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André Couture's avatar

Using the cigarette industry as an analogy to understand how we should cope with the danger of social media is a great idea. I never thought of that, but I'm going to be using it from now on.

Last year I decided to completely delete my Facebook account. At first it was just on hold, but after a while I decided to be completely rid of it. Something happened during the pandemic, either to me or the people in my list. There was no middle ground discussions anymore. Everything was turned up to 11, nothing seemed real anymore and couldn't live with that anxiety.

I miss having normal talks to a variety of people, but Facebook isn't doing that anymore. I check my wife's Facebook occasionally to see if there's any interesting news I might have missed, but there's nothing. Just junk ads and shitposting galore. What struck me is that my wife wasn't surprised by my conclusion, she completely agreed. However to her it seemed normal, to me, who's been out of it for a year, it was grating.

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Dan O'Connor's avatar

The issue raised by Max Fisher was one of those addressed recently at the annual Stanfield Conversations in Halifax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ9xFfHapzI&t=17s

In that discussion Dr. Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab at U of T made a case for breaking up the large social media companies. The EU has been much more willing to regulate in this area than has Canada or the US. And as the conversation indicated, social media is only part of the debate about digital democracy.

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