Be Sure You'll Be Able To Communicate With People You Trust In A Crisis

Instagram and the social media network Threads are restricting the amount of political content you see on their platforms.

From The Hill:

​Instagram has moved to limit political content, with users now having to go into their settings on the app to turn the limiting feature off...Users of the popular social media platform now have to go into their settings under “[c]ontent preferences,” click “[p]olitical content,” and choose the option to not “limit political content from people you don’t follow,” or else Instagram will limit political content from those the user doesn’t follow by default....“We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone,” a post on Instagram’s blog from last month reads. “If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.”​

I mention this as a reminder that we are at the mercy of these companies and that we must have our own ways to communicate. In an authoritarian crisis and at the "request" of a government, we can easily be cut off from one another.  

Recall back on Super Bowl Sunday how you could not search "Taylor Swift" on Twitter.  Much of the Meta social network went down earlier this month on Super Tuesday primary day. These companies or hackers or governments or whoever can do whatever they want to mess with how we interact. They can cut off our channels of communication when we need them most. 

In these challenging times, be sure you have the phone numbers, e-mail addresses, street addresses or whatever you'd need to keep in touch with people you value and people you trust.        

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