps argue with some random bigot because dunking on them may feel somewhat good in the moment.
Plus, as a bonus, it’s a lot easier to get an unhealthy brain to engage in harmful activities, so it suits them to do everything in their power to make their platforms as unhealthy for you as possible.
And what of Twitter? Well, Twitter has been on this for a while now. Besides their latest “feature” that inserts “news” into your feeds when you did not ask for it at all (and said news bypasses your blocked/muted words features), Twitter was already losing its mind. My feed is only tolerable because I have so many muted words and blocked accounts. But the way the platform continues to try and push harmful rhetoric into our feeds is becoming more overt. There’s a reason I took my personal account off my phone last month.
I am not going to get into Elon Musk personally. To be honest I can only speak of his deeds and meddling as a third party as I refuse to consume anything that man is peddling. But I don’t think it surprises anyone that hate and abuse has continued to rise on his site, and it is more and more obvious that the platform promotes hateful comments as well. If you don’t believe me look under the tweet of ANY woman in the sports industry and it’s almost always a who’s who of Neanderthals.
But wait Preston, I thought you said you were going to thank these two “titans of industry”?
Yes, I am actually here to thank both Elon and Mark for making it easier to distance myself from their platforms than ever before. I believe that the happiest people in this world are the ones who spend the least amount of time staring at their screens. As Elon and Mark continue to push for their platforms to spread misinformation and promote hatred and bigotry, it will become less and less appealing to mindlessly scroll.
They believe that we are so addicted to their platforms that we will endure the hate and abuse said platforms are now going to promote. Personally, I don’t need them that much to subject myself to abuse. But I guess it remains to be seen how the rest of the world responds. I see a few people here and there decoupling themselves from Meta platforms. Plenty have already abandoned Twitter. I am not sure where I will fall on this personally, but I am almost certainly going to continue to remove social media platforms from mobile devices. At least, I will be removing personal accounts.
I have always said we need to make sure our phones/devices work for us, and not the other way around. I think the same can be said about the social media platforms we choose to engage with. Who is working for who here? If you’re not careful, you’re going to be doing a lot more for them than they do for you. And as they become more openly hostile towards many of their users, people are going to have to ask real questions like is all this worth it.
So, again, Thank you Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. I appreciate you making your platforms so accommodating for bigots that it behooves me to spend less time on them. As many of my goals in 2025 will benefit from you making your products more hostile to people that look like me, you’re going to help me become a better person. I appreciate you all for saying a lot of the quiet parts out loud.
That said, Elon and Mark will never see this letter. If for no other reason, their platforms squash outside media links. But, more so, they refuse to think someone like me exists because of the way they see the world and what they think of certain humans. That’s more of an Elon thing really. Perhaps we’ll elaborate on that at a different time.
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I love this article!!!! Yes!!! Thanks to these fools it’s making it so easy for us to step away