Well, what a week it's been.
The Trump administration got inaugurated on Monday and so much has been happening on the legal and media battlefields that it's sometimes hard to keep track. Most of you on this network don't know me, so as a means of introduction, I shared above the video announcement I released this week on what is now my private IG account.
The decision to make my account private was because I realised I wanted to keep communicating about what is happening to the ones I know and love, but I knew that my content might eventually be flagged as problematic if it appeared on the Discovery page, IG's version of the TikTok For You page.
In an ideal world, we'd all cut our losses and move all of our content and interactions to new networks that 1) are not ran by Meta, X, Amazon or Spotify and their affiliates 2) are not all based in the US, thus staying outside of direct Trump administration scrutiny and/ or potential manipulatio.
But the truth is, for a large portion of the population, giving up Facebook or WhatsApp means not being able to do their job or losing touch with distant friends and contacts. Not everyone is ready for this switch, which will take time and lobbying from many of us, so I decided to milk the networks for what they are worth and find ways of swaying or "playing" the algorithm and have committed to sharing resources and tutorials on how YOU can do that too. In an information war, it is important to stay informed.
So, in this introductory post I will run through the changes I have been making this week to my socials (and why) and link to further resources that can help you make the same choices (or not). My main goal is to inform, not persuade.
CHANGES IMPLEMENTED
1. I privatised my IG page so as to evade being flagged as inappropriate by telling the algorithm I am not interested in "influencing" with my videos because I am a private account; this has had an amazing and fast result in getting my content across to only the people I follow AND who follow me back, which is what I was hoping for. All of a sudden, people that hadn't seen my content for ages were able to see it again. This is a major win, even if counter-intuitive.
2. I disconnected activity tracking on Facebook and Instagram. If you use Meta Business or have that thing activated where your stories get posted on both IG and Facebook, then it's enough to do it on one app and it will automatically apply to the other. If not, you will have to do it separately for both apps. The photo below describes the steps if you decide to do this.
The idea is simple: the less these apps track, the less they know about you (and can use against you or to market mis/information to you in ways that appeal to you.)
3. Then, from Settings in IG, I went over to "Privacy Centre", first Reviewed my Privacy Settings, then back and went into "Manage My Accounts" and within "Ad Preferences" went into "Ad Settings", then into "Ad experience" and selected "Less-personalised ads" You'll notice this is not so easy to find. Well - it's on purpose on their end. This is because LESS of your info is used for ads, which means that they make less money off of you. They will make it difficult for you to like this option by forcing you to watch ads for 5 seconds every now and then. You don't have to, you can select the 3 dots at the top of the ad, choose "Hide Ad" and select something like "I already bought it" or "This is irrelevant". The more you do it, the less ads you will see over time, the less money they get from ads. Easy. This and more you can learn from this user.
4. The video above explains what to do if you still want to use X. Out of all the terrible things out there, I see no reason why anyone would want to be monitored by someone comfortable to give a Nazi salute on stage. I suggest you get your followers on BlueSky, Mastodon, or start a newsletter or blog here on Substack. X is not worth it. I finally signed up for BlueSky, which is a great alternative to Twitter, and doesn't have the ads. You can find me at @breloombb.bsky.social
5. Spotify funded the inaugural presidential brunch, so I was happy that I had a chance to share about my experience on Tidal. I switched back in December at the suggestion of a friend and never looked back. You should do it too! It's easy, just as cheap if not cheaper than Spotify (unless you're on the free plan, of course) and the artists on it get better royalties. Alternatively, consider buying your music on Bandcamp directly from the artists, listening on Soundcloud, or making YouTube playlists. If you're worried about losing years of loved tracks and playlists, TuneMyMusic will transfer them for you from Spotify to Tidal in just a few hours. The quality of sound is also far superior
Some other links worth watching and ideas exploring:
1. Video RE: online communities for BIPOC individuals in the US
2. Comparison of alternatives to WhatsApp
WEEK IN REVIEW
Now, if we look at the week overall, we had the TikTok ban last Sunday. It took 8 hours for the service to get back on. We saw something that we'd never seen before, which is that an app namedropped a president - the same president that was at fault for their banning in the first place. Next morning we woke up to an app update on Meta that allowed one to connect their TikTok account to Meta for the first time since these services came into existence. Coincidence? Most think not.
Meanwhile, people on RedNote were making new friends and China understood that the American Dream is not what's been sold to them. The natives of RedNote were welcoming. Conversely, the American people who moved from TikTok to RedNote learnt that they have it worse than people under an authoritarian regime. Between the jokes and the funny videos, there was a lot of the discomfort of realisation.
The inauguration wasn't even done and what we saw beginning of the week was that Meta was depreciating certain hashtags, making words like "democrats" or "leftists" give no search results. They claim it was a programming error with bad timing and only temporary. Be that as it may, it just goes to show what is possible when operating with networks that are not open source and have no transparency about their algorithms and censorship content. Later in the week, ads for abortion medication were blocked by Meta and many accounts selling them suspended. Similarly, people using Alexa (from Amazon) have noticed that Alexa stopped responding to certain kinds of questions. The proverbial cherry on the cake was finding out that Spotify sponsored the inauguration brunch instead of paying its artists properly. There is talk about a media coalition as all of these big tech companies are pandering to Trump and, should that happen, we need really be worried. This is the main reason I suggest one diversifies their platforms.
Substack was also under scrutiny after they offered their TikTok Liberation Prize to Aaron Parnas, son of Lev Parnas who was/ is involved in the Trump administration and an out zionist, according to quite a few. Why can’t we have nice things?
Just when we thought it was all over, China released two open source Ai models, including one called DeepSeek which is a direct rival to OpenAi. This "unnerved" the US because it showed you can do better, for cheaper. Trump is investing $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the US because what the people need there is more bots, not better healthcare. Three top tech firms will create a new company, called Stargate, to grow artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US, according to CNN.
That's the dregs of this week. Did I miss something?
For sure. Please feel free to inform me in the comments below, I'm no supreme authority on anything. And if you liked this, or found this useful, consider sharing it. I make no money out of it, but I do think it's important. This US citizen here put it really well.
I'll see you next week with more wild tech updates and tools to survive the war on (mis)information!
