Social Media and News Cycle Fatigue

I don’t feel I’m still benefiting from social media and the news cycle in general. Everybody desperately tries to get my attention. Sometimes it feels even people I value a lot just use social media to just drum-up attention. Everybody is his/her own brand. That’s just tiring.

I deleted my Facebook account around the time when the GDPR was enforced, around end of May. I haven’t used my Facebook account for almost a year. When I got on Facebook I did this to hide all links from external sources, which my Facebook friends posted. I wanted to only see my friend’s personal news. I already unfollowed all content from liked pages years ago.

While this worked well, it still was Facebook with all its dark schemes. After they decided to actually do the same thing I did manually – prioritizing personal posts in feeds, I felt they betrayed all the news outlets they promised to get lots of traffic and lured them into creating fast-loading Facebook articles. So I just deleted my account. I didn’t even noticed the two week grace period, during which users are able to revive the account. It took me three weeks to think about my then deleted Facebook account again. It was already deleted for a full week. Success on all fronts!

I was still interested in getting news articles – mainly tech news, to keep the volume down, but the constant influx of news, unintelligible headlines to increase page views, and shallow reporting made it unpleasant.

I understand that everybody wants to either get a foot into the proverbial news business/advertising door, or to fight the tide that social media brought to ordinary (news) websites. But it undermines the credibility of those sites and alienates readers up to a point.

As a reader I am fighting FOMO given the torrent of information. So, for me it’s time to kick back and ignore this for a while.