I can't believe social media anymore

Two weeks ago, Ukraine struck a Russian data centre. Immediately afterwards, many of the subreddits I frequent went silent.

Well, not silent. But there was a very different tone on posted content.

Small talk is broken

About a year ago, I gave up on /r/ukpolitics, as it had begun a deep free-fall into extreme right-wing, predominantly racist rhetoric.

The moral panic and frothing around ‘small boats’ being the root of and cause of all the UK’s problems got too much for me. There are only so many comments I can read that can be summarized as ‘drown them’, or ‘shoot them’, before I have to draw a line and ask “why am I opting in to reading this bilge?”

I am of the opinion that something around Brexit broke some peoples’ ability to have conversations. You can start on a completely different topic, and the conversation will rapidly shift to complaints about immigration.

Me: I was thinking about paining my house a nice purple.

Person 1: Oh, well there’s no point because the country is going to the dogs.

Me: Oh?

Person 1: The immigrants are moving in and taking all the houses.

That was a real conversation I had in 2025.

Online discourse is no different, at least on /r/ukpolitics. Any conversation, from energy policy, to housing, will shift to statements that summarize the issue as having a single cause: Schrödinger’s Immigrant - both poor and leaching off the state, and taking all our jobs/homes/women/cornflakes. It’s like some horrible Six degrees of separation, where these people can’t help online (and in real life) exploding into action to place the blame of anything at the feet of immigration.

And it’s not just the comments. You would be forgiven thinking it was a shipping forecast subreddit given the number of posts about ‘small boats’ and their ‘impacts’.

Sorry, I’m over simplifying. As well as immigration being the end of times, if one Trans person dared to do something beyond hide at home, it would be endless posts and comments talking about how they are less than human and should be ashamed to continue existing.

At some point last year I stopped reading /r/ukpolitics, and moved to /r/unitedkingdom. It was obvious that the moderation team on /r/ukpolitics were perfectly OK with the kind of rhetoric that calls for people to be drowned in the channel.

It’s spreading

At the start, /r/unitedkingdom was better. The views expressed in the comments were broader, often not aligning with my sensibilities, but that’s OK; a broad range of opinions is important. That was, after all what I was looking for from Reddit. To seek out new and unexplored points of view.

Articles from all major news sites, as well as personal opinion posts were present.

Then, over the last twelve months, the rot set in. It started with ’legitimate concerns’. ‘Just asking questions’ — also known as ‘JAQing off’ — about what shit-rags like GB News were hosing out. Then, it moved to full-blown racism and transphobia¹.

In under a decade, people looking to flee horrible conditions are now ‘fighting age men’, and ‘an invasion’.

I then tried to stop ’the algorithm’, instead of allowing Reddit to sort by ‘Best’, I sorted by New, in the hopes that I could see a broader range of things, instead of the things that got hate-based engagement. But this did not help, as the problem is also with the comments, not just what bubbles up to the top.

Not just Reddit

This kind of unfiltered hatred for fellow humans is not limited to Reddit. Oh no, it is everywhere.

I used to read the Daily Echo, a local paper in Southampton. That was, before somebody planned the pedestrianization of a local high-street.

Ten plus articles a day for months about how it was an outrage, how it would destroy the local economy, and how the councillors should stand down. Let’s ignore how pedestrianization projects have been shown to improve local areas — assuming you don’t water them down (like with a pointless bus-gate which you turn off most of the time) — and instead trust the manufactured consent that it’s bad.

The comment sections were filled with unmoderated hot-takes, like how the local government should be ‘dispensed with’.

Every article on that site suffers from the same ’every topic is actually immigration’ outlook that Reddit does.

I ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth the mental strain of sifting through it.

The ‘Outage’

Then, when the data centre in Russia was taken off-line, the comments left on /r/unitedkingdom were far more kind. More humane.

I think they were always there; just drowned out.

Newspapers were quick to jump in and say that it made no difference, but it was stark enough that I wondered what was going on before I heard about the outage.

I think if the internet could be like that every day, then it would be a nice place to be.

It all but confirmed my suspicion that ‘what everyone is saying’, or ‘common sense’, could actually be completely fake. A lesson I didn’t learn from Brexit and Russia’s manipulation of the populace.

This month our Prime Minister stated what we all know, that disinformation played a key role in my countries decision to apply economic sanctions to itself, but the media quickly shifted the discussion, not from influence on people before the vote, but to how there is no evidence they interfered in the polling booths; which is not what the discussion was.

I think a lot about the media in the UK, and the power they have to make the news, not just report it.

And I think a lot about how reading all this manufactured hate affects me, and others.

I am at a point where I just don’t trust that social media, or online news, is showing me the thoughts of actual humans that live around me. At best, it is showing me the desires and opinions of the billionaire owners, at worst, the misinformation of a foreign power looking to destroy my way of life.

Well, at worst case is that my fellow countrymen are small-minded, hateful bigots; but I don’t believe they are. I meet so many good people, who are kind, and generous, every day.

What is left?

I have started using Bubbles.

Somewhere out there, someone wrote a really good blog post today. You’ll probably never find it. Google won’t show it to you. Social media buried it under engagement bait.

— Bubbles About Page

I have found a lot of great posts from people on Bubbles. Real, human people, with morals.

There is also some horrible stuff from people on Bubbles, who have reprehensible views, but the important thing is that the internet is not being passed a social media algorithm.

I subscribe via RSS, and like seeing long-form content like this blog. Not a 30-second, hastily typed demand for someone to be excluded from humanity, but something where opinions come with reasons.

When I find something that resonates with me, I will add it to my blogroll, as a first class subscription.

I could list a few, but go check out the ‘classics’ page, where there’s some brilliant reads.

Fin

I mourn what social media was when it was first conceived, a chronological list of things from humans you know, and not driven by attention demanding algorithms with a hidden agenda. But now it seems social media only exists to direct us, like a cartoon character following the smell of a pie, to a future steeped in hatred for those not like us.

I’m going to try to detach myself from Reddit, because I definitely have an unhealthy relationship with it, to the point where it consumes multiple hours a day. Hopefully I can replace this with reading, because I am way behind on my reading goal.