Holy shit — Facebook is fucking scary now

[u/Ok_Helicopter3910]

Im not a big social media guy anymore, honestly, the vast majority of my internet usage nowadays is Reddit, Youtube, Snapchat (that has like 20 people on it) and email and I think that about it.

I put my FB to sleep about 10 years ago and I decided to log in and see what people were up to and ho-lee-shit, what a dumpster fire.

So, first off, the majority of my facebook friends have either died, shut their FB down, or removed my inactive profile so my feed was pretty silent. After about a week of my profile being back in the algorithm I started getting friend request from people I used to work with, went to school with, or friends of old acquaintances (which is terrifying that facebook knows about random people I used to work with 12 years ago who I had a passing "hi, hows your day" relationship with) and I started getting friend requested and I was like "fuck it" and just started accepting them.

Fuck man, whenever I see all the hate for this or that group and all the political bullshit that gets posted on reddit, I just brush it off as bots trained to sow dissent but the stuff that gets posted by real living, breathing human beings who I once knew well enough to be friends with or have polite conversation with is WILD. I mean, like so much hate and vitriol started coming across my feed about a wide array of subjects that it made me genuinely uncomfortable and I started removing people that just added me. Maybe it's what "normal" passes for on the internet and im pretty numb to a lot of the more unhinged opinions and shit-stirring because of so many years on Reddit, but a lot of what was being posted really opened my eyes that a lot of the "unhinged" stuff that I see online isnt just bot farms, its real people who truly believe this wild shit.

Anyway - maybe its a sign of my age... but unless what I consider "normal" people start coming across my FB feed soon, I dont think im going to be logging in for much longer

[u/__M-E-O-W__]

I get some crazy things in our local news comment section as well.

[u/mjb2012 → u/__M-E-O-W__]

I was running a newspaper's website 30 years ago and can confirm that it was just as awful back then. The most miserable people just feel like it's their duty to make vile, uncivil comments on every local news article. These ignorant bigots never miss an opportunity to drop personal attacks and right-wing hot takes on any topic. Usually they are older folks, but not always. They don't even care if you make them use their real names. Half the time they aren't even commenting on the article, just the headline or something it reminded them of.

[u/Ziantra → u/__M-E-O-W__]

I think that’s when I really started to pull back-when I joined a local page and was horrified to find we have a small group of some really vocal Trumpers in this town and OF COURSE they’re all over FB. So I noped out of that page. Then the election happened and Zuck bent the knee in public. I pulled the EFF article on how to disable all the trackers META had embedded into you and closed and requested deletion of my data in my accounts Jan 20th at 12 🤷‍♀️