Social media started off so innocently, as a way to connect with friends and family and like-minded individuals. There was Friendster, then Myspace, then Facebook (which now has over 3 billion users). Along came Twitter (now X, with about 600 million monthly active users). There’s Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok. There’s even a YouTube-Twitter-Facebook spinoff exclusively for politicians called YouTwitFace.
What is your view of social media today? Do you use it, avoid it, or something in between?
I jumped on late, used FB and Twitter/X for a few years, then jumped off early. Except for TKZ and a couple other blogs, I’m a social media hermit. Would I sell more books if I were on Insta, et.al.? Yes but the costs outlined below are too high.
It began as a tool to “connect” people, which sounds good on the surface. But at this point, I believe it has now disconnected whole generations that never learned to develop real human connections.
Then it became a tool for cowards and bullies. People could attack others w/o provocation and never suffer consequences for antisocial behavior. Lord of the Flies went on a global scale.
Then purveyors finally admitted it’s a tool to collect data for predatory marketing and other suspicious purposes. Recent developments in AI morphed it into a tool for criminals on an unprecedented scale.
It’s a tool and I am sick of being tooled.
Thanks, Debbie! I nodded and chuckled and the profound truth in your close.
I only scroll Instagram for the funny cat videos. FB is worthless – my feed is filled with people I don’t know and pages I never signed up for. X is too mean. The only thing I spend time on is Pinterest, which isn’t a true social media app, it’s a search engine.
My 21 year old granddaughter regularly talks about how social media has made regular conversation between men and women almost nonexistent.
Except for TKZ, I don’t go to any social media sites. My main writing computer is off-line. My husband spends a lot of time on Facebook and YouTube and honestly, I don’t know how good people can stand the vitriol. I do enjoy the funny stuff he shares; maybe I should give YouTwitFace a try. 😄
We pick our grandchildren up from school and they don’t even look up from their phones. It makes me wonder how they have time for schoolwork.
I would say that TKZ is not a social media site. Just because you can leave comments doesn’t make it “social media,” which is the constant scrolling and constant updates and clicking and liking and reposting and replying in the never-ending stream.
If we call regular sites/blogs “social media” than the term is meaningliess.
That’s great about having a separate computer just for writing. I do that with a pad and paper (I also have a manual typewriter). And I use a flip phone simply because I don’t want to be addicted to a glowing screen all day and walk into a telephone poll or something.
I view social media through the eyes of the parents and children.
Social media contributes to bullying, sexual harassment, stalking, privacy concerns, bias, and more.
Researching social media lawsuits uncovers the executive decisions that have contributed to suffering, addiction, and even death.
When we learn about the dark side of social media, we’re inspired to prioritize the well-being of children and adults over entertainment and marketing.
I quit all social media cold turkey 12 years ago (!). Best thing I’ve ever done. I wrote about it here:
https://sassone.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/thoughts-on-social-media/
I joined Facebook back in early 2009 and Twitter the following year, and actively used the through the 2010s. I made a number of friends through both, and was in several author groups which helped me as an indie. However I became dismayed when both platforms became much less about connection and more about manipulation and commodification of users for advertising and data gathering. I left Twitter/X in 2023 and Facebook in January 2025.
Now I am very wary of that manipulation as well as their emphasis on video (especially shallow video content) over the written word.
I’m on Bluesky, and it’s still free of manipulation or commodification, but it also doesn’t have the same spark as FB or Twitter back in the early 2010s.
In the end, what matters is human connection, which we have here at TKZ, and which is one of the reasons I value this place so much.
I have accounts on all the SM platforms, but I haven’t visited some of them in a long time. I’m most active on x.com where I post every weekday (when I remember) and post the TKZ blog info daily. I post almost exclusively about writing and writers, but I also repost brilliant offerings about math, physics, and some extraordinary moon shots. I never touch politics—that’s probably why I don’t get any political stuff in my feed.
I occasionally get on FB to keep up with family and friends. I also belong to some writing groups there. Again, no politics.
What an apt topic to come across, as I just wrote a blog post on whether or not authors “have to” be on social media.
For many years, I’ve tried the gamut of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube–does that count?–blogging, etc.) because “if you want to sell books, you’d better be everywhere!”
Not only do I think this is poor advice, but I also believe it’s untrue. I worried when I quit my final social media platform, Instagram, last fall, that my (modest) book sales would plummet further. They didn’t.
When I think of the hours and hours of time and creative energy I’ve spent creating pretty pictures, taping reels, trying to come up with perfect # for every post, I feel a little sick.
But you live and learn from mistakes. So, after 13+ years of marketing my books in a variety of methods, I’m going back to what I enjoy most. Writing blog posts and reading blog posts. Glad to see I’m not the only author who has disengaged from socials.