Both X (formerly Twitter) and all the Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) are owned by fawning Trump-loving oligarchs. These online platforms steal your personal information, resell it, and permit hate speech they approve while censoring political opinions they don’t like.

Even if you’ve been on these platforms a long time, it’s now time to leave. Immediately.

Pulling the Plug

One of the first things Elon Musk did after buying Twitter was to re-host far right groups and outright fascists. Some people gave him the benefit of the doubt. But when Musk was anointed Trump’s “efficiency” czar and then hosted Alice Weidel of the German neo-nazi Alternative für Deutschland Party on X, people realized that the grandson of a fascist and the son of a fascistic eugenics enthusiast is himself a fascist. And they are looking for instructions for deleting their accounts on X – advice like this and this.

Ach nein! Was meinst Du denn? Weder von uns ist ein Nazi!

And ever since Mark Zuckerberg made his supplicant’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, plunked down an easy $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and discontinued moderation of fascist hate speech on his now Führer-friendly platforms, people have been looking for instructions for leaving Meta too – instructions like this and this.

In general, it’s not a bad idea to stop helping these fascist-ready oligarchs make more money off you and gain an even greater foothold in government. You may not have as much power as they, but you DO have the power to get off their platforms.

Where else would I go?

If you worry that you won’t be able to find your friends online any longer, you might be pleasantly surprised to find some have already migrated to the far less toxic Mastodon and BlueSky Social networks, or found much more secure messaging in Signal as a replacement for WhatsApp.

But don’t stop with account deletion

Like the end of any toxic relationship, the breakup isn’t complete until you change the locks and block the calls and text messages.

Deleting accounts on X and Meta only ends your contributions to these toxic platforms. To completely pull the plug and cut the cord, you need to stop viewing content on them altogether and block their trackers and bots from continuing to access your devices through cookies, fingerprinting, and other forms of digital surveillance.

You can do this on a desktop (or laptop) by creating a hosts file that prevents your computer’s networking system from resolving the IP address of any X or Meta server. SwitchHosts is a host configuration program that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux and can be downloaded here. Once installed, you point SwitchHosts to collections of addresses of social networking servers you want to block. Several can be found here and here and here. You either download the lists and paste them into SwitchHosts or configure SwitchHosts to read and refresh the online lists automatically.

On both mobile devices and desktops you can accomplish the same objective by using a DNS server that will not resolve IP addresses for social networks you want to block. One such service is NextDNS.

Once you have created your own custom blocking profile with NextDNS, you then configure your mobile and desktop devices to use the profile. Your device will now resolve every IP address except for those of the services to be blocked.

The result is that, as far as your computer or mobile device is concerned, Twitter and Meta no longer exist.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

If you wouldn’t vote for the fascist on the left, why are you using the fascist on the right’s social network?

Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it from an already toxic platform into a white supremacist’s dream. Musk implemented schemes to gouge his customers, blocked third party developers from the Twitter API that had contributed to the platform’s success over the years, and invited back virtually every banned hate group you can think of. After renaming Twitter “X” it has now become indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Trump Social, and it’s not that many goosesteps away from Stormfront. In joining the Trump administration, Musk intends to use his new position for personal gain despite the many conflicts of interest it poses. Just like Trump.

That other Trump-flirting social media mogul, Mark Zuckerberg, is not quite the Bond villain Musk is, but his four social media platforms operating under the grandiose title Meta (above it all) — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Threads — represent a social media monopoly dedicated to hoovering up as much of your personal data as they can get. Meta censors content and de-platforms users for the most obscure of reasons. Many users who posted criticisms of the Gaza genocide, for example, found themselves banned on several of Meta’s sites. Despite best efforts to keep your account private, Facebook will often “relax” your privacy settings without permission. If you use forwarding emails or phone numbers to preserve your privacy, Facebook will treat you like a criminal. Facebook’s registration process may even require you to hand over a photo of your driver’s license. In short, Meta is designed for one thing — to suck up as much of your personal data as it can for resale. You are the product Mark Zuckerberg is selling.

