Backing off from Social Media

I am growing disenchanted with social media. It's as though a slurry-pit wall has been breached and an increasingly large flow of shit is squelching across our consciousness.

I occasionally stray onto Instagram and I have a foothold on Bluesky as @suemillard.bsky.social but I left TwiXer some time ago.

I remain on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/sue.millard.9/ because of some nice people I know there and because I manage a couple of Pages for other purposes like the Fell Pony Society.

While I have a fairly good control of what I see on FB I'm also aware of an increase in posts and reactions by the stupid and the uninformed, the drunk or overmedicated, and the racists and xenophobes who infest the place. 

It certainly seems that FB has stopped employing real people to manage the billions of its users or fact checking their posts except with the blunt instrument of artificial intelligence.

• Tinfoil hatters informed only by YouTube videos
  
• claim cancer is a parasite that can be expelled by animal wormers
• claim vaccinations are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent 
• Chemtrail conspiracy theorists
• any image of the sky that includes an aircraft or an unusual cloud formation will bring them out in force 
  
• Creationist nutjobs 
• any image of geological formations will have them claiming that it was done by "the flood"
• deny the scientifically discovered timespan of the earth's existence and substitute the genealogical calculations of Bishop Ussher in the 17th century
  
• Fundamentalists (of several flavours of religion)
  
• insist that atheism or agnosticism are beliefs and are bitterly opposed to them 
• deny the theory of evolution, which is "Darwinist"
• any image of primates will set them off
• they have no idea that in science the word "theory" does not mean a "hypothesis" 
• The visually ignorant 
• coo and praise "god" for images produced by artificial intelligence
• The verbally ignorant 
• can't tell the difference between AI generated text and genuine human thought 
• or push their AI generated "poetry" across literary pages until - eventually - the admins get sick of them and use the ban hammer
  
• The red-hat brigade in America 
• think Trump can do no wrong and are bitterly opposed to any suggestion otherwise
  
• And they ALL get mad and start slinging insults if you suggest their ideas are part of the squelching shit mentioned earlier.

Re the last bullet point - I'm not well up in American politics or the mechanisms of the USA government but even I can smell an attempted coup there. Trump and his rich, irresponsible mates tear through the Constitution and government structures, issuing Executive Orders which are not laws but are forced through at speed without the agreement of Congress. Isn't it time for Britain to give up any idea of a "special relationship"  with a country that's being deconstructed for the benefit of an incredibly rich few? Isn't it risky for us to go on depending on our increasingly unhinged and abusive Uncle Sam? Or are we just as ignorant as the slurry on social media suggests?

Incredibly depressing.

So here I am, scraping the rust off the blog where at least I can control what gets posted.