😶‍🌫️ Social Media Is Not Neutral — aka the Threads episode

Amelia [00:00:01] [Sparky synth music begins to play, overlapping with the introduction to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:08] [Music continues to play as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing] Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid.

Amelia [00:00:24] [Singing fades out but synthy sounds continue] Have you ever wish that you could have a successful business without social media? Well, you're in luck. I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio.

Amelia [00:00:34] On this show, I share stories, strategies and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. Download the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's b-y-e-i-g and join us in doing it all Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:56] [Music gets louder as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings again] Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid [music fades out].

Amelia [00:01:15] Hello and welcome back to Season Two of Off the Grid. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and this is a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. It's a podcast about doing business differently than our capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, ablest over culture tells us we "should," quote unquote, be doing business.

Amelia [00:01:37] It's a podcast about cultivating energetic sovereignty and radical generosity so our businesses can be sustainably profitable, not exploitative, but profitable over the long-term. And it's a podcast where we get to talk about all things social media and why we are not taking part in the attention economy any longer.

Amelia [00:01:59] If you're tuning in live, it is July 2023 and we are just returning from a summer break. Let me tell you that I really needed a break. Maybe you caught on because I did three episodes about sabbaticals and retreats [chuckles softly] in the first part of Season Two.

Amelia [00:02:17] But I found myself in a growth stage with my primary business, Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. Softer Sounds was growing really fast, expanding both in revenue and clientele and the types of offerings we had and the depth of those offerings and how much they required of me.

Amelia [00:02:38] And I could tell that it was not sustainable and I was on a fast track to burn out if I didn't step back and get some time to rest, restore, and reassess where the business was headed. And I will say I'm still in the middle of that process, but I'm feeling that excitement to get back to the mic again, that joy of new ideas, of things to share on this show.

Amelia [00:03:06] And I'm just really grateful for those of you who are supportive of podcast breaks, who take your own podcast breaks, and who are helping all of us build a different sort of marketing schedule that is sustainable for our cyclical bodies, for us as cyclical beings where we don't have to be on all the time because nature is not on all the time so why should we be on all the time? I think it's inhuman and I'm deeply invested in being human these days.

Amelia [00:03:39] So, while I was away on break, a big thing happened in the social media world. You likely already know about this event. If you rack your brain, you can probably think about, "Huh, what happened in social media in the past month?"

Amelia [00:03:53] And you got it, friends-- Meta launched Threads, their much lauded and a long-promised Twitter alternative. And not only did Meta launch Threads, but it kind of blew up. While I was hanging out my backyard resting [laughs softly] and restoring, I saw so many news reports about how Threads hit 100 million users in only five days, making it the fastest growing platform ever, according to Morning Brew.

Amelia [00:04:25] I also saw so many-- so, so, so, so, so many [giggles] takes on what the launch of Threads means for social media, for our businesses, for our lives, particularly for millennials. And I will be honest, I was, like, voraciously reading these things-- mostly on Substack.

Amelia [00:04:49] You know, as much as I don't think Substack is a great business tool, I do follow a lot of Substacks, and I think that every person who writes on tech news or business news or Internet culture wrote something about Threads in the past few weeks.

Amelia [00:05:02] And so, I was trying to figure out what Off the Grid might have to say about Threads. And honestly, my first thought was, "Does this even matter to Off the Grid-- like to the show or to the listeners?"

Amelia [00:05:15] But I want to use this as an opportunity to kind of revisit, you know, some of the claims that I make in different episodes of the show, but to really talk about why I think that social media is not only not neutral, but can even be harmful to ourselves and our businesses.

Amelia [00:05:34] So, you know, I think that this episode is most likely for the social media ambivalent or anti-social media folks or for folks who are, you know, continuing to realize maybe that, like, you just really don't want to be on social and you need a little bit more of like, you know, a gentle but no nonsense nudge to step back from the platforms, especially maybe for folks who, like, saw Threads and felt this sort of sense of, "Oh my god, I need to be an early adopter, I need to get famous. Threads is my chance [chuckles]."