There are other options out there, though none are so popular as to make it possible for your long-lost high-school friends to find you. But if you want to share your views — or your cat pictures — you can try BlueSky, Mastodon, or Substack. Among others. That is, if you’ve had enough of censorship, violations of your privacy, and neo-Nazis.

Getting out

To delete your Twitter/X account, click the three-dot menu icon and on X’s left sidebar and choose Settings and privacy. From there choose Deactivate Your Account. To delete your Meta accounts, go here and delete Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads accounts through Meta’s Accounts Center.

Blocking the bastards

Deleting Meta and Twitter is one thing. Removing them permanently from your life is another. Both Meta and Twitter use cross-domain trackers to keep an eye on you even if you aren’t a user. There are browser extensions and tracker blockers you can install to try to prevent this, but they may not always work with all internet apps,

One way to stop all access to and from Twitter and Facebook is by blocking them at the domain name server level. On every desktop system there is a hosts file that can accomplish this by telling DNS to ignore certain websites, resulting in a refusal to resolve a domain name (like “www.facebook.com”) to its IP (internet) address.

One tool, available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, is Switchhosts, which makes it easy to safely edit the hosts file. You create a profile similar to this one and simply enable it in Switchhosts. No more Facebook or Twitter! Attempts by any of your internet apps to forward personal data will not be completed because they won’t be able to find the IP addresses of Facebook’s or Twitter’s trackers.

If you want to accomplish the same on your mobile devices, you can use a custom domain server that will do the blocking for you. One popular and currently free solution is NextDNS. You create an account, choose the social media networks you want to block, and NextDNS creates a profile for you. You then load the profile onto your mobile device, where it overrides your network settings and points to a custom DNS profile on NextDNS that is all yours.

Any time your browser or any other app tries to connect to the social media networks you want blocked, it’s as if the site simply doesn’t exist.

Which, in the best of all worlds, would be totally fine with me.

Social Networks

Aside from blogging I was never much of a social networking person, mainly because for the most part these platforms are angry places run by sociopathic billionaires who want to steal your personal data. However, I have recently begun to use a few social networks and for the most part they are civilized places that respect my privacy. Recently, several people have asked me about alternatives to Twitter. And Facebook’s founder just announced a social network called Threads. I decided to do a roundup of social networks I’ve tested. The list below focuses on social media for communicating short messages; consequently I didn’t mention Facebook, VKontakt, Telegram, Hive, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, or other social media.

Twitter

Facebook was launched in 2004, and Twitter followed up two years later as a minimalist social network for posting 140-character messages. By 2023 Twitter had between 250 and 550 million users, while Facebook had nearly 3 billion users and its media-centric network, Instagram, had 2 billion.

In 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter and set about almost immediately making it inhospitable for 3rd-party developers, anonymous readers, and even his own users whom he tried to gouge with monthly charges and verification fees. Adding injury to insult, Musk welcomed back Nazis, gay-bashers, and racists who had been banned, and Twitter quickly went from already-bad to worse.

As a result, Musks’s users have been defecting in droves to alternate social media sites like Mastodon, BlueSky, Post, Substack Notes, Spoutible, and Spill. And now Threads.

Threads

By now everyone knows that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) just launched a Twitter competitor called Threads. Threads leverages Meta’s Instagram platform (and its two billion users) and within 48 hours Threads had attracted 70 million users.

Because of its rapid adoption, as well as the realization that Elon Musk is rapidly destroying his own vanity project, some are calling Threads a Twitter-killer. While that remains to be seen, Threads has enormous potential because Threads is literally built on top of Instagram and leverages Instagram’s 2 billion users.

I have been experimenting with Threads. It’s still pretty primitive. Since you can’t use Threads without an instagram account, you also can’t cancel your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account. Unlike Instagram, there is also no way to use Threads in a web browser. What you see in your feed is (rather annoyingly) determined by a Meta algorithm, not by you, and it seems half-finished in comparison to three other apps (Mastodon, Post, and Spoutible) I have been testing.

