Digital unravelling - losing Facebook and the transience of social media

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

When I signed off here in 2024 (see previous post) I didn't think I would return. But today I suddenly feel like writing again. Not about education but on the transience of social media in an age where AI controls what we do and who can participate.

Last week I was suddenly and without explanation thrown out of Facebook and Messenger. I was scolling through posts, as we all do, when a message appeared telling me that my account was suspended because activity on it didn't follow their Community standards on account integrity. They included a link to appeal against the decision and that lead me to a video selfie facility. I don't like the idea of recording a video of myself, especially for a company like Facebook, but I had no alternative in this case. So I did that and it was accepted. Then came a captcha to prove I'm not a robot and finally a confirmation of my e-mail. An hour later came the final bombshell as you see below.

I have been a user for almost 20 years and have always been a responsible user, never making offensive comments or promoting disinformation or hatred. I had absolutely no idea why I had been targetted like this except that the algorithms had made a mistake. Since Facebook, like most social media, is basically a machine there is no contact information or customer service and my attempts to find out more about my banishment simply hit a brick wall of FAQs.

I was deeply hurt by this. Despite the enshittification of the platform, ie all the ads and "suggested links", I still got a lot of joy from it all. I posted photos from my hikes and travels and was active in several enthusiast hobby groups mostly on topics like football, cricket, railways and nature. Nothing very controversial there!  I also had a lot of contacts: relatives, friends and work colleagues from around the world. They were now all gone and I had no back-up contact channels for most of them. Suddenly my digital world shrunk even further. I started searching for as many as possible on other platforms - after several years of neglect I finally found Linkedin very useful! 

Then came the next blow. My computer crashed and I began to think that the digital gods were really out to get me. I took the ailing machine into an IT repair company in town and awaited the verdict on whether they could salvage at least some of the contents on my hard drive. It turned out that Windows was corrupted and the hard drive was virtually finished. But the main discovery was that the computer was full of virus including trojans. The repair guy said that that could have triggered alarms in Meta's algorithms leading to my sudden expulsion. I hadn't noticed my account being hacked but the trojans and their friends were certainly doing some strange things with my accounts. At the same time I have been well aware of the dangers of viruses and have run anti-virus scans every couple of weeks and always got the all clear sign. I also used VPNs and anti-tracking software so I thought I was well protected. However they told me that my protection, Macafee, was very unreliable and I have now bought another solution. But how are ordinary mortals like me supposed to know all the details of which solution is best? Some people really enjoy comparing products and reading reviews but I don't and I suspect I am far from alone. I just chose a well-known brand and trusted that. The computer was cleaned out and I have now started from scratch with all the bright and shiny updated apps and programs and am now checking my virus scans daily! I had backed up my data on two external hard drives so I didn't lose my photos and documents but it's still a dull chore getting everything working again.

So what have I learned from all this? Don't trust anything digital and always have multiple backups. Platforms can delete you whenever they feel like it or if the company goes bust. If it is free you are not a customer and we have usually forfeited our rights by accepting the terms and conditions. I have found a lot of my contacts on other platforms and am beginning to adapt to having fewer things to scroll through (probably a good thing even if I get withdrawal symptoms now and then). There is really no alternative to Facebook - the nearest I've seen is MeWe. I created an account there but can't find anyone I know. If you have lots of digital contacts I strongly advise you to copy them in multiple places including on paper. I went out and bought an old-fashioned paper address book and am writing down all the contacts with e-mail addresses, phone numbers and any other information I have on them. If you are one of my old contacts please conatct me through this blog or search on other social media.

Be careful out there! 

Digital is never forever - print still matters

Photo by Mayer Tawfik on Unsplash

We have lulled ourselves into a false security that digital content is permanent and have therefore entrusted our society's most important records to servers, often owned by commercial corporations. But as file formats change every few years and new technologies make old ones obsolete, everything has to be converted and updated and some content may be lost on the way. Files can be corrupted or hacked. Our own stores of family photos and videos will probably not last as long as the old negatives and tapes unless we keep updating them. I have several disks and CD-ROMs that have become unreadable. Digital vulnerability is an issue.

A new threat has been added now that we depend so much on cloud storage and streaming. The company that owns the service can at any time decide to withdraw certain services or even delete content. This digital vulnerability is highlighted in an article on Slate, Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four. Users of Amazon's Kindle platform for e-books who had bought George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm discovered recently that the books had been suddenly deleted from their devices. Amazon claimed that there were legal irregularities with the copies and therefore they had to delete them. The users were refunded and the explanation seemed plausible. This has happened with other publications as well but the irony of the two most famous works of a dystopian authoritarian future being suddenly deleted from all devices is alarming. Even if this may have been an honest mistake it shows that these companies have enormous power of the content we can access.

The worst thing about this story isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That’s an awesome power, and Amazon’s justification in this instance is beside the point.

