Count another person who isn’t ‘liking’ social media these days.
Linus Torvalds, the Finish-born creator of the free Linux software that competes against Apple’s MacOS and Microsoft’s Windows to power computers, did not mince words when discussing Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And in an interview with Linux Journal, he suggested it’s one of the biggest issues he thinks the tech industry is facing today.
‘I absolutely detest modern ‘social media’—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It’s a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior,’ he said in response to a question about the one thing he would fix in tech today. ‘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.’
Torvalds, who first released Linux in 1994, is known within the tech community for being rather rude. But even then, he isn’t the only one unhappy with social media.
Surveys indicate people’s opinions about social media have markedly dropped in the past several years, driven in part by issues of harassment, bad behavior and terrorism that have overshadowed everything else Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are used for.
A root cause, he said, is anonymity. ‘When you don’t even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn’t help.’ Instead, he said, people shouldn’t be able to share or like things without proving their identity first.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
