When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he didn’t just destroy the good parts of a thriving social network. He also did massive damage to many people’s livelihoods, including creative people for whom Twitter was a key part of their marketing and who saw their post engagement – how many people see and interact with them – effectively disappear. And now the same’s happening over at Facebook, Instagram and Threads thanks to their parent company Meta’s new policy, “it’s great when you hate”.

Meta’s moves to emulate Twitter are bad for business – not Meta’s business, but yours.

It’s not just the open embrace of online hate, with Meta happily saying it’ll allow the online abuse of women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and more. Meta’s various properties also already engage in significant censorship, such as hiding posts by LGBTQ+ people and content it deems “political”, while also suppressing links to anything that isn’t hosted on Facebook, Instagram or Threads.

The very creative people that helped make Instagram so big now have to post “link in bio” because Meta won’t let them include links to their own creations in their own posts if those creations are on their own websites or other social networks. And that’s getting worse as Facebook, Instagram and Threads hide more posts by the people you choose to follow in favour of ads and shoddy AI.

If you’re a creative type, doing nothing isn’t an option: unless you’re selling AI-generated crap to the bigot market or reinventing yourself as a troll account you’re going to see the reach of your posts diminish as some of your audience leaves and the people who still follow you see fewer and fewer of your posts.

In the short term that means it’s wise to look at other social networks, if you haven’t already. Bluesky has the juice right now, but that comes with an important caveat: it could easily go to shit too. Many people quit Twitter and attempted to rebuild on Threads; many of them are now facing a repeat as they look for yet another new home.

Sometimes clichés persist because they’re true, and that’s definitely the case when it comes to finding a basket to put your eggs into. Just because the eggs are electronic doesn’t change the underlying truth: having everything in one place means there’s a single point of failure.

With any social network your access can be removed without warning and for no good reason, with few if any rights to appeal. And if it is, the things you’ve posted, the connections you’ve made, the audiences you’ve built… they go too.

I know several people whose businesses and/or careers have really suffered because of social network policy changes, censorship or bad-faith reports by third parties, and what adds insult to injury is that there really isn’t anything you can do about it because third party networks don’t give a shit. As Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg famously said of early Facebook users, “They ‘trust me’. Stupid fucks.”

It’s not just social media. Online spaces for creatives can disappear or remove entire archives overnight: art websites, digital magazines, blogging platforms. I don’t archive my consumer news stories because they’re ephemeral, but everything else I write I archive – and as a result I have copies of features that no longer exist anywhere else because they were never printed and the online versions are long gone.

I’ve been online for over 30 years now, and in that time countless social networks have risen and fallen: USENET, CompuServe, AOL, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Google Plus, Bebo, Vine, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut, Jaiku and many more. And that’s before you factor in the many thousands of user-created content websites and online publishers that have been and gone too.

User-generated content is a scam, and part of what Cory Doctorow described when he coined the term “enshittification”:

Each commercial social media service has two imperatives: first, to make it as easy as possible to switch to their service, and second, to make it as hard as possible to leave.

The harder it is to leave – for example, because you’ve built your entire business on a specific social media platform, and going elsewhere would mean losing most or all of your audience – the more the social network can then exploit you. That potential loss is a “switching cost”. Doctorow:

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

Meta’s social networks aren’t dead, although their hyper-growth is ending. But it’s important to understand that abusing you, the user, isn’t something that happens by accident. It’s the entire strategy. And if you’re using social media for your livelihood, you need to have a strategy of your own for when the abuse becomes intolerable.