We're on Social media (a little bit)

Social media could have been just what it says on the tin. A media to allow you to socialise with your friends and family. It can still be used like that and maybe a small percentage of all posts are just that. But it has become a fantastic money-making opportunity for a few rich people and a serious and harmful tool to so many more; please note not just those aged under the purely arbitrary age of 16. In order to force you to watch and feed their pockets, the owners of social media companies have produced a deliberately fast-paced, dopamine-fuelling, addictive doom-scrolling tool which, in many cases, instead of being controlled by you, the user, completely controls you.

I know that a presence on social media could help people find our site but, in total honesty, we could not bring ourselves to make use of something we so totally disagree with. Therefore you will only find us on the following two platforms.

All our videos on our children's School of the Air site are uploaded to our own dedicated server. This is to ensure that a young person watching our videos cannot, while on our site, end up on any other site. EVER. The near duplicate videos uploaded here are first uploaded to YouTube and then embedded to this site. As such YouTube may give you options at the end of each video. It also allows us to thank our sponsors. However, like all social media, it can become dangerously addictive.

To date, August 2026, we have not found or heard of any major negative faults with Bluesky. This is the first time we have used it so all is very new. One of the major advantages, as we see it, is that it is decentralised which means that no single company or entity controls the network. However this can mean more inconsistent moderation. It most definitely has a smaller user base but that is growing.

We have decided that other popular social media platforms go completely against our beliefs.

Both Facebook and Instagram are owned by a company called Meta. They own serveral other social media companies. In our view the whole idea upon which they function is to make money for the owners. To do this they need you the user to become addicted to the content, keep clicking on the content and so they employ algorithms which spy on your usage, interests etc and keep throwing up links at you that will entice you to stay longer. The more you click, the more advertisers pay to Meta. You may have noticed that many users put up the supermarket equivalent of an impulse buy by making the headline they put on requiring you to click on the link to find the whole story. Obviously this click is shown as being a "view" for that contributor. Yes, you, the user, are being duped and manipulated all the time. Meta also makes a great play of investing heavily in AI (Artificial Intelligence). Sadly a vast number of stories you will find on Meta's platforms are blatantly AI generated and complete nonsense.

There is one other account that I refuse to have and that is X, formerly twitter. It started out as a way, in a small number of words, a user could share their thoughts with others. It has grown to be a cross between a way of allowing free-speech and a means where fake news, automated spam accounts and trolling and harassment can broadcast. In our view its present owner, Elon Musk, seeks to confuse freedom of speech with permission to cause harm and distress. In our view too much of the content is harmful and there seems to be little moderation or, if you want to be more generous, ineffective moderation. We, therefore, have no such account.