We still have millions of printed copies of these books as well as digital versions on other e-book platforms but if we continue to move towards a completely digital future the risks are clear. Our digital content can be deleted, our accounts can be blocked and our access limited. It's not hard to imagine how this power can be misused. In a rational, civilised society governed by laws that work in the interests of the public good this would be regulated but we don't live in that sort of world today. We have put enormous power in the hands of a few extremely powerful global corporations.

Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else. Steve Jobs has confirmed that every iPhone routinely checks back with Apple to make sure the apps you’ve purchased are still kosher; Apple reserves the right to kill any app at any time for any reason. But why stop there? If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you’ve bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I’ve predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too.

One of many disturbing echoes of the 1930s is the growth in banning and even burning books that challenge the narrow-minded values of a government or militant political or religious movement. This is not restricted to authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran or China but also now in many European countries, both western and eastern. Authorities can try to stop libraries from lending certain books or schools from letting pupils read them or even stop shops from selling them, but copies will always be out there and people will hide them and circulate them even when banned. That's how many important works have survived through years of repression and tyranny. Once printed books are out there it is impossible to be sure that you have eliminated them all.

Digital is different however. In the world of e-books you never really own your e-book, it is dependent on the device or app you use to read it with and that can be upgraded, replaced or disappear completely. When a digital service dies all your content goes with it unless you get advance warning and find a way to download it. My music collection on Spotify exists only as long as I pay the subscription and the company still offers the service. Quite a few songs on my Spotify playlists are shaded in light grey with the explanation that they are no longer available. They haven't been censored or anything like that but we have to accept that content can be withdrawn. If Google pulled the plug on this platform, Blogger, all my blog content goes with it. Digital is never forever.

Digital content is transient and unreliable. It can be deleted without your consent and I'm sure with the growth of AI, all content can be manipulated and changed to better reflect a dominant ideology. We need to preserve knowledge safely for the future and not be reliant on just one medium.Print still matters.

Forget me not

Soon after writing my previous post on being able to filter what you write on social networks I read an interesting article in the New York Times, The Web Means the End of Forgetting. This discusses the digital trails we leave and the fact that whatever we write may come back to haunt us. Since everything is searchable whatever you put on to the net may be taken down and used in evidence against you. Online reputation is a fragile comodity and many have discovred the drawbacks of not thinking too hard before posting.

  by  snopek 

Identity boundaries are getting increasingly blurred as we reveal more of our work life to friends and relatives and more of our provate life to colleagues at work. Even if we do manage to filter our posts as I suggested earlier once you tell a few people something interesting you can assume they will pass it on. It's the first law of gossip and is even more true on the net.

There's even a service called Reputation Defender that promises to enhance your digital reputation by making sure that all the positive information gets top scores in a Google search and although the embarrassing stuff cannot be deleted they make sure it ends up at the far end of a search list. A sort of personal spin doctor. It's no longer only celebrities who need help with their media profiles.

One tempting solution mentioned in the article is that of being able to label content with a digital sell-by date after which the content will self-destruct, in true Mission Impossible style. I like that idea on social networks where you must choose how long you want a photo or text to be accessible. It would certainly free up storage space otherwise clogged up with digital junk. The problem is whether we can trust such a system. When we delete something on our computers we naively assume that they are gone forever but if a skilled IT technician gets hold of your hard drive it's amazing what they can dig up.

Dirt diggers will always find something in your past no matter how careful you are. We may have to get used to a web that never forgets and become more forgiving and tolerant of previous misdemeanours.

"Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever." 
New York Times, The Web Means the End of Forgetting

What's a zettabyte?

There's a certain fascination in extremely large numbers. Children often invent their own vocabulary for numbers higher than a billion; I remember using zillion for example. The world of computing is teaching us to use all sorts of new prefixes to describe the vast amount of information in the world today. I remember when a megabyte of information was considered a lot but now we talk more in terms of gigabytes and terabytes.

So I enjoyed reading an article in the Guardian, Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes, stating that the total amount of digital information in the world today is fast approaching the zettabyte level and is set to reach 1.2 ZB by the end of the year. In case you wondered, a zettabyte is a million million gigabytes or the equivalent of 75 billion iPads. Once you get up to these levels you lose track of how many zeroes there are. If you enjoy mind-numbing number crunching have a look at a couple of entries in Wikipedia: the biggest number of all, the Googolplex and the names of large numbers

The trouble is that this vast amount of information is largely unstructured and impossible to retrieve despite the growth of Google. Our texts, photos, films and music are stored on servers, own computers, CDs, DVDs and memory sticks and most of us hardly even bother to label them. Just imagine a famous tourist attraction like the Eiffel Tower. How many photos of it are taken per day every day, every year? Just watch the camera flashes in the crowd at say the opening ceremony of the Olympic games and imagine that each member of the 80,000 crowd took at least 100 photos per person. Where are we going to store all this in the future and more importantly should we even try to store it all? Who decides what to save? There must be plenty scope for some serious spring cleaning on the web. How many identical photos of the Eiffel Tower does the world need?

