When the Flames Go Up
When the Flames Go Up
Episode 66: What is Meta for?
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Episode 66: What is Meta for?

Facebook's flag is flying pretty low for people who like facts. But we're staying on, for the moment, because the communities we've built are too valuable to leave behind.

Now that Mark Zuckerberg thinks fact-checking is overrated—a decision described as both desperate and potentially disastrous—you might find yourself in a quandary over whether to keep using Meta’s social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Even though Facebook’s credibility has fallen off a cliff and its feckless moderation often results in random bans and post deletions, we’re not ready to abandon the communities we’ve built over the years. There’s still value to be found, but like most things we now have to work a little harder to find it.

Facebook’s flag has been flying pretty low since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the site’s war on local journalism. But we think our overall opinion aligns pretty well with that of Mark Lemley, the Stanford law professor who fired Facebook as a client. He’s chosen to deactivate Threads and buy nothing off Facebook ads, but he’ll stay on the site because “it doesn’t seem fair for me to lose [my connections and friends] because Mark Zuckerberg is having a midlife crisis.”

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We also talk about the joy of pebbling, how “to give smile in picture,” and the cognitive dissonance when a puddle of anchovy paste decides that corporate America needs “more masculine energy.”

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When the Flames Go Up
When the Flames Go Up
After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we're looking to our community to help us all keep up.