Positive tweets for game developers

Social media can be incredibly toxic. In the world of video games this is especially true, with game developers sometimes enduring torrents of abuse from people who either have an axe to grind or just find harassment to be a fun pastime. Recently Colin Moriarty, a former senior editor at IGN and cofounder of Kinda Funny, put out a video detailing some of the cyber bullying experienced by a game developer, a games journalist, and himself. It’s a great insight into what some people in the games industry experience and if you have about 19 minutes to spare it’s definitely worth your time. I’ve embedded the video below.

After watching Colin’s video I was thinking about what, if anything, I could do to help combat the tide of online abuse. At first I was drawing a blank since I’m just one person with zero online influence, but then I got an idea. What I could do is use my Twitter account, which currently is used mostly to observe the tweets of others, and start sending out some encouraging tweets. After finishing each game that I play for Late to the Party I’m going to send a positive tweet to the game’s developer. Even if I end up not liking a game I’ll still send a tweet to thank the developer for making the game. One tweet at time, I’m going to try to put a little positivity out into the online world.

Oh, and if for some reason your curious, my Twitter profile is @ricardopedia.

12 Years Ago

12 years ago yesterday, my college roommates sat me down in front of a computer and made me join Facebook. The social network had existed for a few months at that point, however up until that day I had been hesitant to join because I had seen how it could consume peoples’ lives. On that day, however, my roommates told me to get with the program and I gave in. In the 12 years since that day I’ve seen Facebook dramatically change from the relatively innocent and fun-loving platform into the global empire that it is today. Several times during those 12 years I’ve thought about quitting, but here I am, still a member after all this time. Yesterday Facebook provided me with a fun little video celebrating my anniversary, which I suppose I should thank Facebook for since I would have completely missed the date had it not told me. So much has happened since that fateful day 12 years ago, and I can’t help but wonder at what Facebook, and indeed the world will look like in the next 12 years.

Logging Off

Last month, in my writing piece related to Inauguration Day, I suggested, as others have done, that people intentionally limit their social media consumption during this particularly toxic period in American history. Not long after that I took my own advice and stayed off of Facebook for an entire week. Twitter and Instagram were not proving as corrosive by comparison, so I was still regularly checking on them, but the normal five to ten minutes I would spend each day on Facebook were redirected to other concerns. In doing this, I was reminded of the fact that I got along just fine before Facebook was a thing, and if it were to disappear tomorrow it would be weird for a few days, but after that I’d hardly notice it. Don’t get me wrong, social media certainly has its uses, but it’s not the be-all, end-all, of our modern lives.

A week after logging off, I logged back on to Facebook and found the social media world much as I had left it. My more politically active friends were still overloading my timeline with every last offense committed by the Trump administration, my friends with spouses and children were still sharing amusing stories from their families, and others were posting random things from across the web. I quickly perused my timeline, sent a message to a friend, and then logged back out. I had gone a week without Facebook and was none the worse for it.

Your Memories on Facebook

For a few months now, Facebook has been doing this thing where it shows you photos you uploaded several years ago, and then you’re given the option to share the photo with your friends if you want. I’ve never used this function myself, but I can understand the appeal and I must concede that it’s another clever feature that Facebook has come up with. Seeing those older photos brings back a rush of memories, and since it’s normal to post positive photos to Facebook, those memories are normally good ones. There is one problem, however, with this feature, specifically as it applies to me. Facebook’s photo selection lately has been from my 2012 trip to Europe. While it is nice to look over those photos, the sight of them keeps prompting the question of when I’m going to go again. Seeing as how I don’t currently have the resources needed for another trip, looking at and thinking over these photos is leading to a great deal of depression and frustration on my part. Seriously Facebook, stop reminding me of this!

Independence Day

Happy Independence Day to the American readers of this blog. I originally was going to type up a brief writing piece with some thoughts on my country, but yesterday I read a Facebook post that better speaks to how I’m feeling. Below is the link to it. (Log in to Facebook before opening the link in order to read it)

https://www.facebook.com/appealtoheaven/posts/10102814510066079?pnref=story

I realize this might seem like I’m taking the easy way out by linking to someone else’s work, but if you’ve been reading this blog for some time you know that it’s rare for me to do this.