Photo: by Anne Helmond on Flickr, CC-BY-NC-ND

How free is free?

We all assume that everything on the net is free and that somehow advertising pays for all the services we use. As a result we upload tons of content to servers somewhere out there and believe they're safe there. But what happens when the company providing that service has financial problems and decides to charge for the service or, worse still, decides simply to pull out the plug?

There's a critical article on this theme in Times Higher Education by Tara Brabazon, Beware writers bearing promises of a free internet. In particular Chris Anderson's book "Free" comes under fire as it shows the "freemium" movement to be ultimately highly commercial rather than the philanthropic movement it is sometimes presented as.

"His (Anderson's) “free” is corporatised. The cost of free is permanence, reliability and stability. The old cliché is correct. We get what we pay for: when the price is free, then the “service” can be removed without questions or reprisal."

Brabazon used a web service for storing her audio files that suddenly disappeared because the owners decided that the service wasn't being used enough. Since it was "free" they had no obligation to communicate with the users. In addition, the cost of using many free services is the irritation of having sometimes highly inappropriate ads next to your content; especially sensitive if you're using it for teaching.

We trust companies like Google and Ning but if times get tough who knows what may happen. Our information is at their mercy. Terms can be changed at the drop of a hat and it's important we are aware of this and not place unlimited trust in companies that, after all, are there to make money. The free services are, of course, mostly there as bait to get you into the premium services. I admit the irony of writing this on a free blog tool!

The article does however point us in the direction of a genuine non-profit archive for digital material, the Internet Archive. This is a massive library of films, photos, audio, texts and an archive of 150 billion web pages from 1996 to the present day. The archive “is free and open for everyone to use ..... to encourage widespread use of texts in new contexts by people who might not have used them before." This is possibly the real meaning of "free".

Pictures at an exhibition

I enjoy art galleries and especially work from the past 100 years or so. I was walking around one the other day and I looked at some video art. Of course I began thinking about preservation. Paintings and sculpture can of course be preserved for hundreds of years for future generations to admire and study but what about film and modern video? If future archaeologists discover a video tape or a DVD how are they going to play them?
Today's artists and writers have a vast range of media by which to express themselves but how will it be preserved for future reference? If Shakespeare had written exclusively on the net there wouldn't be anything left of his work now. The collected letters of Wordsworth or Dickens are still available but who will ensure that the collected blogs or e-mails of today's writers are preserved? Many artists are doing very interesting work using net-based tools but such work will be transient, available only as long as the server is connected or the format becomes obsolete.
I read a great science fiction story as a kid about space explorers who land on Earth to find it uninhabited and in ruins, presumably after a nuclear war. They find the remains of human civilisation and most importantly a film. They take the film back to their own planet and scientists discover how to play it. After years of analysis and study they feel that they have a good idea of what life was once like on Earth. Only one thing baffled them. At the end of the film were four words they couldn't decipher .... "A Walt Disney Production".

Digital preservation

Remember the original TV version of Mission Impossible? I always loved the start when Jim Phelps got his orders from a reel-to-reel tape recorder rounding off with the classic line "This tape will self destruct in five seconds" after which the tape magically went up in smoke. Self-destructing tapes are still not commonplace even today but we do have a problem with information that inexplicably disappears.

I've had several cases of files that I've stored on a USB memory stick that suddenly became corrupted and about as useful as a second-hand Mission Impossible tape recorder. My digital camera suffered a similar fate this summer when one day's photos became corrupted data overnight. Back to a favourite theme then; how long can you trust a memory stick to actually store what you put on it? How long will a CD or DVD last?

I read an fascinating article in Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish) about the growing concern about digital preservation. The problem is how we are going to preserve all the digital films, photos and documents on all the world's servers. According to one test around 40% of all DVD-R discs will be unreadable within 15 years and similar figures apply for many other storage forms. All archived material has to be reformatted regularly otherwise the next generation of computers will not be able to read them and just this task will be a full-time never-ending job for a lot of people. In contrast paper can be preserved for hundreds of years.

An interesting example was the BBC's project to produce a digital domesday book to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the first one. One million people contributed to this epic which was produced on a laser disc. Sadly 15 years later the material was unreadable because the technology which could read the files had become obsolete. Furthermore it costs $12,000 a year to preserve a digital movie and a mere $1,000 to keep a traditional film version in a suitable archive.

It's reassuring to read that there are now projects and organisations dedicated to trying to find solutions to this enormous problem. It would also be nice if the industry could cooperate by trying to ensure more compatibility between applications and especially backward compatibility. Otherwise we face losing vast amounts of information, documentation, culture and entertainment for ever.

The Swedish Centre for Long-term Digital Preservation is just one of many international groups working with this. There's also an EU project called CASPAR. Good luck to them!