If you wouldn’t vote for the fascist on the left, why are you using the fascist on the right’s social network?
Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it from an already toxic platform into a white supremacist’s dream. Musk implemented schemes to gouge his customers, blocked third party developers from the Twitter API that had contributed to the platform’s success over the years, and invited back virtually every banned hate group you can think of. After renaming Twitter “X” it has now become indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Trump Social, and it’s not that many goosesteps away from Stormfront. In joining the Trump administration, Musk intends to use his new position for personal gain despite the many conflicts of interest it poses. Just like Trump.
That other Trump-flirting social media mogul, Mark Zuckerberg, is not quite the Bond villain Musk is, but his four social media platforms operating under the grandiose title Meta (above it all) — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Threads — represent a social media monopoly dedicated to hoovering up as much of your personal data as they can get. Meta censors content and de-platforms users for the most obscure of reasons. Many users who posted criticisms of the Gaza genocide, for example, found themselves banned on several of Meta’s sites. Despite best efforts to keep your account private, Facebook will often “relax” your privacy settings without permission. If you use forwarding emails or phone numbers to preserve your privacy, Facebook will treat you like a criminal. Facebook’s registration process may even require you to hand over a photo of your driver’s license. In short, Meta is designed for one thing — to suck up as much of your personal data as it can for resale. You are the product Mark Zuckerberg is selling.
There are other options out there, though none are so popular as to make it possible for your long-lost high-school friends to find you. But if you want to share your views — or your cat pictures — you can try BlueSky, Mastodon, or Substack. Among others. That is, if you’ve had enough of censorship, violations of your privacy, and neo-Nazis.
Getting out
To delete your Twitter/X account, click the three-dot menu icon and on X’s left sidebar and choose Settings and privacy. From there choose Deactivate Your Account. To delete your Meta accounts, go here and delete Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads accounts through Meta’s Accounts Center.
Blocking the bastards
Deleting Meta and Twitter is one thing. Removing them permanently from your life is another. Both Meta and Twitter use cross-domain trackers to keep an eye on you even if you aren’t a user. There are browser extensions and tracker blockers you can install to try to prevent this, but they may not always work with all internet apps,
One way to stop all access to and from Twitter and Facebook is by blocking them at the domain name server level. On every desktop system there is a hosts file that can accomplish this by telling DNS to ignore certain websites, resulting in a refusal to resolve a domain name (like “www.facebook.com”) to its IP (internet) address.
One tool, available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, is Switchhosts, which makes it easy to safely edit the hosts file. You create a profile similar to this one and simply enable it in Switchhosts. No more Facebook or Twitter! Attempts by any of your internet apps to forward personal data will not be completed because they won’t be able to find the IP addresses of Facebook’s or Twitter’s trackers.
If you want to accomplish the same on your mobile devices, you can use a custom domain server that will do the blocking for you. One popular and currently free solution is NextDNS. You create an account, choose the social media networks you want to block, and NextDNS creates a profile for you. You then load the profile onto your mobile device, where it overrides your network settings and points to a custom DNS profile on NextDNS that is all yours.
Any time your browser or any other app tries to connect to the social media networks you want blocked, it’s as if the site simply doesn’t exist.
Which, in the best of all worlds, would be totally fine with me.
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