With all of the complaints I keep seeing from people on social media, about. social media, I wonder how in the world any of these platforms can still exist? It isn’t that every other. tweet I see is a complaint, but it seems to be a fairly common refrai9n I see when perusing my timeline during the day.
Accounts are suspended for a short time because of some violation, sometimes. the user doesn’t even know what the offense actually was. Other users get a permanent ban because of something deemed to be so egregious that this person must be silenced, forever. I have a friend ( a liberal) that has had 2 accounts permanently suspended from Twitter in the past 2 years. She’s not what I would describe as a nasty individual. But hey, say the wrong thing at the right time and you’re gone.
And although I see a lot of this from conservatives, they’re not the only ones being suspended or banned. Yes, plenty of liberals are experiencing the same thing on a daily basis. Any and all of these platforms may do whatever they want, even change the rules on the fly and it seems to some that they do exactly that.
there’s even been politicians calling for some sort of regulation of these companies to ensure that they are not being viased against any particular group, and even calls for breaking up some of the larger ones, like Facebook and Google because they’ve become too powerful. Bad ideas all the way around. Yes, just what we need: the government to become involved because as we all know, government is the answer to all of our problems.
I can’t vouch for the accruacy of what I’ve been reading, but there have been a few stories in the last few months of how people are becoming fed up and leaving social media. So, insteaf of having the government get involved, it may be that the problem will eventually fix itself when these companies see users leaving and their revenues drop. That’s the way it should work.
We, the users have the power to change the way social media operates. If more people start staying away, deleting accounts, maybe they’ll wake up to the fact they’ve been doing it wrong. Maybe not, but if not, another platform will come along that will actually listen to it’s users.
Conservative Skeptic 
Yep, that would be me – 2 times on Twitter in the past couple of months. By a person who’s had 800+ account suspended/removed on Twitter, has stalked me for 8 years, and makes a point of looking up contact information on my family to harass them. The last time, *she* contacted me and because I fought back, I got suspended and removed. Ugh! Anyway, my personal take is social media is still fairly young. I’m of the opinion it will improve as it grows up.
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Yep, that was you I was thinking of when I wroite this. I’m not so sure that these platforms will get any better with age. Twitter is 10. Am I supposed to wait until it can legaly buy booze to determine whether or not it’s worth the time? I still use it, haven’t ever been even temporarily suspended, but I try to be very careful as to what I tweet about. I read an article last week, which I unfortunately forgot to bookmark about some up and coming social media platforms. What I think we need to see is more competition in the arena and maybe that would get all of them to be clear, and fair, with their “rules”.
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There is some competition…unfortunately they suck.
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The social media stuff is certainly a problem. Someone takes the time and effort to build up a follower base and then loses his or her account for no clear reason. What bothers me even more (probably because I was recently shut down by AdSense for about a week) is how easy it is for them to end someone’s ad revenue and/or significantly reduce one’s traffic. In this latest round with AdSense, they did not even tell me there was a problem; they just turned off my ads.
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I was looking at going with Adsense until I read your recent piece. What bothers me is that they believe they have the tight, or obligation, to police your personal site! Yes, you’re earning some money, but then, so are they and I’m certain you only see a tiny amount of what they charge the customer. Then, not to tell you what it is that caused your revenue to be suspended, is even worse.
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