September 5 Friday roundup

In this week’s podcast episode, I look how journalists have managed to soft-pedal authoritarianism over the last century, including some examples from recent days. I compare them with the pre-kindergartners I taught self defense years ago, and ponder what it means when you’re unable to connect the dots. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

My dog is eleven or twelve years old now. We don’t know for sure, because we got him from the Lost Dog rescue ranch in Virginia in 2015. They’d received him as an underfed stray and thought that he was already an adult. But he proved that everyone involved was just guessing when he kept growing and gained forty more pounds.

I call him “Area Dog” on social media so often that my followers sometimes think that’s his name. And though he’s had a decade-long career on everything from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Bluesky, it occurred to me today to be amused that our pets are the stars of so much social media, yet they have no conception of connecting with each other there. (My cousin’s dog used to love to watch Animal Planet on cable, but I’ve never heard of a pet that was into Facebook.)

Pets may be the better off for their ignorance. It also occasionally occurs to me to ponder how foolish or even evil social media can be. I myself saw its toll on the Rohingya in detention camps, where Facebook facilitated its use in Myanmar to stoke ethnic hatred and atrocities against a Muslim minority. The public also learned recently that Meta apparently had greenlit allowing its chat bots to talk in romantic and sensual ways to children—until Reuters asked it about the policy.

I used to love Twitter. But since Elon Musk bought the site, he’s dismantled nearly everything that made it an astounding and unparalleled source a decade ago for breaking-news stories and journalists. Now it promotes mostly white supremacist and eugenics-related content, and very little actual engagement. Instagram and Threads are bound up with Meta, so it’s hard to defend being on them too much if you think what Facebook is doing is a problem and worry that it’s not limited to just Facebook.

I haven’t canceled any of my accounts, because there are whole communities I’ve reported on that only know me through one social media platform. I want those vulnerable people to be able to find me quickly if they need to.

At the same time, I don’t want to support harm being done to others. It’s one of the reasons I’m on Beehiiv with this newsletter instead of Substack. And it’s why my posts on Twitter have dropped to one or two in the last six months. Facebook doesn’t get much more out of me.

Because of all the nastiness, I try to focus on using Bluesky and Mastodon now. Both of them show posts from the people I follow, in chronological order, whether they include text, links, or photos. There are some questions over moderation that I think need more attention, to make sure that targeted communities don’t get excluded. But those services are pretty much what they say they are.

I have a number of friends who have bailed on social media entirely. And their choice makes a lot of sense to me—it was stressing them out or making them depressed.

Yet I still spend a good amount of time on Bluesky. As a writer who works on her own rather than in a newsroom (and likes it that way), I’m missing a lot of the advantages of being in an office: getting the dirt on things in the world that will affect people like me, interactions with co-workers, and having a way to let the larger world know about what I’m up to.

My subscribers fund this newsletter and help me reach my audience more directly, which I’m thrilled to do on a weekly basis. It’s a way for me not to be too dependent on any social media platform.

But because of social media, there are times I write something that breaks out to a wider audience. I’ve also encountered colleagues and friends on Bluesky with whom I’ve later met up in real life or done virtual events. It’s given me some great opportunities. So all in all, I’m a fan.

Yet Bluesky has gotten a reputation as being rabidly left-wing or snobby, although I’ve seen that side of it mostly when pundits who don’t use it much show up lecturing its users about how to act. And certainly every platform has its clueless commenters, its humorless scolds, its in-groups, and its power-users.

But if you’re still game to be on social media, I think Bluesky is a good option. As I noted in the Tuesday post, journalism is having a difficult moment. Social media can be a useful way to stay on top of what’s really happening by following individual reporters and independent journalism outlets in one place.

At the same time, I try not to fool myself about part of my compulsion to use it, or let myself get too self-righteous when someone is wrong on the internet.

My dog has a friend down the street. They never actually get to play together in real life, because they’re always separated by a fence. But whenever they spot each other from a few blocks away, my dog’s friend, Bumpy, starts barking excitedly from his yard.

He keeps it up until my dog comes over. My dog pees on the fence, then Bumpy takes a turn anointing the same spot. They each stand and smell the result. Being a smaller dog, sometimes Bumpy pees again, probably the better to cover my dog’s smell.

Then my dog walks away. At least half of what’s happening is territorial pissing and making a statement. They’re each more focused on what they’re contributing than on any real interaction with the other dog.

It’s a ritual that seems to bring both of them joy nevertheless. They’re happy to be there, happy to see one another, doing their little performance and moving on. No need to make it have any deeper meaning than two dogs on either side of a fence, saying hello. I’m still trying to acquire that wisdom.

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