Amelia [00:06:09] I want to kind of pull us back from that and remind us, like, why this podcast exists and why we encourage small business owners and creatives and artists and writers and all sorts of people making wonderful work in the world to step back from social media and do business differently.

Amelia [00:06:27] So, that's what today's episode is about. It's going to be short and sweet. So, let's dive in [splash sound].

Amelia [00:06:37] As I've mentioned, since Meta launched Threads, there has been a wave of reflections on the role of social media in our work and our lives and our businesses and our culture and our identity.

Amelia [00:06:50] So many people have been tuning into how these platforms have impacted our behavior, impacted our sense of selves, impacted how we interact with other people. And, you know, I think the first wave of coverage that I saw was really just about like what's happening on Threads [chuckles lightly].

Amelia [00:07:09] And it all seemed to talk about how Threads was full of brands being brands and people being brands. And for the most part, people seemed to be reporting, like, a real cringe effect, a sort of like, "Wow, this is embarrassing for all of us-ness of it."

Amelia [00:07:29] And then, from there, I saw a lot of, you know, lightly or heavily ironic essays lamenting how millennials have become social media machines performing themselves into Internet oblivion or something like that. You know, that seems to be kind of the general gist of it all [laughs lightly].

Amelia [00:07:53] And, as I said, I read a lot of these pieces-- one that stood out to me was definitely Kate Lindsay's essay from the Embedded newsletter. It's called, "Threads is the Mecca of Millennial Brain Rot," and in that essay, she says, and I'm quoting here, "Threads is the first new social media platform in years that millennials have joined enmass, and it has revealed just how much the past ten years online have absolutely rotted our brains. Our behavior says something about how we view social media now. It's not for connection, but performance. It seems that many of the people who rushed to download this app did so to get in early on a rush for potential new followers and in doing so, adopted digital personas that bear no resemblance to how a single human talks in real life. After years of being subliminally nudged toward this behavior through algorithm changes on other platforms, when given the opportunity to do something different on Threads, we came running back to the bland platitudes and low hanging fruit we've been conditioned to rely on for engagement. To do anything else is now extremely difficult."

Amelia [00:08:57] Okay. That definitely resonated for me with everything that I share on this podcast, right? The platforms themselves impact our behavior on them, and we have been subliminally nudged, as she says in the essay, but I think also explicitly [chuckles softly] taught and trained by Meta to create the sort of aspirational lifestyle version of ourselves and perform that on social media, especially if we are creatives or small business owners who desire for people to follow us so they can support us or buy our work in some way.

Amelia [00:09:35] And I have to admit, it's not a surprise to me at all that Threads is simply Instagram in another form, right? It's obvious. Meta owns them both so they are building these environments, they are shaping these algorithms. And as a result, for many people, Threads just kind of showed them the sort of worst of Instagram.

Amelia [00:09:58] I also really appreciated Nick Dobrenko's [Editor's note: Author's name is Alex Dobrenko] essay, "I posted 300 Threads in Three Days," which kind of opens with this question that I think we're all asking ourselves, "Should I be on Threads?"

Amelia [00:10:11] And then, shares his experience on Threads by posting 300 threads in three days [laughs], which is great for someone like me who's not on Threads and wants to see what it looks like inside or what the engagement interaction is like.

Amelia [00:10:24] And at the end of that essay, he circles back to this question of, "Should I be on Threads?" And shares just some really interesting reflections, I think, on like whether any of this is meaningful at all. And he kind of comes to the conclusion like, "It truly doesn't matter."

Amelia [00:10:41] And then, he says this next thing, which I'm going to quote here. He says, "The real problem I fear comes in how quickly we-- one, FOMO the fuck out of each other by way of the app's hype cycle, and two, moralize ourselves and others into believing we are good or bad because we are or are not using these apps."

