The university and the association both use Facebook and X (twitter) platforms, but recently these have become politically devalued and meta’s most recent moderation change is absolutely not a thing we can approve of, with the revelation that they have removed their content moderations teams and altered their moderation standards to the point that women are now able to be described as household objects, or LGBT+ persons as “mentally ill”, along with large sweeps towards the right that are deeply alarming.
We as a student body and even a university need to decide if we want to continue to use meta and x, whether we are content to accept these platforms and not protest these changes or whether we are willing to stand up and say that these changes are not compatible with the values of the Open University, and pull back, whether that is a complete withdrawal from meta and x, to move our social elements off and leave our informational sources alone, and pull all of social materials into the ouceonnect/discord other form of communication (eg a large public facing moderated forum system with more user friendliness than the vle so we can use it as a public source to bring new students in/communicate with alumni etc) but these thoughts require us to actually stand up and consider, whether we stay or go, we need to have this conversation, both as an Ou and possibly across the higher education sector and in conjunction with NUS.
For reference https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/over-60-german-universities-quit-social-media-platform-x/3447287# these things can be done, we need to decide what we are and what we stand for, and who we stand with.
I hate to be reactionary, but with potentially decades of social growth going into regression, mentioning pastor Niemullers famous poem does not feel like it’s being overblown for once…