Don’t forget about the tariffs too! The US economy is actually a joke that can’t compete on the world stage anymore except by wielding their enormous capital from a handful of tech billionaires.

Yup. Now I also get that exposure and engagement are important to small businesses, but to that end they shouldn’t lock themselves to one place either. Point out the benefits of more open solutions like Bluesky and Mastodon, and the benefits of setting up their own hosted site/blog that they can then broadcast on social media but slowly cut them out as a middle man by pushing customers to their site directly.

And most certainly businesses should never use the “algorithm” on social media to collect data or get “free” advertising such as those “like/repost to win” style posts. Those are not free advertising, those are doing free data collection work for Meta.

Tell those local businesses that you really want to support and follow them, but that you boycott Meta and the reasons that you do.

Honestly there’s so many reasons businesses should also avoid Meta, like the fact Meta is literally collecting and selling their most valuable business data about their customers to other competing businesses. Tell them for their own good that Meta is not their friend, it might help them at first to get exposure, but only long enough to get that data and sell it off to a bigger fish.

I don’t think there is any way to have a genuine “open forum” amongst complete strangers. There have always been human troll farms pushing narratives using sock puppet accounts, AI is just enabling it to reach new scales.

I actually am for echo chambers when it comes to social media, but one in which you only follow people you know or trust and ignore complete strangers and to make sure you get news and critical information from OUTSIDE social media, again with institutions you trust.

Just going to leave this here with proof that Elmo said cars would be fully driving themselves by 2018: https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/autonomous-driving/timeline-of-tesla-self-driving-aspirations-a9686689375/

The reason is that Elon Musk got caught liking questionable content through the likes page.

I barely watch YouTube as it is. Sometimes I have to watch a tutorial or review that I can’t find information on elsewhere, but literally every time I wish it was a blog post instead.