Amelia [00:11:05] [Takes a deep breath] And I think this is really interesting. Like, I think this gets to something that's core in why we turn to these social media platforms. This question of, "Should I be on Threads? Should I be on social media?"

Amelia [00:11:22] I'll preview for you but the next episode is going to be all about addressing these shoulds, how to take them seriously, and deconstruct them. So, we're headed there next. But when asking, "Should I be on any social media platform?"

Amelia [00:11:35] So much of it is that FOMO, that wanting to get in early on a rush of new followers, or to be where everybody else is? And then, another piece of it is, as he's pointing to here, like this sense of like, am I good or bad because I'm using the app or I'm not.

Amelia [00:11:54] And I see this a lot. And this is kind of where I've come with a, you know, a slight-- a gently critical lens of, like, the sort of sense of, like, it doesn't matter if we're on social media or not. And it's great if you are and it's great if you're not. And that's something I say on this podcast, you know, and I'm not here to moralize or judge you for whether or not you're on Threads.

Amelia [00:12:18] Like, in the most loving way possible, I just don't care if you're on Threads [laughs gently]. I'm not there. I'm never going to be there. I don't care if you're there.

Amelia [00:12:25] But while I'm not here to moralize your life, I do think that whether or not you're on Threads or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or anything else-- like that can be a moral decision that you make for yourself. It can be a values-based decision that you're making, and that decision can express your values to yourself and to other people.

Amelia [00:12:51] And so, while I maybe agree with Nick Dobrenko [Note: Alex Dobrenko] that like, "We too quickly moralize ourselves and others into believing we're good or bad because we are or are not using these apps," to quote him again.

Amelia [00:13:02] I also think that it can be a moral choice and that that's okay. Like, we make choices in alignment with our values and our morals with what we believe is right or wrong. And, for me, not using social media is a value-based decision and as such is a certain type of moral choice that I am making.

Amelia [00:13:24] I was reading yet another Substack [laughs] the other day where an influencer that I first encountered well over a decade ago argued that social media is simply a tool. And that I'm quoting here, "It is neutral, like a fork or a toothbrush and as such, it's up to us how we decide we're going to use this tool."

Amelia [00:13:46] And I think this is like-- [sighs] this is the slipperiness of that, sort of like it doesn't matter if you're on Instagram or not. Like, who cares? It's not a moral choice. It's just a thing you do or don't do.

Amelia [00:13:59] And then, we get to like, "Because the tool itself is just neutral and you decide how you use it." And I have to say that, like, this is the sort of take on social media that I do, like, patently disagree with.

Amelia [00:14:10] The social media platforms run by VC-funded, for-profit companies are not simply a tool, and it's not up to us to decide how we're going to use them. You know, it goes back to Kate Lindsay's argument that to do anything else is now extremely difficult.

Amelia [00:14:29] But I keep digging deeper. You know, why? Well, social media platforms are built environments that dictate our behavior with their design and influence what we create with their algorithms. And the primary goal of those platforms is to make money, meaning that they will dictate and influence us to do whatever is required for them to increase profits.

Amelia [00:14:52] So, social media is not simply a tool, it is not neutral, and it's not up to us to decide how we're going to use it. And that's not a personal failing on any of our accounts. It is the nature of the thing [laughs softly], the nature of the apps themselves.

Amelia [00:15:09] And I think now that we can see the impact that these apps have in the world, you know, as we learned in the Season One episode with Vickie Curtis, Meta is in the business of making money regardless of their negative impact on global mental health, regardless of their widespread encouragement of political disinformation. Meta just wants to make money and they don't care about the harmful impact of these apps and knowing that-- that is where we then get to make a values aligned or moral choice about whether or not we use them. It's not simply how we use them.

Amelia [00:15:49] As I've shared before on this podcast, this was a big part of why I left social media. The values of these platforms were too far out of alignment with my own values. And so, I made a moral decision. That doesn't mean I'm here to moralize about it. You get to determine your own values and make your own choices [chuckles softly].

