Questioning

I didn’t have a New Year’s resolution this year. I didn’t really feel the need for one: not because I think I’m perfect or anything like that, but I have got better at sticking to projects (this one, for a start) and I’ve already loaded my days up with things to do: reading, learning, writing, professional development.  The idea of adding more things to the schedule when I was already struggling at the end of last year seemed a foolish idea.

I did, though, join a little online reading group which was starting its new book on January 1^st.  It seemed like a fun little project, so I signed up.  The group worked though an  Instagram chatroom. I’ve never been all that big into Instagram, but had opened an account along with a number of other social networking accounts in order to promote this blog when I started last year so I used that to join in.  The group were lovely and I settled into reading my allocated pages each day.  Then, this week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta were going to get rid of fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram in the US.  It was, he said, “time to get back to our roots around free expression”.  He would be following Elon Musk’s use of “community notes” on X, where users comment on the accuracy of information shared on the platform instead.

In addition to this, Meta have changed their hate speech rules to include the following: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.”  This is an exception to the rule that does not allow “allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness” – in other words, you can allege someone is stupid or mentally ill, but only if they are LGBTQ+.

I shut down this page’s Facebook and Threads pages straight away.  If I’m honest, this was no big deal; I’d yet to receive any engagement on those platforms anyway.  I’d got even less traction on my Instagram account, but an instant shut-down there would have meant losing contact with the online reading group I’d just joined.  So, I went into the chat there and asked if there were any other platforms where the reading group might also be running.  The guy running the group very kindly (and very swiftly) set up an alternative chatroom on Discord, and so I joined up to it, and within about 48 hours my Instagram account joined my Threads and Facebook accounts in the digital graveyard.

Around the same time, Mark Zuckerberg posted the following to his Threads account in response to a user commenting that Meta is “counting on the fact that it’s too hard for people to leave Threads and [Instagram]”.  Zuckerberg responded that “people want to be able to discuss civic topics and make arguments that are in the mainstream of political discourse, etc. Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better.”

“Virtue signaling”.  I pondered this after raising the issue of leaving Instagram with my little reading group.  When I’d initially posted about the fact that I wanted to leave Instagram, but still wanted to be able to access the community (they were, after all the only reason I was sticking around) I thought carefully about how I phrased my post.  I was aware that what I was asking was either to split the group, or to ask everyone to leave Instagram with me.  I took care to make it clear that I knew this would cause issues, but that I simply wasn’t comfortable on the platform at this point in time.

The responses were interesting: a few people said that they’d been feeling the same way, and a few said that they didn’t want to leave Instagram as they had communities there which they didn’t want to abandon (which I completely understand – I still have my personal Facebook account active, although dormant, because there are professional reasons for being on there at the moment and I don’t want to lose touch with people just because Zuckerberg’s gone all Musk on us).  It was interesting, though, how a few people, in the nicest way, became quite defensive about their decision to stay on the platform.  The guy who runs the group was very clear that he had no intention of moving the group off Instagram as he wanted as many people as possible to be able to access it – and, as I say, I made it clear that I wasn’t suggesting anyone else move – but still messages came through from members defending their decisions to remain (“I don’t like Zuckerberg either, but…”).

Taking down my accounts for this blog on Meta platforms strikes me as the right thing to do at this point, so I’ve done it; it strikes me too, though, how hard it is to do the right thing without people accusing you of virtue signalling – directly or indirectly.  It reminded me of when I first turned vegetarian.  There was a joke going round a few years ago which went something like “How can you tell if someone’s vegan? – Because they’ll tell you”, which probably has some truth to it, but in my experience when I’ve had to bring up that I’m vegetarian, if the person that I’m speaking to does eat meat then they’ll either start trying to justify their own diet or, at times, go on a full-on rant about why vegetarianism is misguided and stupid.  It’s pretty much always other people that want to talk about my vegetarianism – I’m pretty bored of it by now.

The point I’m trying to make is that doing what feels to you to be the right thing is almost always met with accusations of “virtue-signalling”, no matter how quietly and subtly you go about it – and this is increasingly the case as the right-wing become louder and louder about their own right to free speech.  As strategies go for shutting down debate or action, it’s really very effective: it takes advantage of people’s natural tendency to become defensive about their own actions, as well as the unwillingness of people-pleasers like me to ruffle any feathers, that fear some of us have becoming the guy that people go “oh god, he’s off on one again…” about.

So, my New Year’s resolution is to say fuck that.  The horrible dickheads of the world are loud and proud right now, so I’m going to keep trying to do the right thing and, where possible, to rub it in their stupid faces.  Here are my virtues, Muskerbergs of the world.  Watch me signal the living shit out of them.