Yes, that is why we should voluntarily not participate in FB. 
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You finaly got me!
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Woo hooo! 
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Fully agree. More seclusion is the best solution. It’s also by far the simplest solution.
I apologize to those who may suspect that my view is that alternative technologies are something better than sticking to the teachings of the Buddha first and foremost.
Regarding views and apologies, just wait until another rebirth thread comes up… 
The problem is that, at present, participating in social media necessarily means that we are exposing ourselves to a degenerate form of social interaction and communication, where the most basic beneficial moral standards that we still follow in real social life, can be and are easily ignored and forgotten! The control and power which these media afford every individual user, have rendered the behaviour of people on social media ever more increasingly egoistic and self-obsessed, in ways which have compromised our behavioural capacities and even awareness regarding the moral dimension of our social experience. And already, this change in people’s behaviour online has pervaded our actual social and public reality as well; the most visible manifestation of this is the moral normalisation of the practice of the “selfie”, taking a photo of oneself by oneself, even in front of others in public, which was nearly unheard of before the emergence of social media, and which would have been viewed as an excessively narcissistic behaviour by most people only a decade ago or so. Today, it is everywhere accepted as a very normal behaviour, fewer and fewer people, and mostly older ones, still view it as a self-obsessed behaviour.
This is the real danger of social media; that they were bound to become agents of negative social transformation due to their eliciting and stimulation of people’s compulsive craving for imaginative pleasures, just as fast food franchises did with people’s craving for gustatory pleasures. The fast food experience has wrecked much more than just people’s bodily health; it compromised or even brought an end to the social culture of the local market and cooking, and to the gathering of the whole family round the dining table at regular intervals of the day, every day. Social media seem to be doing something very similar: they have normalised phenomenal levels of laziness and physical inactivity, and through the new, but widespread phenomenon of smartphone hypnosis, which seem to have successfully destroyed the little bit of environmental attention that people previously enjoyed; such inattentiveness has in several occassions delivered people to accident and death! And though the claim is substantial that social media may have helped “bring people together” who would otherwise remain separate, and have increased people’s communication “quantitatively”, nevertheless they certainly have been the most powerful force behind lowering the quality of people’s social interactions, reducing both the frequency and potential of more meaningful interactions. A visible example of this inversely proportional relationship between quantity and quality, is how the problematic behaviour of ignoring others on social media (quality) frequently occurs due to people’s incapacity to pay proper attention even for a short while, to such flooding (quantity) of all those unceasing moments and instances of social contact, to which they are now being continuously exposed.
The problem is never in whatever it is that people choose to share and discuss on social media, but rather the negative social behaviours and attitudes with which they relate to each other, at regular intervals of the day, every day! These attitudes are eroding the common social values which we used to take for granted, such as sensitivity, attentiveness, politeness, kindness, and generosity toward each other. And I am not saying that we lived in utopias before social media; all I wish to emphasize here is that these negative social behaviours and attitudes, a certain measure of which certainly existed also in the past, are being now transformed into “habits” that are commonly accepted on a very widespread level, even outside the domain of those social media and into real life.
At present, one can already clearly observe the effects of such transformation in the private and public behaviour of both individuals and groups, and possibly beyond any chance of reverting the tide now! It becomes then up to each individual to wake up to the significant effects of this transformation, or to accept to absorb them while one remains asleep! And since it seems obviously to be the case that, by now, more and more people are unable to bear real life without the indulgent escape from it in a virtual life, our challenge is to make an effort in becoming more aware of the psychological, moral, and behavioural problems that are associated with the virtual experience, and how these may be directly influencing our experience of real life as well, both for our own selves and in the way we exercise an effect on others around us. We at least have the option to observe our own behaviours on social media, and to make an effort to do something about such behaviours that are characterised by cruelty, pride, and self-obsession, even if everyone else around us has become completely reconciled to such harmful mental states.
This post involves excerpts from an article I wrote on this subject recently. 
