MJSfoto1956 said:
Pretty much all social media has been taken over by bad actors. Real folks don't stand a chance.
There's tons of social media sites that have 0.5% of marketshare that don't abuse their users, don't have algorithms controlling what you see and don't see, don't have censorship, and have lots of friendly people - i'm on a few. I even run an ebike group on one.
The problem is not really facebook - it's that people aren't mad enough to branch out and try new things. They'd rather complain about facebook, twitter, etc than be a pioneer and try MeWe, Minds, Mastodon, Gab, Voat, etc etc - "because my friends aren't there"..
The behavior of facebook, et al is just a symptom of internet users granting them a monopoly. Any company with a majority marketshare in their field is nearly guaranteed to abuse their customers. And facebook continues to find new limits in what human beings will tolerate. Personally, i would have thought that the site running psychological experiments on their users in 2014 would have been enough for the public to hit the brakes, but no..
I would call this phenomenon an expression of stockholm syndrome, but it resembles drug addiction more - IE, you know it's bad for you, other people know it's bad for you, you know that alternatives exist, but you keep coming back anyway, because it tickles the pleasure center more than it sounds the alarm bells about your own mental health. And it's specifically engineered to do so.
I've been facebook free since late 2018 and am loving it. I would have nuked the site sooner if i didn't run so many groups on it.