Why I Blocked You on Twitter

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Maria Langer

The answer to a question I received by email.

The other day, I got the following email message through the message form on this blog:

Just curious. Why did you block me on Twitter? @[redacted]

Was interested in following your flight home with the new bird.

I honestly don’t remember blocking this specific person. I probably block about a dozen people a week.

The reason I usually block people is because of their unreasonably voiced political views. You know the kind of folks I mean: the ones who watch Fox News and echo the bullshit they’ve been fed there. The ones with #MAGA in their Twitter profiles. The ones who share obnoxious memes that bash Obama or Clinton or liberals in general.

Yes, I’ll admit it: I block Trump supporters who attempt to interact with me on Twitter. I honestly have no time or patience for their bullshit. I am a New Yorker at heart and, like most New Yorkers with a brain, I know that Donald Trump is a conman. During the 2016 presidential election, he conned the same kind of people he conned into signing up for Trump University: the desperate and the gullible. I am neither and no one will ever get me to support him.

And frankly, I’m offended by the kinds of things his supporters do and say to attack the people who don’t support him.

Twitter is a haven for these people. They make a game out of preying on people who don’t agree with them, using personal attacks and ridicule, often getting other Trump supporters to join them. They try to make a living hell for the people they find on Twitter who dare to question their glorious leader. It’s fortunate that Twitter makes it easy to prevent these people from targeting us — that’s what the Block feature is for and I’m not afraid to use it.

So there’s a good chance that’s why I blocked the person who emailed me last week. I was simply heading off what I thought might be a Trump supporter following me to see Tweets he could attack. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.

If I erred and he really was interested in following my trip, he would have been disappointed anyway. I didn’t tweet much along the way. And a blog post about it will be posted here shortly; he can always read that to catch up.

And if that’s truly all he wanted from me, I do apologize. But if he’d been on the receiving end of as many Trump supporter attacks as I have on Twitter, I think he’d understand.

Another (Brief) Facebook Rant

Posted on April 2, 2018 by Maria Langer

This might be enough to get me to completely pull the plug.

I’ll admit it: the only reason I haven’t completely pulled the plug on my Facebook account is because I use it to promote two businesses: Flying M Air and ML Jewelry Designs.

Flying M Air has been on my Facebook account for years. For a while, I tried hard to use Facebook to share information about what the company is doing through events, offers, galleries, and plain old posts. I was checking in daily to stay on top of messages. Flying M Air’s website has an annoying pop-up window that invites visitors to like us on Facebook. (I’m still trying to figure out how to turn that off.) The only thing I didn’t do was pay money to promote a Facebook post.

And here’s the rub. Flying M Air’s Facebook page has over 1000 likes. That means that over 1000 Facebook users have indicated that they want to see new content. I don’t post much anymore — heck, there are only five or six new posts since July — so it isn’t as if I’m bombarding page followers with content. It doesn’t matter, though. Facebook isn’t showing this content to the people who want to see it. Indeed, one of my posts from last summer “reached” only seven people.

Yeah. Seven out of over 1000.

This post came out two days ago, yet was shown to only ONE person. For all I know, it could be me.

Against my better judgement, I set ML Jewelry Designs up on Facebook, too. I figured: why not? But rather than put a lot of energy into keeping its page up-to-date with new content, I set up new posts on its WordPress-based website to automatically post to the ML Jewelry Designs page on Facebook. This means the page gets new content just about every day. (I schedule posts so no more than one new item appears each day.) Now the page is less than a month old and has only 20 followers. But I’m getting the same ridiculous low reach numbers I get with Flying M Air.

So here’s the situation. Facebook users have indicated that they want to see the content posted on certain pages. But the Facebook algorithm has decides what they should and shouldn’t seen. My two business pages don’t pay for “promotion” so they’re pretty far down on the list of what gets shown. As a result, my content doesn’t appear for anywhere near the number of people who have indicated they want to see it.

So why bother posting it?

And what about the people who like a page because they want to see all of its new content? How many of them think there just isn’t anything new because it doesn’t appear in their newsfeed?

Can you see why I’m just so done with Facebook?

Open Letter to My Facebook Friends

Posted on March 22, 2018 by Maria Langer

A version of what I posted on Facebook yesterday.

Okay, folks. Most of you should know that I’ve pretty much removed myself from Facebook, popping in now and then just to share a link to a blog post and comment on friends’ posts. I went from being on Facebook for more than an hour a day to being here less than an hour a week and I love having that time back in my life.

I’m still on Twitter a lot and although I know a lot of you “don’t get” Twitter, I do and I really enjoy it. One reason: every tweet from every person I follow always appears in my newsfeed, in reverse chronological order. In other words, Twitter doesn’t use algorithms to decide what I should see and bury the rest.

I’ve been wanting to delete my Facebook account for quite some time now and recent news is making me think again about how foolish it is to participate in a social network that manipulates what content appears for me and other users. I’m very upset that the manipulation has changed how some of my friends and family members think about what’s going on in the world and the amount of hate the content they share seems to generate.

In short: I feel that Facebook and its paying advertisers are brainwashing users, making the people in the country I love ever more divided. I don’t want to be part of that in any way.

So there’s a pretty good chance that the blog post link I share in a moment will be the last one I share here. And an equally good chance that I’ll be deleting my Facebook content and account very soon.

That said, I’d like to keep in touch with all of you. Although I assume that Facebook’s algorithms will show this to a tiny percentage of the 300+ friends and hundreds of followers I still have here, I’m asking those of you who see this to take a moment and let me know where else I can find you online: your Twitter name, blog URL, email address, and/or cell phone number. You can put it in a private message if you like. I want to keep in touch with the folks I like, but I don’t want to do it on Facebook.

I hope you understand.