Has the negative social media coverage affected it?

Here in the UK there is a wildly covered court case going on right now with the wife of a councillor who is looking at prison time for a tweet/x she made during the recent riots and unrest. Now – I’m not going into the post, it was at best totally racist and worst incredibly stupid, for someone to tweet something like that and at that time. But as the social media companies fail (well generally) to keep things in check, is imprisoning someone for something she said a good use of resources? I do have to say that someone has already been sentenced for retweeting (re-x’ing?) the offending post, but what does this do for social media? Well as I have already discussed a few times, social media has seen a massive decrease in useage in 2024. How much of that is due to things like this being reported? Well I have had a debate with a few people about this, and well it seems it has had a small effect. However, this does seem to be on the increase recently and I believe that it is the cumulative effect of this and other factors like privacy and advertising have had just as much to do with the changes. The real thing here though is that continued legal disputes and action surely will change the landscape of social media forever, and the real thing here is that as it gets more and more coverage it will start to push people who are on the fence to change their minds. I have also seen that the older platforms like Facebook, X/Twitter are losing users to newer alternatives and this fragmentation, well makes things far more difficult – I mean suing 10 platforms instead of 2 or 3 is logistically far harder for starters…

Now I didn’t post this posts at the time because the news was (and still is) panning out – but the fallout continues. As Huw Edwards (of BBC fame) gets a suspended sentence for child sex offences how is it that someone on X/Twitter who posted some pretty racist stuff looks to be getting a custodial sentence? I mean, that’s a pretty big leap of faith really isn’t it, to say a social media post is worse than a paedophile. It just seems so, well, wrong to use a sledgehammer to crack a social media nut really doesn’t it? This seeming childish choosing who and when to prosecute from the govt. seems to be really shifting up a gear. Prosecute a person for a racists post, but let some racists free so there is a spare prison place for the social media morons! It just seems so, well, childish and unnecessary. Surely fining the idiots a shedload of cash would be better than sticking them in jail at the taxpayers expense eh? Well that’s my 2 pennys worth anyhoo. The thing here is that it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. The idiots still post, the prisons still remain full, people don’t care and of course best/worst of all the social media world still spins. So all in all – nothing has changed!