To social media or not to social media

It's a question a lot of people have been asking themselves

I joined social media in the early days of Facebook, circa 2006. Thankfully, these platforms did not exist when I was in high school, so I avoided the deep shame of later rediscovering my cringe-worthy teenage angst. When I look back, I'm surprised how fondly I remember those early days.

Facebook came at a time when I had just moved away from my hometown to Vancouver, and it gave me a way to stay in touch with friends that I otherwise would have probably never reconnected with. It was nice to know what was happening back in the Okanagan while I got settled in the big city.

There was plenty of toxicity on social media, but it was largely isolated to fit-for-purpose forums, such as Something Awful or 4chan. It was easy enough to avoid, unless you were an online gamer, in which you would inevitably be called horrible slurs eventually. I prefer single-player games, so I didn't have to deal with my digital adventures being punctuated with being called the six-letter f-word.

Though you did sometimes hear some pretty horrible things in single player games back then

Public facing social media, however, didn't really become a part of my life until the early days of Twitter. Unlike Facebook, where I was a few years behind the times when I signed up, I was an early adopter. I was involved in local Vancouver politics, and it gave me a platform where I could not only get hyper-relevant, timely information by just typing #vanpoli, it provided a space where I could actually interact with some of the journalists, politicians and key figures involved at the time. For a small town kid freshly arrived in the big city, it helped break down the walls of local politics.

My sense of humour is at its best irreverent. As one of the few people posting anything about local Vancouver politics, and attempting to do so in a humourous manner, I quickly built up a small following. By and large, it was made up of people I knew — or knew of —in real life, or at least tangentially connected to someone I knew. Rather than a random smattering of anonymous online profiles, it felt like a small community with few degrees of separation.

It wasn't until the 2013 election that social media began to take a big role in my political life. Having already established myself online, and having enough of a following in the lead up to the election, I became one of the more active accounts for the 2013 campaign. I cracked jokes at the expense of politicians of all stripes, peppered with passionate posts about the issues I cared about. Midway through the campaign, Vote Compass identified me as one of the more influential accounts in the campaign.

I can't find the full graph online so you'll have to take me at my word that I'm one of the medium-sized bubbles

It was amazing to have a platform and feel like people were listening to me. I was ecstatic when, out of the blue, I logged in to find Rick Mercer was following me. A particularly salient post of mine was reposted by Sarah Harmer, whose music played on repeat in my car on long drives. For me, the barriers between myself and significant or influential people seemed to come down on these platforms.

It led to some incredible moments in my life. At an event in Victoria at the legislature, a cabinet minister pulled me aside — me! — to tell me she followed me and appreciated my insights. I had a long, very thoughtful back and forth with a party leader about safe consumption sites. People were engaged, and I saw a lot of value in having a presence online.

Just me casually being featured on Al Jazeera standing up for queer youth

I don't know when exactly that changed, but it sure did.

Who is online?

There are a few different numbers out there, but according to Statistics Canada, about 78% of Canadians are regular social media users. According to a 2023 report from Environics Research, “over two-thirds of respondents (67%) use Facebook at least weekly. After Facebook, the next most used platforms are YouTube (54%) and Instagram (41%) . . . Just 10% of Canadians said they used TikTok on a weekly basis in early 2023; that’s almost doubled to 18% in early 2024.”

However, it's important to remember that just because someone is online does not mean they are interested in seeing political posts when they log on. According to another report, “the most important reason at 58.2% for using social media is to keep in touch with family and friends.” They found that only 31% of Canadians use social media to read the news, and since Meta (Facebook, Threads, and Instagram) bans online news links, they are limited to reading what makes it through to their feed on other platforms.

In your face(book)

What’s happening?

As I continued to use social media after the 2013 election, I found things rapidly shifting. It wasn't long before politicians would regularly admit to me when I saw them in person that they had handed off their social media to someone who would post on their behalf. Major brands, which could pump sacks and sacks of money into getting their content in front of people, began to dominate. Despite following a carefully curated list of local accounts, I saw more and more generic content. Because I was interested in politics, it meant my feeds became flooded with American political news.

This also meant being frequently mistaken for my name twin

Soon I started to notice posts that were unlikely to have been from a real person. In the early days, there were obvious grammatical or spelling errors that would reveal a bot-account, but as programming became more sophisticated so did the fake content. Algorithm-savvy chatbots started to replace real people, and suddenly I wasn't debating someone a degree of separation from me in the real world, but dozens of random, anonymous usernames.

In the 2017 election, I had a communications role with a provincial campaign. On social media, I noticed the growing influence of a particular account. They purported to be from British Columbia, and were a supporter. But, despite being well connected through the organization, I could not find anyone who knew this person. No one had ever heard their name before, no one had worked with him, and he hadn't shown up to volunteer for any local campaigns. Yet, I kept hearing about how this “influential campaigner” was a big part of our team. Shortly after the election, his account vanished. I still have never encountered anyone involved in BC politics with that name.

A few years later I was working on a campaign where one of my primary responsibilities was to monitor social media at all times, to ensure we were responsive to anything bubbling up or that people were concerned about. For the most part, it was generic arguments for or against our candidate, and when issues came up, they curiously did not match the things we were hearing at the doorsteps. When we knocked on doors and spoke to constituents, they talked about affordability, or transportation, or education. When we checked social media, people really hated the gays.

Out of curiosity, I started trying to see if I could match any names of the people posting to names in the provincial voter database. Surely these folks — with such passion for a local campaigns — lived in the riding. Surely — as self-proclaimed contentious citizens — they would have registered to vote. Nope. In monitoring dozens and dozens of accounts, I only ever matched a couple people to an actual name of someone registered to vote in the riding. None of the big “influencers” in that campaign matched anyone on the voter list.

There were likely some that used a pseudonym, or people who lived in a nearby riding and didn't realize they were outside the boundary. There were probably a few that just weren't registered. But what became clear to me, at least anecdotally, what that most of the accounts I was required to monitor were to some degree fake — they weren't constituents, they weren't voters, and they may not have even been real people.

And here we are

About a year ago I was scrolling through Facebook, when it occurred to me that none of the posts I had seen were from anyone I actually followed. I refreshed my feed and started counting posts to see how long it would take until I saw a post from someone I was actually connected to. It took 56 posts — things I never signed up for that were being put in front of me by an algorithm — before I got to anyone I actually had on my friends list. Fifty six. With companies embracing artificial intelligence to flood their platforms with randomly generated slop, it's become obvious that the social media days of yore are long gone.

But there is a huge loss there. I miss seeing pictures from the people I went to high school, hiking old trails we grew up around with the families they've built since I saw them last. I miss getting a glimpse into the real lives of people I only know from the news or television. I miss former Prime Minister Kim Campbell sharing her Thanksgiving cranberry sauce recipe.

It was the best of times

At the end of the fall provincial election, I deleted my Twitter account. I hadn't used it actively in over a year, and had only kept it so I could see what politicians were posting during the campaign. But it felt tedious logging on and seeing a hundred posts of trash before I got to anything I actually wanted to see.

I tried giving Threads a try, but then they randomly blocked my account from posting this blog, saying my link violated their code of conduct for being “misleading”. Rather than try to figure out how some algorithm decided a Substack about BC politics is not allowed, I just deleted it as well.

I mourn the loss of the community I felt I had built. I wish I had another way to engage with people that I don't see on a regular basis. At my core, I'm an introvert who struggles in busy social situations, and social media was an easier way to keep in touch.

I don't know what social media will evolve into next. For the time being, I've started just texting people. Mostly cute pictures of Scout.

She doesn't have Facebook and she seems pretty content