Facebook Newsfeed

Last week saw a number of interesting headlines regarding Facebook and accusations of political bias. Specifically, a number of former Facebook staffers are claiming that the Facebook team in charge of the trending news stories routinely suppressed articles that came from conservative news sources. Additionally, these ex-Facebook staff stated that they were told to place certain stories into the site's news module, regardless of whether or not they were actually trending. The report on this first appeared on the website Gizmodo and afterwards was picked up by news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. If you have the time, I suggest reading the original Gizmodo report for the full details, which can be found here. Facebook has been scrambling to mitigate the fallout from these allegations, though I doubt they are going to experience any significant drop in their user base or ad revenue. Even though this whole thing may very well just blow over, the Gizmodo report got my mental juices flowing, and I thought I’d share four things that have come to mind during the preceding days.

First, if you're relying on Facebook as your primary source for news, you're making a massive mistake. While it may be true that traditional news outlets are sometimes guilty of excessively truncating and dumbing-down the news for the sake of a wide audience, Facebook's trending news stories take this phenomenon to a whole new level. There's also the issue that these trending news stories are just that - trending - meaning their appearance is based on popularity rather than actual importance to individuals or society. Simply put, I do not believe it is possible for you to be a well-informed person if you have Facebook as your main source of information.

Second, Facebook is well within its rights to do this and is under no obligation to anyone to have any level of balance in the news stories it highlights. Just as Fox News can legally spin the news in a conservative direction and MSNBC can do the same in a liberal direction, Facebook can highlight and slant news stories any way it sees fit. If you have a problem with this, take it up with the First Amendment.

Third, no one should be surprised by this. I've been on Facebook since 2005, and I can't remember a single instance (until now) when Facebook claimed political neutrality. Facebook is run by people, and its algorithms were made by people, and people have biases. If Facebook's news curators really are as overwhelmingly liberal as the Gizmodo report suggests, then it naturally follows that they would tend to elevate news stories deemed important by the political left while holding back ones deemed important by the political right.

Fourth, this report highlights the incredible, and perhaps disturbing, power that Facebook has to shape people's views. With over 220 million users in the United States and Canada, and over a billion users worldwide, the news stories Facebook chooses to highlight can reach an audience that any other website or news outlet can only dream of. If those users are regularly bombarded with news stories promoting a particular political ideology, its nearly inevitable that some of them will start shifting their views. Even if it's a small fraction, like ten percent, that's still over 22 million people in the United States and Canada and 100 million people worldwide. This begs the question of whether or not we are okay with a single entity having that much influential power over people. That's something our society will have to decide for itself.

Cancer Posts

On the same day, two very different posts related to cancer appeared on my Facebook feed. I took a screenshot of both and then combined them into a single image for ease of viewing. Below is what I saw. The image is rather small, so you'll need to click on it to enlarge it for easier viewing. I have erased the names of the persons who posted and/or liked the posts to protect their privacy.

 I have no commentary on this; I just wanted to put it out there. Make what you will of it.

Online Slander

Today, April 1st, is April Fools Day. Sadly, this story is no joke.

