The Social Media Cesspool

Must. Not. Engage. Again.

I don’t know if I’m just old or tired or both, but I’ve stood just about all I can stand of trolls, liars, contrarians, dimwits, dipshits, downers, dickheads, dorkwads, and professional provocateurs on social media.

I might also be tired of social media in general.

For years I defended Facebook as a great place to keep track of friends from all the different groups I’ve been part of over the years: high school, college, various ad agencies, comedy, theater, relatives, miscellaneous. But over the course of 15 years I’ve watched it deteriorate into a cesspool of irrelevant advertising where you can go weeks without seeing posts from friends whose posts you want to see. Is Bob taking a Facebook break? Is he dead? Why I haven’t I heard what Bob is up to?!

And a quick look at Bob’s page reveals that he’s fine and that the post he posted five minutes ago didn’t appear on my feed because it couldn’t fight its way through the posts from posters who paid to have their posts posted instead of the posts I want to see.

Here’s what’s on my Facebook feed at the time I’m writing this:

1. Post from my friend Bill Dotson.

2. Post from a guy I’m friends with but have never met. Good post with some political insight, but should he get priority over my first cousins or a friend from the FCHS trombone section?

3. Post from CNN. OK, I followed them so that’s on me.

4. Post from “Funnies Now.” This one is sponsored (meaning I don’t want it and never asked for it) and it’s a list of “35 Relatable Memes That Sum Up Life’s Absurdities.” There are three sample memes in the post with the punch line artfully hidden; these three memes will not appear anywhere in the list.

5. Post from my friend Jim Fisher.

6. Post from a group I joined as a favor to the group creator but whose posts I’m already tired of.

7. Post from my friend Adron Chambers. Nice guy. Member of the 2011 World Series Champion St Louis Cardinals. His posts are aimed at young athletes, of which I am not one—yet all of his posts appear in my feed while I have to go searching for posts from closer friends, and that’s if I happen to think of them. If I could automatically receive every post posted by my friends, that would be great. Sure, that would presumably be a lot of posts. But I already see a lot of posts, so this would be a win for me if not for Mark Zuckerberg and FB shareholders. And yes, I understand that’s the whole point but by golly it isn’t enough reason for me to stop ranting.

8. Post from Movie Dose, an “entertainment website” who paid cash money to put “25 Shameless T-Shirts People Wore in Public” on my feed. I don’t care about the shameless t-shirts or Movie Dose either one but I wouldn’t mind hearing what some of my Phi Psi friends are up to. Don’t worry about that, the Phi Psis are probably fine and probably busy checking out these shameless t-shirts.

9. Post from my friend Dan Umthun. Dan’s posts are generally funny. Thanks, Dan.

10. Post from Redbubble. It’s an ad. They’re selling t-shirts but I don’t know if they’re shameless or not. I do know that I already know where to buy t-shirts so this is just getting in the way of my social media enjoyment.

11. Post from a friend I barely know wishing happy birthday to someone I don’t know at all. Why is this on my feed?

12. Post from LITB F/W Collection. Another ad that would seem to be the opposite of targeted advertising, considering that they’re trying to sell me pants that look like this:

13. Post from my friend Dave Williams. From two weeks ago. The thirteenth post on my feed is two weeks old and I’ve already commented on it.

I don’t know what goes on at Facebook headquarters but I bet nobody showed up for the meeting on How to Make Our Product Better For Users.

Wrestling with Pigs

“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.” –Robert Heinlein

“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get filthy and the pig enjoys it.” –Misattributed to Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, and others

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, dimwits and dipshits are partly responsible for my waning enjoyment of social media. Part of it is their fault for existing but a larger part is mine for engaging with them.

Here’s a handy checklist that will help you decide whether or not to engage with social media pigs and trolls:

Is this person going to be happy to be contradicted? __ Yes __ No

Is this person going to be grateful for being shown an opposite point of view? __ Yes __ No

You can almost always check both boxes no. But then a third question invariably arises:

Are you going to engage anyway? __ Yes __ No

It’s possible that pointing out someone’s ridiculous opinion is less about changing that person’s mind and more about showing solidarity with other people who thought it was ridiculous but had the restraint necessary not to engage. That’s what I’m going with, anyway.

Unless this is your first time reading this newsletter you know that I’m most likely to refute the ideas of people who hold misogynistic, superstitious, and anti-small-d-democratic views, people who mainline the lies of the right-wing noise machine, people whose grasp of reality is so tenuous they think Former President Scumbag is being persecuted because he’s just so wonderful. That’s true 98 percent of the time. The other two percent I reserve for folks who just hate seeing other people have fun. Most recently I was following a thread on Threads in which travelers recounted some of their funniest and most bizarre encounters with guards at the US/Canada and US/Mexico borders. There were dozens and dozens of these rib-tickling anecdotes. But then someone—and there’s one in every crowd—someone chimed in with: “This is their job. Nothing unusual.”

I think Rachel Dratch would agree that Debbie Downer was not someone you were supposed to emulate. I don’t know what compelled this person to be the wet blanket in the punch bowl, but I do know that somebody responded “Need me to shoo these kids off your lawn, Grandpa?”

That somebody was me. I couldn’t not engage.

I generally don’t bother responding to the MAGA crowd, mainly because I’m still a few credits away from getting my online certificate in cult deprogramming but also because if I want to beat my head against a wall I can go back to trying to find a literary agent. Still, occasionally some derp will post something so egregious it’s impossible to pass up, like the guy who claimed the United States has had the world’s greatest universal healthcare system for more than 60 years. I asked if his favorite part of this superior system was the fact that middlemen without medical degrees deny coverage in order to boost profits for shareholders. He didn’t respond. (Same derp also claimed “No one is dying in the streets and no one is suffering in pain.”)

Oh, and there was the obvious Russian troll who claimed public schools were unsafe because “on average, a teacher is arrested for molesting children every 24 hours.” That statistic, while technically true (in 2022 350 teachers were arrested for child molestation—that’s 350 out of 3.2 million full-time teachers) conveniently ignores the fact that 77 percent of molested children were victimized by parents.

That’s the kind of misinformation that should be pointed out (and the kind Facebook officials ignored in the leadup to the 2016 election). The troll will always deflect and do some name-calling, probably because he hasn’t been given the facts or he’s been told to ignore the facts or he just can’t wait to get at the borscht casserole Natasha Smirnova left in the break room.

Ah well. I should probably just relax and see what my friends are up to. If I can find them amongst the ads for weird-ass pants.