Information resliency
During inauguration week, I logged off to all Meta products to protest the company’s rollback of trust and safety standards. The company, frankly, has taken a dark turn in the new year and no longer will be quality-assuring the community it enables. It’s weird, because their business is community and this type of content destabilizes the connections needed to build healthy communities. You’d think they would know this by now.
After the week was over, I realized I am not done and didn’t miss being online that much. So I have begun divesting myself from Meta. I think this is a company that is worth denying our attention. My Threads and Instagram are now deleted, and my Facebook will be deleted during the next week. I am trying to work through messaging alternatives; WhatsApp and Messenger are a thornier problem but one I intend to solve.
I will try not to sermonize, but make plain my own ethical reasoning. Meta is a company that has decided to stop policing hate speech and has placed bets on potential profit gains to be had by supporting the Trump administration despite our president’s war on our most vulnerable. This has rhymes in history; there are examples from the 1930s and '40s of media moguls and companies cozying up to the very fascists we fought in WWII, companies that in pursuit of profits became mouthpieces for propaganda that justified great evil.
The consequences for these decisions are all Meta’s problem, of course. But while we cannot change these systems on our own, we do have an ethical duty to use what power we do have to change systems of harm. To that end, it’s important to realize our power is in our attention. Engagement with Meta’s products fuels ad dollars is how the company makes money, and to deny them our attention is power because it affects their bottom line. We can, in other words, live out our values by virtue of what we regard, knowing that regard affects Meta’s bottom line. We can collectively grab their attention by individually exercising our choice.
No shame on anyone who feels like they have to stay. I get it. Our social relationships are locked in, and I don't relish the possibility of leaving behind dear friends I only connect with on Facebook. I would ask us to consider the costs of a malevolent corporation owning the map to our social connections and whether we ought to build differently. Regardless of your political views, we can probably agree at least that we should own the map to our own social relationships.
As you can see I feel really strongly about this. I have dear friends under threat from his administration. There are days I feel this threat myself. The future of my institution and my own ability to do the professor job I love so much is under threat as the culture wars come for a university’s right to independently determine in the free market what comprises a good education. I have not slept well since November. Truthfully, I haven't slept well since 2016. So it’s time to stop supporting platforms that are enabling the people causing so much havoc.
But this isn’t just about leaving. To that end, I strongly recommend you start to invest in decentralized media that is architecturally designed to let you own your own social relationships and posting data, and that by design keeps companies from making us feel trapped. Leave behind centralized products that consolidate their power by owning your address book. Being trapped is the method of abusers.
Information resilience is my watchword for 2025; it's time for us to own the communication lines that will bring us strength through the trials and horrors to come. If I have a media prediction for the coming year, it’s that companies that are premised on the idea of locking you in are going to suffer as users begin to realize their attention is power and seek resilient lines of communication that can withstand the whims of an unaccountable billionaire. This, again, has echoes in history. During times of oppression and autocracy, regular people take control of their communication lines and reorient them to work better in terms of privacy, information quality, and rethinking who you can trust in times of trouble.
As I have written before, I'm on one decentralized product, Bluesky, that uses a decentralized protocol that can be run on any platform and let you connect with people cross-platform if their platform of choice uses the same protocol. This is a principle known as interoperability, which gives power to users by letting them build a network that isn't dependent on being on a particular platform, similar to having someone's email address. Bluesky users (you can follow me here) then can migrate from that platform to any other platform that uses the underlying ATProtocol software and take their follows/followers (i.e. their address book) with them if they don’t like the way a particular platform is operating. Nobody owns the communication language that makes interoperability possible, and thus they do not own you.
I also am on Signal, a secure end-to-end encrypted messaging service built on open source technology. I’m actively looking at other types of products for audio and video that do similar things. Resilience is something we have to actively build, and right now the times call for it.
And not Meta-related, but one project for the first half of this year will be to migrate this newsletter off of Substack because of this service’s same decisions about content moderation.
Elon Musk has singlehandedly wrecked Twitter and sent it spiraling. Meta is doing it to itself next. I say burn it all down and rebuild with decentralization in mind.
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Bluesky for short-form commentary and analysis about digital media and society.