tranarchist:

– There are huge privacy issues with social media and surveillance, intimate details of our lives are being collected by institutions that can and do use that information against us

– Social media is in many ways bad for mental health, it’s intentionally engineered to be addictive and manipulate our emotional responses to generate profit, encouraging us to marketize our lives, to entrap us in the spectacle

However

– Social media is very important in providing spaces for marginalized people to build relationships, access information, organize, where these things may be very difficult or impractical offline

– There’s a smug hipster trend of renunciation or abstinence from social media which, like the “minimalist lifestyle” trend, is little more than a conspicuous expression of privilege, claiming themselves as morally praiseworthy for doing without things they don’t actually need, but marginalized people may be dependent on

– There’s a lot of moralizing about social media in “thinkpieces” on millenials and the like which serves the purpose of both trivializing the issues we face and placing the blame on us rather than the capitalist system