One of the most disheartening aspects of today's social media is the mass of persons whose sole purpose in life is to malign others. About two weeks ago I was on Twitter and saw a tweet from one of the people I followed, noting with alarm the amount of racism he was seeing from other people on Twitter that day. The tweet seemed innocuous enough, and I thought nothing of it. Towards the end of the day, however, I was checking Twitter again and it was clear that something had exploded, as the guy who posted the tweet was getting an avalanche of hateful and accusatory tweets being thrown at him. This immediately caught my attention. It didn't make sense that a guy who had tweeted his concerns about racism was now being accused of being a racist himself, so I decided to wade into the fray and do some searching to see what had happened. A few days prior to the tweet, this same guy had done a status update on Facebook, wherein he had posted a brief video from the dashboard camera of his car. In the video, his car is waiting at a stoplight, and a teenage boy crossing the street flips off a passing police vehicle. Below the video the guy had written a short, two-paragraph statement in which he commented on some of the social issues facing young people in our society and pondered why he had not behaved that way when he was a teenager. I read through the whole post and I while I could see there was a generalization or two that could maybe be construed as questionable, nothing about it struck me as racist. Somebody, however, had taken this post, edited it to make it look like he had said blatantly racist things, and then posted it to Twitter. Sure enough, it didn't take long for social media to take note of the edited image and then the onslaught began. Nobody bothered to check the source of the slanderous Twitter post or verify that the image was unedited. No, social media did one of the things it does best - automatically assume guilt and heap scorn upon any supposed wrongdoer. It took a day or two for the truth to finally come out and slander to be exposed. I was glad to see some people on Twitter apologize for their remarks, but I highly doubt that most of the people who piled on the hate had bothered to follow up on the situation, or even cared for that matter. There were still some people attempting to make accusations from the original Facebook post, and the guy did a few responses to them over the following days, though it was clear that the persons still on the attack were not particularly interested in reasoning with him. When the storm had died down, the guy who had been the victim of this social media assault announced that he was going to be curtailing his Twitter participation, as he had come to the conclusion that the platform had too many vitriolic individuals and he was wasting his time trying to interact with them. Worse still, the individual who created and posted the edited image that started this whole incident had the gall to claim that in fact he was the victim of slander. Internet trolls had again draw blood, another voice had been muffled, and once more a testament to the sheer gullibility of our supposedly enlightened modern society had been put on display.

Facebook Purge

I have 60 friends on Facebook. That's rather small compared to a lot of people, but in my opinion it's too many. Once a year or so I go through my Facebook friends list and purge remove a few people that I don't talk to anymore, and today it's time for another purge. The goal is to whittle my friend list down by removing around six to ten people. This shouldn't be too hard, as I added a number of people while I was in Europe who wanted to see my photos, and now that that's over I have no reason to maintain the connection with them. Everyone has their own policy on Facebook friends, and mine is that I only keep friends that I actually talk to or that I'm interested in staying current with what they're doing. If you're reading this and for reason concerned that you might be among the persons getting purged, don't be. Anyone who actually reads this blog and is friends with me on Facebook (all three of you) should be safe. And if I do accidentally delete you, just send me a friend request and I'll add you back.

Week of Blogging - Day 4

Facebook, Then and Now

Like many people, I have had a love-hate relationship with social media. It has its uses, but also plenty of annoyances and absurdities. I joined Facebook back in 2005, which doesn't quite make me an early-adopter, but still one of older members. As an interesting side note, I was actually forced to join by a few friends of mine who sat me down in front of a computer and made me create an account. Back then Facebook was still young and fairly innocent, with only a few features and a simple design. The novelty of social networking was undeniable at the time, and for me it served a useful purpose in keeping touch with friends from high school and college as well as a means of sharing photos. No longer did you have to wait until the 10-year high school reunion to see what other people were up to; with Facebook you now had a reunion almost every day. This of course begs the question, are high school reunions now obsolete?

One of my favorite things from the early days of Facebook were the groups. Back then it seemed most of the groups being created were lighthearted, and I enthusiastically joined a number of them. One of my favorites was a group titled "The most productive thing I did today was create a group on Facebook." The cover photo for the group was a shirtless guy on a recliner holding a N64 controller. Some other notable ones included the Coalition Against Uggs And Big Square Sunglasses, Ninjas for Jesus, The Infinite Gloriousness That Is Undeniably Captain Falcon, I'd Mess With Texas, Raptor Awareness, and In-N-Out Lovers.

Over time, however, things changed. Facebook opened up to more than just college students, which was inevitable (and not a bad thing at all), but it meant Facebook lost that feeling of being somewhat like a club. Groups and individuals got more politicized (again, not necessarily a bad thing) which meant that Facebook increasingly became a platform for spewing bile at others. More features were added and the complexity of Facebook steadily increased over time, which I imagine some people liked, but I personally found many of these things as just more ways to hand over personal information to marketers. For better or for worse, Facebook has grown up and left those innocent days of youth behind.

As Facebook has changed, so has my account on it. I only have about 50 friends these days, and from time to time I purge people that I don't talk to anymore. I've left nearly all my groups and my profile information is now bare-bones. It's been well over a year since I last uploaded a photo album, and my profile photo, which I used to change every three months or so, has not been changed since 2012. There have been several times where I seriously considered shutting down my account, but for now Facebook still has just enough value for me to stick with it. How long that will last, I cannot say.