Seeing the way that bad actors have used social media advertising and virality to present biased information designed to divide us, i have grown less comfortable with allowing these platforms to sell my attention and information.
I am afraid to stop at least reading these platforms, though, since twitter may be the first place we hear about the next war
Below are some steps you can take to make your twitter account unprofitable. I spent Saturday afternoon implementing all of them
Delete your data
A lot of Twitter’s money comes from your data: selling information about you to advertisers, placing ads at you, and so forth. Instead of boycotting Twitter, hit them where it hurts, in the moneymaker. Here’s some tips for doing this.
Use an adblocker. They know you’re doing it. It hurts the advertisers’ feelings. Also, you should be using an adblocker anyway.
Turn off personalised ads. Hit “disable all” here. While they’re still collecting your information, they can’t use it, which pisses them off.
Edit your data. Twitter makes guesses at your age and gender for advertisers. You can change them here. My gender is “communist”, and I’m age 13-54.
Turn off location. Again, it’s data about you, don’t let them have it.
Delete your interests. Twitter likes guessing at your interests for all the marketing. There’s a list here, and you can delete all of them.
Block your “tailored audiences”. This dovetails with the personalised ad settings. You’ll find, here, that you’re a member of some personalised audiences. You can request the data. Do it. They’ll send you an email. Block every single account on it. Note: this may take a while- the bulk block feature seems to no longer work. If you’re really committed, do please manually block as many of those accounts as possible. And remember to block every advertiser you see!)
Make your content unprofitable. Twitter owns a pretty broad copyright licence on what you’re posting there. Drop a few f-bombs into your tweets. Append silly gifs to everything. Hate white men, hate Nazis, loudly and proudly. Tweet a lot about how shit Twitter’s policies are. If you have 280 characters, tweet in 140, and use the other 140 to append stuff about how appalling their policy is to every goddamn tweet.
On facebook, i removed my age, location, and gender and removed all of my "likes"
I changed all accounts to private.
My goal is to stop adding value with my identity and interactions
I will interact only with the personal posts of private individuals and click no paid content.
Neither will i any longer produce potentially profitable content.
All of my posts this weekend have been image-only, with any text embedded on top of the photo, and originated from Instagram, which-- being a vanity-only platform-- has not been
politically subverted
When sharing news articles the plan is to post an unlinked screenshot and use the caption for keywords that can be highlight-searched to return the article via one's off-platform search engine. Once i set up an "alt" instagram (too many cousins on the other one)
These are my new social media hygiene practices.