Commercial social media networks embody the adage: “if you’re not the customer, then you’re the product.” In other words, your data is the source of their profits. And the Threads app (like all Meta products) wants pretty much all your data. You can find a comparison of data collection practices of top social networks here.

Julia Angwin, who is both a keen observer of social media as well as an online privacy fanatic, wrote (on Mastodon), “Joined Threads but immediately regretting it. [Wired link].” A light-hearted faux advertisement poked fun at Thread’s privacy issues, which are serious enough that they will prevent Threads from being rolled out in the EU until it finally complies with European privacy laws.

Since I had never used Instagram before, I set up a new account, providing them with my email address and cell phone address. I used my real name and added a current photo of myself to my profile. I made one test post:

The next day I added some more contacts and received a surprising message:

I appealed their algorithm’s “decision” in the Zuckerberg Court of Appeals, and I prevailed:

I don’t have these sort of problems on other social networks. Overall, between the privacy risks, the lack of features, and the aggravations of dealing with an evil monopoly, I simply can’t recommend Threads.

But I’m sure people are going to love it because all their friends will be there.

Mastodon

Mastodon is a federated (clustered) network, distributed over thousands of privately-owned instances (servers). It has between 4 and 5 million users. Mastodon distinguishes between a local and a federated (global) feed. Another feed consists of all the people you follow, regardless of which instance they’re on. On Mastodon a Tweet is called a Toot. I have not found any reason to care which instance I’m on because I can follow people anywhere. And because Mastodon has been around since 2016 there are a surprising number of writers, journalists, and political commentators on the platform. But it’s not a place to follow your favorite actress or hockey player.

Besides Mastodon’s web interface, you can also choose between a large number of apps to use with it. On iOS alone you will find: the official client, Mastodon; Ivory, Ice Cubes; Mammoth; Metatext; Tooot; Tootle; Mona; Radiant; Toot!; Mastoot; Wooly; Trunks; Tusker; Mast; Manny; and Feather.

Mastodon, silly name notwithstanding, is still the most democratic and privacy-conscious platform today. However, at the moment it lacks encrypted DM’s (direct messages), a feature supposedly in development.

BlueSky

BlueSky is the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and has much the same political views as Elon Musk. I can’t tell you much about it because I am still waiting for an invitation to join. BlueSky is still in very early stages, although mobile apps are available. Users who have experienced the site say it’s less toxic than Twitter. However, given Dorsey’s politics and his reticence to moderate right-wingers, it probably won’t be long before BlueSky follows Twitter’s path. Let’s not forget that Twitter under Dorsey was a MAGA paradise even before he sold it to Elon Musk.

Post

Post has a nice design and has focused on recruiting journalists and writers to its platform. Post’s monetization scheme is based on selling journalistic content for points, although you don’t have to use points for most interactions. Post offers an app, although at present it is very basic. Post has fewer privacy risks than Twitter or any of Meta’s products. Post is a great place to have informed and civilized discussions since there is a notable absence of unhinged haters on the platform.

Substack Notes

Substack is a great blogging platform and there are many excellent blogs on the platform. By the same token, since Substack is politically neutral, there are also many you might not care to read, depending on your taste and politics. Substack makes its money by sharing profits with authors of monetized content. However, many blogs do not enable the monetization feature. While Substack has always offered commenting on individual posts, it now offers the ability for Substack subscribers to post messages for all Substack content creators using a new feature called Notes. I have posted a few Notes but have not found the feature to be all that useful. Bloggers would actually find it more useful for Substack to provide hooks to re-post content to other social media.

Spoutible

Like Elon Musk, Spoutible’s founder Christopher Bouzy is a cantankerous guy who picks fights with his critics. Spoutible is in early stages of development, but has a beautiful design and its community is friendly. And Bouzy has promised to keep it that way, as well as moderating any kind of content of a remotely sexual nature. There is presently no app, so I don’t know what its privacy risks are, but I commend Spoutible for their encrypted DM’s (direct messaging). Mobile apps for Android and iOS are reported to be coming out this month.