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I also agree that it’s not all or nothing and that though social media are engineered to stimulate certain problematic states of mind and behaviour, there’s nothing in them which could prevent us from being caring toward ourselves and others. I have never seen any tool so successful in enabling people’s social reach and communicative capacities as FB and Twitter. But generally speaking, a very small minority is using them with this understanding and for these goals. And given our increasing dependence on them, let’s not forget that with few clicks these social media giants can alienate you from your access for whatever reason, and there will be nothing you can do. So in a certain sense it is both empowering and threatening.
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Well, it can happen in SC too.
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https://discourse.suttacentral.net/badges/6/nice-reply?username=media
Yay! Thank you all for making this possible for me. I would like to thank my agent, my mom and dad, my lovely children and everyone who has supported me in meeting my goal. It’s been a tough road, but I’ve struggled on and learned to live day by day until I reached my goal. 
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It might be just me, but I think ‘spending time together’ is overrated- people just eat, stare or tick off the To-do list. . I guess my point is unless there is intensional cohesion of people intensionally avoiding arguments and being nice and considerate, no amount of physical proximity means anything much other than perhaps, convenience. I rather be on-line with my real friends than the virtual ‘family’, in meatspace! I hope that’s not too radical a thing to say. Also what opportunity to crave for real things in the real world is FB taking away? Why do we singularly focus on craving on FB vs craving for anything else? Does canda stand for attachment to the dhamma, and is that better, if so is attachment to staying in touch with friends and family on FB really so bad? It’s easy to point at everything external to us as the cause of our craving. There is some truth in this but it is because of believing that this is the entire truth that we are still attached and craving. Part of the ‘blame’ must be with us- part of the responsibility is with us. Are we trying to reduce our attachment to FB and the next successive platforms set to get out attachment for their profit? Our vulnerabilities make us slaves, to others’ machinations. I am too lazy sometimes to reduce my vulnerabilities so that I become a willing slave. Isn’t that how modern society works?
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Bad or good or whatever … my hope is that the amount of moments of three characteristics produced out of all nonsense going on online, will bring about a shift in those individuals that seem to be attached to places like fb
Not to knock this video, which is terrific, but Jeff Bezos (net worth: 100 Billion $ ) could fund a large homeless shelter in NYC that would provide food, clothing, medical care and other services, and the money spent to subsidize this for a decade he wouldn’t even notice missing from his billions in his bank and investment accounts.
To see homeless people in NYC is a sad paradox; millionaires walking past these desperate folks every day.
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It becomes involuntary for Farcebook addicts. 
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In a post that combines Facebook utility, another post here on D&D on Rape Gangs in Burma (reprehensible horror for the Rohingya ), violence, empowerment of women, Buddhism,and other themes, I stumbled upon this video this morning on Facebook, to share:
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People seem unwilling to accept the strong likelihood that it’s Game Over for humanity.
Climate change gets anemic attention, and many doubt it. But that’s only one prong of the trident here, the others being overpopulation and unequal living standards.
Such amazing communication about these issues is possible, but it’s too late to matter in any substantive way, I think.
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Some of the complaints above about the harmful effects of the internet or information technology hardware do not appear to have much to do with Facebook. If someone is addicted to their phone, for example, it is very possible that they are just addicted to their ongoing text message gossip among their peer group - or to Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, a favorite blog, porn, or something else.
I want to mention a few reasons why my own experiences with Facebook seem, on the whole, much more wholesome than the experiences I have had with most other locations on the internet.
Much of the internet is anonymous, but Facebook is generally not. Anonymity gives people the opportunity to express themselves licentiously, without putting the reputation of their public identity at risk. The results are not always salubrious. Several blogs I once visited have been ruined because the conversation is dominated by a handful of toxic, angry lunatics, identified only by a nickname or a first name, with an open invitation to disgorge all of the hateful misery they are experiencing on the heads of everyone who happens to be available. Anonymity also provides more opportunities for marketers, public relations professionals, and various kinds of propagandists to ply their trades deceptively, while adopting an appearance of neutrality.
