REM, Stephen King and the meta-boycott: Let’s rehearse the exit

When Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he would discontinue fact checking on his meta platforms and replace it with so-called community notes following the example of Elon Musk’s X, initially only in the USA, there was great outrage. How to deal with it now?

After

Since last weekend there has been the “Lights Out Meta Boycott” in the USA, which is scheduled to last until next Sunday and calls for activities on all meta platforms to be suspended.

Perhaps the most prominent Instagram user who has joined this boycott is Michael Stipe, former singer of REM, whose other members are also there. “Last post by Monday in a week,” says the REM account, which has almost 700,000 followers, on a black tile that only shows a lock and the writing.

For Stipe, who is followed by 229,000 people, the dates are March 19-26. January 2025 and the call to do the same so that “companies like Meta can imagine that there could be consequences for helping the extreme right in America and around the world.” Or, Stipe asks, “are we so addicted that we can’t even log out for a week?”

Why just a week?

That is the crucial question that can also be asked about this boycott in a broader sense: why only one week? Why not unsubscribe completely?

Difficult is not just an addiction, but often also a business model. And Mark Zuckerberg is unlikely to go back on his decision. Stipe writes how happy he is about this protest and that after the week he will decide what to do next. He probably does like the writer Stephen King – and stays.

King left X with quite a bit of fanfare at the end of last year and switched to the Instagram news offshoot Threads, where he already has almost 800,000 followers on his Instagram account there are 1.4 million.

And the latter still has his sentence expressing his relief: “Being here on Threads feels freeing”. Will this continue to be the case for him? Stephen King has so far remained silent about Zuckerberg’s move towards Donald Trump.