Spill

Another interesting alternative that has popped up is Spill, sometimes described as Black Twitter. Spill is the creation of Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, two young Twitter veterans. Spill’s user interface is unlike any other, and its terminology is different as well. The app uses spill for post, sipping for following, and serving for being followed. Fresh Tea is a live feed from everywhere, while My Brew is a feed of everyone you’re sipping. Because the app’s conventions are unique, I initially had difficulties getting around but ultimately I got the hang of it.

Spill is still a work in progress. For example, it’s impossible to paste text plus a URL into Spill, which many people do when commenting on an online article. I found I could only enter the text and URL separately, which is rather cumbersome. Perhaps this is by design, but the result is that most spills are short thoughts or observations. There is also no web app at the moment, which the developers promise to rectify shortly.

The vibe on Spill is quite different from other social networks. Black vernacular is the lingua franca on Spill. Many of the users are well-known Black journalists, authors, professors, and social activists, but you might not even know it because frequently these self-aggrandizing details are not mentioned in the profiles (although it’s possible). Rather than exploiting the opportunity to network professionally, Spill is clearly a more personal, safe, Black space where folks are just sharing their thoughts and feelings in ways that are most comfortable and fun.

### Introduction

Of all the perils of blogging, it’s not the people who send you hate emails that are dangerous: it’s the copyright trolls — and also their occasionally legitimate cousins. I recently got slapped with a legitimate charge for inadvertently using a copyrighted image. If anyone sends you a bill of this sort, verify that in fact they represent the agency they claim to represent. In my case, I called Reuters and determined that the agency that had billed me was, in fact, legit. Here, then, is my advice on how to avoid improperly using copyrighted images on your website. I will assume most readers are running WordPress which purportedly powers 40% of the web.

### Getting legal images

There are plenty of collections of stock images you can use under Creative Commons licenses. Most are generic images, perhaps a little bland, and may not be the type of image you are looking for, or they may require rooting around dozens of collections of stock images. An alternative is to use Google image search — as you may already be doing — but to use the **advanced image search**: https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search Now, for example, let’s search on “black lives matter” and move the cursor down to the bottom next to “Usage rights” where we’ll select Creative Commons licenses:  This should bring up some images licensed under Creative Commons which we can use **with attribution**. I’ve circled one that we’re going to use as an example:  To properly attribute an image this is an excellent guide: https://www.pixsy.com/academy/image-user/correctly-attribute-images/ Our strategy will be to place all the copyright attribution information we need right in the caption of the WordPress image in the WordPress Media Library (more on this in a minute). For this we need **six pieces of information**. We can usually track it all down from the image details provided by Google. Remember: **you must provide attribution to prove your use is legit!** Here’s the information we found:

– Caption: Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced
– Link to caption: https://www.flickr.com/photos/59952459@N08/28113568721
– Author: Alisdare Hickson
– Link to author: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/
– License: CC BY-NC 2.0
– Link to license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

### Attributing an image

Attributing an image is a bit of a pain but it’s got to be done. To make life easier, I developed a [script](https://www.ehrens.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/caption.sh) on my Mac. You should be able to use it on your Mac or a Linux system, or adapt it for Windows command line:

“`
#!/bin/bash # this is a Unix & MacOS script that will generate the correct HTML
# for your WordPress image caption. CAPTION=”Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced” CAPTIONLINK=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/59952459@N08/28113568721″
AUTHOR=”Alisdare Hickson”
AUTHORLINK=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/”
LICENSE=”CC BY-NC 2.0″
LICENSELINK=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”
echo ” “$CAPTION”, by $AUTHOR, licensed under $LICENSE” > caption.txt open caption.txt
“`

The script [produces a text file](https://www.ehrens.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/caption.txt) called *caption.txt* which you can open and use for cut and paste:

“`
“Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced”, by Alisdare Hickson, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
“`

### Media Library

In WordPress, add the downloaded image to your Media Library and also add the title and the generated caption code above to the image’s metadata. The generated code above will go in the **Caption field**:  Now that the nightmare is over **you can use the image in any WordPress post or page**, and the caption (which is now fully attributed) will follow the image to whatever post in which you use it: 

### What about my existing images?

If you are using a bunch of images that could turn around and bite you later, delete them.

