"And I agree with Dave - Facebook and it’s problems are a far wider issue than British politics, and really should be discussed in a separate thread."

A quote from BWM on the Brit thread there, echoed by others. So I'll bite.

I said this on that thread:

"This site is closely moderated [meaning Mudcat], and the mods do a pretty decent job of removing promptly any offensive, insulting or threatening material. By so doing promptly (a key attribute), it encourages us to know that trying to post stuff like that isn't worth the effort. Jeremy Keith polices his Session website closely and assiduously, and members know that it simply isn't worth trying to post nonsense. Dick Gaughan's former website, the same (good old Molly...) You call these social media sites, Dave, and I suppose they are in a way, though I don't generally class them as such meself. Compared to behemoths such as Facebook they are tiny. In a way, that makes my point about too big to fix. BWM highlights one aspect of that [basically, that opponents of Facebook are likely to be shat on from on high], and another aspect is that smaller is more beautiful and more fixable. It would take an army of moderators to police Facebook as effectively as here. Two points about that: first, Facebook can well afford an army of moderators, but has always preferred profit over people, and why spend your profits if you can get away with not doing? Second, an army of moderators keeping Facebook clean and safe would have the far-right and the conspiracy theorists, and all the other multifarious do-badders who use it, deprived of the mass audience they so easily exploit, ranting and raving about the denial of democracy and free speech. It's gone to far to fix, it's too big to fix and it won't be fixed. Maybe a mass revolt and a rapid bleeding away of its members voting with their feet will be the only way. There again, I think I may be in cloud-cuckoo land..."

I think that Facebook, in spite of apologist attitudes that "it helps one to keep in touch with friends and family," etc., is a force for evil. It nakedly puts money-making above the safety and security of ordinary people. It propagates, unmoderated, conspiracy theories, misinformation and hate speech that all damage people who are vulnerable.

I've never subscribed to Facebook. On one occasion several years ago, a visitor from New Zealand to our house took photos of us all in the house. Grand, no problem. A few minutes later she was fiddling with her iPhone very quietly and I asked her what she was doing. Well, she was posting the photos on to her Facebook account. She was amazed and surprised when I asked her to not do that. I mean, why should I have had to explain to her that I didn't want photos of me to be posted in a place that I don't subscribe to? She is not an arrogant person at all, but the sheer arrogance of her assuming that she could airily do that without asking... Is that what Facebook does to people? I mean, how many photos and how much stuff about me is up there that I don't know about? Do I really have to sign up in order to find out and monitor it?

So I think, let's ditch Facebook. Let's not make the arseholes who run it, who don't give a stuff about us as long as they can carry on making their billions, any richer from now on. The damage they've done far outweighs, in m'humble, any "good" they've done. Ten or fifteen years ago you didn't know that you needed Facebook, and there's no reason to think that you need it any more than that now.