Linus Torvalds, who gave the world Linux OS in 1994 has always been an outspoken individual. He is recognized for always being blunt and speaking his mind, and it has caused him some trouble.
In an interview with the Linux Journal, Linus did not hold back punches when talking about modern social media sites.
“Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern “social media”—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It’s a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.”
The renowned OS creator particularly pointed out to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as the biggest culprits. His biggest complaints against the platforms are how they encourage sensationalism, click-bait, and other forms of low-effort content creation.
“The whole “liking” and “sharing” model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it’s all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.” Said Linus in his interview.
As it stands, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are home to millions of daily users from all parts of the world. Each site caters to different audiences looking to fulfill different social needs. While a lot of what Linus said can be agreed with very easily as these places have been known to be the root for the rise and spread of fake news.
If not these sites, in particular, social media today is indeed a troubling plight. If you aren’t worried about what you consume on these sites, then you’re maybe worrying about the commonly occurring data breaches.
Linus makes some strong points regarding modern day social media, the issue was less prevalent in the days of Orkut and MySpace where data wasn’t such a precious commodity.
Areen Zahra
Amnah Fawad
