If you missed the memo, GraniteGrok is mothballing its Facebook Group on March 1st. The Grok Page will continue for a while longer but not much. As bad as things are now, Facebook has announced that it will begin filtering even more political content out of our news feeds.
Find ‘Grok on Parler* – MeWe – Minds – Gab – Twitter – Codias.
“…We’re currently considering steps we could take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well. We’re still working through exactly the best ways to do this…one of the top pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” wrote Zuckerburg.
I take that to mean content that challenges the favored orthodoxy. The ideological difference, defined by Facebook, between news and opinion they like and that they do not.
Go for it.
But by decreasing our ability to use that medium to grow an audience or cater to the one we built, investing valuable time there has become a liability. In the case of the Grok Group content, Facebook is constantly pushing us into forced moderation. This means I have to visit the page repeatedly, review everything and approve it.
It is rare to reject anything our group members share, so this exercise taps limited resources from more productive pursuits for no purpose other than wasting time.
We are there to build traffic. If we can’t do that and it takes time away from the goal, there is no reason to be there.
And with the latest decree, we have even less reason to waste time there we could spend building audiences on other platforms.
One reader, reacting to the call for the exodus, said they’d rather stay and fight. For what? Free speech, open dialogue, a right to choose with whom you associate on the platform and what you see.
That ship has sailed, stalled, burned, and sank, but you are welcome to explore its ruins. We’re moving our political discourse and content to safer waters.
That’s what you do in the free market. You can yell at the grocer to lower prices or carry products you prefer but at the end of the day, the best cure for what ails you both is to shop at their competitors.
Please understand that I am not suggesting you bail on all the other connections you’ve fostered on Facebook. It’s a great tool for connecting to family and friends and about things that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics or its mission creep into every corner of the fabric of our lives.
But if you go there to read or share content of a political nature (whose definition I suspect will become increasingly like the progressive gender construct), you’ll need to go fishing somewhere else.
And they are weaponizing and normalizing censorship to silence all forms of political dissent as defined by the people in power.
We are working to distance ourselves from that, and how you will find us on these other platforms.
Find ‘Grok on Parler* – MeWe – Minds – Gab – Twitter – Codias.
*If and When Parler Returns