Amelia [00:16:09] And much like people say, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, I don't think that you can run a business in this day and age and not use a single tool that is somehow, like, corrupted by a giant capitalist enterprise. For instance, if you have a website [laughs lightly] and you built it with any popular platform or if you use Notion, you know, these are all supported-- or many of them-- most of them are supported by Amazon Web Services. So, we are implicated in the Amazon-ification of the world, right?

Amelia [00:16:41] So, I'm not here to say that your business-- it can't be morally pure. We're not going for purity here, but we can still recognize that we're making moral decisions and we can choose the places where we really want to live into our values. And for me that is around social media and this podcast, right? So, I'm here to remind us that while I don't think we get to determine how we use social media apps, I do believe we get to decide if we use them.

Amelia [00:17:16] And this entire podcast was created to help you chart a social media free path forward for your business and your life if you want that. And I'll go out on a limb here and say that if you're still listening, I think at least a small part of you wants that, right?

Amelia [00:17:32] If you're somebody who really wants to be on social media, you probably did not give this the 20 minutes of your life that you can't get back [laughs]. And that's fine. You know, again, we get to make different moral choices and I'm not here to moralize about your choices.

Amelia [00:17:48] I'm just here to help you see that you can do things differently, that we can deconstruct these shoulds that we encounter around social media and marketing and small business. And the answer to the question: should you be on Threads-- is that it's up to you and it doesn't matter. And it does matter when we're talking about your values.

Amelia [00:18:09] So, I hope that you've followed me along this current. I know we kind of went a couple different places. I will link to everything that I quoted in the show notes, if you want to read more takes on Threads check on the news.

Amelia [00:18:23] Again, at the end of the day, I think what's most important is that you feel connected to your values and that you're choosing ways that you want to live those in the world. And that may be on social media or off social media or maybe being off social media is a values-laden decision like it has been for me.

Amelia [00:18:42] The point of me sharing that is not to get you to do what I did, but to get you to undergo your own process of discovery and to try to help you along the way. If you start to question social media and want to make some different marketing choices.

Amelia [00:18:57] So, where does that leave us at the end of this episode? Well, because I am a small business owner [chuckles], because I've been talking about helping you along this algorithm-free, social media-free path, I, of course, have to share that The Refresh is coming up.

Amelia [00:19:14] It's my three-workshop series happening August 22nd, 23rd, and 24th, where I will help you refresh your relationship with social media and chart a new algorithm-free path forward for your business. These workshops are part summer sabbatical and part fall planning.

Amelia [00:19:33] The whole series only costs $99 and you can take 20% off for a few more days if you're listening live. There's a code in the show notes that will get you 20% off until July 31st. So, head to the show notes to learn more.

Amelia [00:19:47] If you've been listening to this episode and you're feeling like now is the time that you want to reimagine your relationship to social media, that you want to dig into your business fundamentals to make sure that your offerings and your marketing and your community are in a really good place to support you not being on social or being less on social in the future, that's exactly what we do at The Refresh.

Amelia [00:20:13] And if you want to learn even more about what we do at The Refresh, you can head back to the last full episode. It's called, I think, "How to Map Your Business Ecosystem." Listen to that one where I walk you through the three-step Refresh process.

Amelia [00:20:25] So, thanks so much for joining me for this exploration of why social media is not neutral. I am cheering you on as you do business your way, creatively, in alignment with your values, your vision, your creative practice. Next week, I will be back with a very special interview that you're not going to want to miss.

Amelia [00:20:52] So, make sure you're subscribed to the show, leave us a rating and review while you're at it, grab that Leaving Social Media Toolkit on your way out, my friends. And until next time, I will see you Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:21:07] [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing over sparkly synthy sounds] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid.

Amelia [00:21:23] [Music continues to play softly] Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig.

Amelia [00:21:35] This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter and our logo is by n'atelier Studio.

Amelia [00:21:42] If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help. Find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:22:07] [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings the new theme song again] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really wanna put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid [sparkly synthy sounds fade out].