1. Go into your media manager and **delete the images**.
2. This **will break some of the image links** on pages or posts that are using the images. **But no worry! We can fix it!**
3. Install the **Broken Link Checker plugin** in WordPress
4. Run Broken LInk Checker to scan all your links and then “unlink” any deleted images that broke links in the pages or posts.


### How to check questionable images

You may still need to check some of the images you did not delete but believe **may be** safe to use. There are two ways that I know of to check an image:

##### Google Reverse Image Search

 https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&ogbl If we upload the image we were just looking at we can find all sorts of uses of it all over the internet. You may have to dig through all the images to find the owner’s version: 

##### TinEye

 https://tineye.com/ Searching with **TinEye** produces a similar list of places the image can be found, but also information on whether it is a stock image or not: 

In a recent piece, American Enterprise Institute opinion-shaper Claude Barfield (“Encryption: the next battle between security and privacy”) wrote of the demands that spy agencies are making on tech companies to provide back-doors and weakened encryption.

Barfield poses the issue as a “conflict” between tech companies and government – not as one more violation of the 4th Amendment, which provides for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” – and not as something that an ordinary citizen might have an opinion about.

While Apple and Google are actually stepping-up their use of encryption, Barfield writes that FBI directory James Comey’s is demanding neutered encryption. Barfield repeats Assistant FBI director Michael Steinbach’s unproven assertion that terrorist groups are “going dark” with all this great, new encryption.

First of all, some facts.

Terrorist groups did not suddenly discover encryption after Edward Snowden spilled the beans on blanket surveillance of U.S. citizens. Long before ISIS, Al Qaeda often used couriers instead of cell phones and internet chatter. When Osama bin Laden was finally discovered, he was totally off the grid, as had been his practice for over a decade.

Jihadists understand technology – and its weaknesses – quite well.

9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta was an architectural engineer. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed had a degree in mechanical engineering. Two of the three founders of Lashkar-e-Taibi, the group behind the Mumbai attacks, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. Two thirds of the 25 9/11 hijackers were engineers.

One study by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog in the UK, which looked at 400 jihadists, found that an astounding sixty percent of Western-born jihadists have engineering backgrounds.

If you can build a bridge or fly a jet into the Pentagon, using encryption is a piece of cake.

Flashpoint Partners, an intelligence firm concentrating on Middle East terrorism, reported recently that “there is very little open source information […] that Snowden’s leaks served as the impetus for the development of more secure digital communications and/or encryption by Al-Qaida.”

In fact, jihadists were developing their own encryption software almost a decade ago – long before Snowden’s revelations in 2013.

“Asrar al-Mujahideen,” a PGP-like program launched in 2007, uses both public and private keys to securely send files and messages.

An October 2010 article in Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula”s (AQAP) English language magazine”Inspire” cautioned readers to use encryption.

And on February 7, 2013, right before the Snowden story broke, a new encryption tool, “Asrar al-Dardashah,” was developed, which allowed secure communications to be sent over Google Chat, Yahoo and other messaging services.

But aside from spy agency fear-mongering and lies there is a better reason to reject back-doors in OUR computer products.

The recent Chinese attack on US government computers, which compromised four million federal employees’ personal information, is precisely why weakened security should NOT be baked into the security cake. If a sophisticated and determined nation-state can attack computer security, why design it with vulnerabilities?

This was published in the Standard Times on June 11, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150611/opinion/150619892