This post was prompted because I’m frustrated because I want to go to the Million Woman March in Washington, DC but all but the most basic information seems to require a Facebook login to access.
Not everyone’s on Facebook — for a lot of good reasons
Given what Facebook has done in this election, their refusal to take responsibility for it, and their long history of privacy overreaches, we must have an alternative.
Some of us have deleted Facebook, and others have curtailed their activities due to the recent election. Others (I’m one of those) have never trusted Facebook in the first place, because of their complete disregard for privacy, the way they’ve treated transgender accounts, and/or the byzantine security settings that change without warning.
My own situation is fairly typical.
I’m a business person, and an admin for two company pages. My Facebook connections include clients who probably suspect my political leanings but not my level of engagement. I use Facebook for nothing more controversial than travel photography.
I don’t connect on Facebook to anything political, religious or otherwise controversial. I know enough about how software like Facebook works to know that there is no way their settings can be iron-clad enough to protect me.
It’s possible that I’m missing something — and if so, please tell me!
My Google searches and requests for information here and elsewhere have not led me to anything else (OK — I did find one volunteer form on Google Docs that I now can’t find). So if there is information available elsewhere, it needs more clicks and links to be more visible the way most non-Facebook users are going to try to find it.
So — all information published on Facebook needs to be available by other means as well, to make it accessible to those of us who choose not to use Facebook.
If things do get bad, we need decentralization.
We are going to be much better off if we learn now how to use local and international systems that are not so easy to shut off.
A web server located in the EU is going to be much harder for the NSA to take down than a cloud-based system. This is one core strength that Internet organizing has, if we are careful not to to use the large platforms that are most vulnerable.
Wordpress is not that hard, and a lot more robust in the event that Facebook gets compromised (or compromises itself).