Growth of the #Twitter platform of 9 years >>> @Fisher85M @antgrasso @jblefevre60 @MikeQuindazzi >>> #SocialMedia…

In the parallel universe of Facebook, though, The Western Journal has been among the most popular and influential publications in America, shaping the political beliefs of more than 36 million deeply loyal readers and followers. In the three years ending in March, according to a New York Times analysis, Western Journal’s Facebook posts earned three-quarters of a billion shares, likes and comments, almost as many as the combined tally of 10 leading American news organizations that together employ thousands of reporters and editors.

"Host Molly Wood spoke with Darius Kazemi, a programmer and artist who recently wrote a guide to building your own small-scale social media network, and it got a surprising amount of attention. He built one called Friend Camp that people support through the donation platform Patreon. Wood asked him why he thought people would want to dump all these existing services to program their own social networks. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation."

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Conor Dougherty, who covers economics from San Francisco, discussed the tech he’s using.

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"The catch is that I have zero social media on my phone. Like a lot of people, I’ve been trying to look at my phone less and to have a better work/life balance. In the past I tried some of those phone monitoring apps but didn’t find them helpful. Instead I hit on what you might call a design solution, which is to curate my phone so that it’s mostly a work tool.

I cover California and the economy and have to read news for work, so the mental bargain I’ve made with myself is that I can use my phone as much or as long as I want — so long as I’m reading books or news. Aside from news, Audible, and service-type things like maps and airline apps, I have nothing on my phone. I even disabled the browser. I find this keeps me mostly sane and mostly productive.

Technology is a hard balance for everyone these days, but it’s especially hard for reporters, who in the pursuit of readers and stories can convince themselves that Twitter wars (“being part of the conversation”) and YouTube holes (“cultural research”) are productive uses of time. My biggest problem with social media is that sometimes I used it for work and sometimes I used it to goof off, and somewhere along the way I lost track of which was which.

Don’t get me wrong: I love wasting time. I just prefer to waste it on things like beer, skateboarding and video games (some of my favorite weekend activities) instead of an argument with someone I’ve never met (and who probably isn’t even who they say they are) on Twitter."

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"Plus, most reporters spend a lot of time on social media, and not that many read lots of hyperlocal news. I get a lot of great story ideas just scanning various small papers and trying to put the pieces together and looking for emerging trends."

Article about businesses failing when social media accounts get hacked. Interesting stats. Bizarre lack of information on how this happened and how to keep yourself secure. and presents the risks of having a single marketing platform as your sole source of leads.

Knowing what it isn’t, let’s plainly define what Facebook is: an entity which extracts monetizable data in exchange for a place to store and grow our digital lives. At its most basic, the relationship resembles that of a tenant to a landlord. So what kind of accommodation does our personal information afford? More populous than any single country, and six of the seven continents, the 2.4 billion people crammed within Facebook’s blue and grey walls are spending their data to rent a digital equivalent of a tenement, constructed to maximize profit at the expense of safety and quality of life.

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Leveraging the same exponential power of network effects that make cities desirable and efficient, the density of population in these unsanitary buildings at a time when vaccines had not yet been developed for diseases like typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis turned outbreaks into contagions. A wave of cholera could kill thousands, and often hit poor neighborhoods hardest. At least some of the blame for the scale of these epidemics lands squarely on profiteering shoulders of tenement owners.

In the same vein, the network effects that attracted our friends, friends’ friends, and barely-memorable tertiary acquaintances and packs them into close proximity behind the walled gardens of sites like Facebook and also generates its own negative externalities. The airless, lightless confines of these networks has a worrying tendency to amplify the most extreme content that takes root, namely that of racists, xenophobes, and conspiracists (which, ironically, includes anti-vaxxers.) There is no bigger audience, no soapbox that gets a better bang for the buck, whether you’re Coca Cola or ISIS. This isn’t the anecdotal rambling of paranoid users guessing the workings of the black box their trapped in: Facebook’s own internal research has found extreme content finds greater engagement.