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Introduction. And fear of social media

Stringcat

Hello everyone. Having suspected it for a while, I’ve recently had an autism diagnosis in my 50s. It’s brought a great sense of relief, after years of dealing with anxiety, etc that I just put down to being ‘bad at life’ or bad at dealing with people. I always felt I was just ‘getting it wrong’ and could never find out why.

Do others have difficulty dealing with social media? I’ve given up using things like Facebook, even though it gives me access to support groups (I’m also widowed). It’s such a stressful environment. Even group chats with close family or friends feel like being in a noisy bar with everyone shouting at once. I hardly ever post replies myself - in a large part, for fear of saying something inappropriate and being humiliated for it. Or I just spend days worrying if I’ve said the wrong thing.

Even posting here is making me nervous. (I’ve reread this message about five times now before posting!) Does this sound familiar to anyone?

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  • Stringcat said:
    I hardly ever post replies myself - in a large part, for fear of saying something inappropriate and being humiliated for it.

    You can continue this way no problem - using the groups to observe and learn can be quite empowering and this way you get to keep abreast of what is going on in the groups relevant to you without an expectation of unprompted contribution.

    I "lurk" on most of the major platforms but have been losing interest in them over the last few years as the way others use them has been steadily morphing and companies are exploiting it much more, often for shady reasons.

    I don't know if you saw the recent fuss around Twitter / X when they enabled geo-locating for the accounts. It turned out some of the main government accounts were being run out of Israel and many of the far right influencers were being run from Russia and India. There was a sharp U turn by Twitter on this for a while so they could "fix" this unwanted reveal and the government accounts now all show the USA as the location.

    A bug or a slip of the curtain? I suspect the latter, but it does reveal a lot of influence by outside parties if this is the case.

    In terms of posting on any of these platforms - I skip it altogether. I used to do a bunch of tourist related videos from the seaside town I lived in just because I had a load of time on my hands and I have a YouTube channel for the work I do (renovating old properties) but there is very little interaction required this way.

    In essence there is little to fear if you don't get into too much interaction. If you do interact then I would say as little as you can since there will always be someone who will want to take offence at any opinion.

    It has its uses even just as an observer.

Reply
  • Stringcat said:
    I hardly ever post replies myself - in a large part, for fear of saying something inappropriate and being humiliated for it.

    You can continue this way no problem - using the groups to observe and learn can be quite empowering and this way you get to keep abreast of what is going on in the groups relevant to you without an expectation of unprompted contribution.

    I "lurk" on most of the major platforms but have been losing interest in them over the last few years as the way others use them has been steadily morphing and companies are exploiting it much more, often for shady reasons.

    I don't know if you saw the recent fuss around Twitter / X when they enabled geo-locating for the accounts. It turned out some of the main government accounts were being run out of Israel and many of the far right influencers were being run from Russia and India. There was a sharp U turn by Twitter on this for a while so they could "fix" this unwanted reveal and the government accounts now all show the USA as the location.

    A bug or a slip of the curtain? I suspect the latter, but it does reveal a lot of influence by outside parties if this is the case.

    In terms of posting on any of these platforms - I skip it altogether. I used to do a bunch of tourist related videos from the seaside town I lived in just because I had a load of time on my hands and I have a YouTube channel for the work I do (renovating old properties) but there is very little interaction required this way.

    In essence there is little to fear if you don't get into too much interaction. If you do interact then I would say as little as you can since there will always be someone who will want to take offence at any opinion.

    It has its uses even just as an observer.

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