The Death of Keyboard Activism

We have reached the end of keyboard activism. More and more, left wing pages on Facebook, and left wing accounts on Twitter complain of their reach and post views considerably dropping. The changes in algorithms see to this censorship. Now, none of the pages I follow on Facebook actually appear in my feed, even if I view the 'most recent' posts. I have to view each page manually.

There exists an unnecessarily long article explaining how you can beat the algorithms on Twitter: you basically put all the accounts you want to read in a list which will show you a supposedly unaltered feed of posts in chronological order. This is certainly useful, and if some windbag can write a 500 word article just to make that point, I can at least indulge a few words explaining a way to beat Facebook's algorithms.

I have actually written about this in the comment sections of Facebook posts and since I was flatly ignored by everyone, I say 'fuck 'em'; I'll write about it on my own blog and they can continue to ignore my wisdom.

In simple terms the trick to Facebook is to use the bookmark or favourite function of your chosen web browser. I use Firefox – for many reasons – and it happens to be pretty versatile when it comes to bookmarking pages. First thing, however, one must bookmark the right web address.

When you visit a Facebook page, you are met with a summary page with several sections, each with a couple of posts in them – i.e. posts, photos, videos, etc. To see all the posts, you must go the post section and scroll to the bottom where it says 'See all'. Clicking on that will take you to all the posts of the page, taking you from 'facebook.com/pagename/' to 'facebook.com/pagename/posts/' or something similar.

This is the page you bookmark. The great thing about Firefox is that you can place all your bookmarks in a folder. So I drag the page tab to my bookmark toolbar, right click on it and select 'create folder'. I name the folder and put all the Facebook pages I want to read into it.

Unfortunately, this won't save political discourse. As effective this is for a user to see the pages she wants, Facebook is still blocking the sharing of this content, and sharing is the crux of social media activism. The only alternative I can see, other than paying for sponsored posts, is for someone to make an alternative Facebook; a political-style Facebook that does not censor genuine political discourse. We need a new social media platform but I really doubt anyone will build it, and even if it is built, it will need the dedication of the serious political bloggers – and I don't think they would dedicate their time to it.

It is like people unable to see the matrix. People are too accepting of Facebook and Twitter's power. We don't need Facebook or Twitter, we can turn away from them, but I don't think many political bloggers believe they can. In the meantime they will continue their quest of censorship into obscurity.

See if I care.

Over and out for now, guys!

xxx