I can’t claim to know what the best social media platform might be for your Lodge’s internal and external communications. But, if like the majority of Lodges in the United States, Facebook is your Lodge’s primary platform, it is well past time to start developing an alternative.
I know that in the past our Lodges were able to use Facebook to great result. For many years I used it for all of my Masonic and Lodge endeavors, advertising events, and building a large community of Freemasons. It was fun, and effective.
But, if we hope to get the word out about our Lodge to the public, and Lodge happenings to our Masons, we must realize that the Facebook of today is not the Facebook of five years ago.
It has been largely taken over by scam accounts, bots, and advertisers. Masonic posts are given very little visibility or reach, and scams targeting those interested in our Craft are widely tolerated despite the damage they do to real people.
But, as bad as it has been, it’s about to get much worse.
Facebook (and Instagram) have apparently decided that people prefer interacting with Artificial Intelligence Bots on the platform more than they enjoy interacting with real people.
As a result, they plan to introduce millions of Ai generated accounts on the platform in 2025. Ai generated ‘people’ indistinguishable from actual people.12
So, sure, your Lodge’s posts will get ‘likes’ and will be ‘shared’ but the likes will be from artificial people, and the shares will be among networks of artificial people. Lodge posts on Facebook barely reach real people now, with the deployment of these millions of artificial people, it will only grow worse. But, of course, we won’t see it growing worse, because we’ll see all those likes and not realize that they are being generated by artificial people.
If we hope for our Lodge to have reasonable internal and external communications, we are going to have to start utilizing a social media platform other than Facebook (or Instagram.) As it takes time to build a following on any new platform, the time to do so was certainly last year. As a second best, we need to do it now. Right now.
Lest we keep expending efforts into something that the platform itself has left behind.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/metas-ai-drive-could-kill-off-social-media/
I know that Lodges and other Masonic bodies in the UK utilize Twitter a great deal more than we seem to do in the US, so I presume that it works out well for them.
I use it a little bit, but am not too sure about it. I've started baby steps with Bluesky, just testing the waters. And of course everyone who receives Emeth has an account here on Notes.
Our lodge has been using GRAND VIEW quite successfully for our up coming meeting, so far it's been well received.