Many people on Facebook, I suspect most, have large collections of Facebook friends, and these collections are a much more diverse group than the groups they will interact with elsewhere on the internet, or in private life. On Facebook my friends include my close and extended families, friends of my family members, and their spouses and relatives, my co-workers, my former-co-workers, my academic and scholarly friends and associates, and all sorts of political and internet-based friends and associates. I experience a much wider range of opinions and attitudes than I do on any other internet site. Also, the presence of all of these people exerts a continuous pressure on me to be my most “responsible self” - a self I don’t mind exposing to almost everyone I know. If I behave badly on Facebook, my son sees it, my mom sees it, my business associates see it, my intellectual friends see it. If I express snobbish and disdainful attitudes among my intellectual friends, my less educationally advantaged friends see that, and would be hurt. If I express anti-intellectual attitudes among the latter, my more intellectual friends will view my words negatively. All of this pushes in the direction of maintaining an integrated, single identity, responsible to many people and interests at once.
My news feed is filled with many media stories from a diverse group of global sources, much more than if I was narrowing my news content by getting all my news from some online news tunnel filled with like-thinking people thematically self-selected by political orientation or some other ideological similarity, and which often seem to thrive by becoming a kind of support group for fearful people, who huddle together to feed themselves comfortable, prejudice-reinforcing vanities and propaganda, and who rapidly gang up on, and exile, trolls - who are in some cases merely people who disagree with the dominant opinions on the site.
If a site like Sutta Central does not descend into the most all-to-frequently common internet insanity, that is because it is heavily moderated. If that moderation were removed, I suspect that within less than two weeks SC would become the standard blogospheric rage-fest , overrun by angry political commentary, routine misogyny, verbal violence, and daily indecent exposures of the kind of unhinged hatred that comes out when social inhibitions are removed and people feel free to become online warriors of “political incorrectness” or some other self-dramatizing species of what they see as heroic truth-telling.
Also, we should remember that many people suffer from extreme loneliness, or are cut off geographically from their close friends and loved ones, or are so old that they are not very mobile any more. So the ability to make use of an online social network is invaluable for them. They can see videos and pictures of their grandchildren, nieces and nephews, along with the college and high school graduations, the prom dates, the first day on the job, etc.
All that said, I feel almost certain that if the Buddha were around, he would institute rules prohibiting his monks from all online social networking altogether, just as he forbade them from hanging out in markets, family homes and brothels.
By the way, my son has been traveling around the world with his girlfriend for six months. When he posts pictures on Facebook, they are mostly of the places he is visiting. But sometimes he posts a selfie. And we are darn happy he does, because we miss him and love seeing his face!
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Now what is bad about face book?
Mat, that’s no apples-to-apples comparison, that’s like an apples-to-Terminator comparison.
Once people come to see that they are up against AI’s that are much, much smarter than them, and much more sociologically and psychologically manipulative and devious than Mara himself (with his laughable vilvawood lute), how can anyone escape the eventual conclusion that the only defense is to avoid those media outlets completely?
I strongly recommend watching the following (and please pay particular attention to how the “machine learning” results in the generated database tables [which become the rules by which the AI operates] have THOUSANDS, maybe MILLIONS of rows and columns, being FAR more complex than any human could ever hope to understand. If that kind of unfathomable complexity doesn’t blow your mind, then please watch the video over again until you understand what was said):
Thus the apples-to-Terminator comparison. I strongly recommend “getting out of Dodge”, because the place has effectively become overrun with Terminators.
I think FB and the like OPTIMALLY screw with your mind (as the AI’s are programmed specifically to be that way). Not merely moderately screw with your mind, as would all the conventional vices Mara would employ: drinking, gambling, drugs, etc. Note in the following video how the Dopamine hits are actually algorithmically scheduled for the users (not to mention the use of sleep deprivation, a well-known brainwashing tactic):
Mara would be jealous to have programming skillz like that!
And when I say “Get out of Dodge”, I’m referring to all the big corporations (who are in a competitive “race to the bottom”), such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. BTW: in the Open Source world, you don’t see any such “race to the bottom” (mentioned in the above video), nor do they shove AI down anyone’s throats. Perhaps now you can see why I tend to align my trust there instead.
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So, you think Buddha was very lucky?
I think Buddha would beat the Terminators all the same, owing to his excellent skillz in seclusion. 
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