Limiting whom you follow and not tweeting means you have some control over what shows up in your feed. It doesn't mean you made anything useful out of it, thoug

Limiting whom you follow and not tweeting means you have some control over what shows up in your feed. It doesn't mean you made anything useful out of it, though I can understand how other people might think they have made something useful. By analogy I can control the real-life interactions I have with people to some degree, but not completely. I can choose not to engage with family members who spout conspiracy theories, just ignore them, or not put myself in the situation in the first place. But I can't always avoid that in real life because I can't always control those interactions. With social media, though, I can choose not to participate at all, based on weighing the value I might get against the downsides of time waste and nonsense I have to read, skip over, block, unfollow. In my experience with social media the downsides always far outweighed the benefits, and that was before taking into account the platforms harvesting and selling my information. If something important happens in the world, or some new tool or technology comes out that I might care about, I will find out through some other channel (here, for example) that doesn't come with so many downsides. Other people will have different experiences. I mainly want to push back on the idea that we have to use social media to participate in some imaginary "global town square," or that we will miss something vitally important if we don't pay attention. We don't, and we won't.