While you were busy scrolling your feed this week, a slow but steady movement was gaining momentum to #DeleteFacebook.
The social media giant has been mired in controversy after it was revealed it been selling its data – er, your data – to companies using it for profit.
But, was this really news? Exactly where did you think all that content was going?
Last Friday, Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps declared she would log out of her Facebook account for the last time in this, an election year. This from an incumbent candidate whose first term win was largely credited to social media.
In a blog explaining her decision, Helps spoke of persistent misinformation marring her dialogue with constituents. She called Facebook a “toxic” space of “psychological violence.”
It was a moment to pause.
If a person running for mayor in the capital city of the province of British Columbia doesn’t need social media – do we?
We would be remiss not to notice her name delete itself from our screens the same week Facebook found itself in hot water. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Helps has caught a lot of flak, particularly on Facebook where whole groups devoted to ousting her from office are currently supplying Russian bots with their municipal political leanings.
It is also worth noting that as a news outlet, social media is one of our greatest tools for reaching an ever-changing audience. Asking you to #DeleteFacebook in many instances would be asking you to delete us.
But, there is one lesson to be take from eaction to Facebook’s dirty little secret, and from Victoria’s mayor decrying the community relying on the world’s worst game of telephone for pertinent information: critical thinking is a skill seldom used these days, and one that is increasing necessary in this world social media echo chambers and alternate facts.
Maybe instead of rushing to erase your existence from the cyber realm – which is just more smoke and mirrors (is this how we fix our ignorance?) – it’s time to “put social media in its place” as Helps said. The information highway that has captured our brains still exists, just like it did before social media came up the on-ramp.
Let’s put our thinking caps on, slow down, and get back to using the internet the way it was intended.
(And keep those photos of your breakfast to yourself.)