Skip to main content

Time For a Better Platform Than Faceschnook

 "Why would Meta do this? The company seems to understand that Trump’s attacks undermine democracy and can destabilize the country."

Because Mark Zuckerberg has made it abundantly clear for years that he believes nothing whatsoever should stand in the way of monetizing the users of Facebook for advertising purposes. He does not believe in privacy. In 2010, he said the idea of privacy is no longer a social norm, and that we no longer have an expectation of privacy. That was to justify a change of Facebook's privacy settings that dramatically increased the amount of personal information exposed to the world on Facebook. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, said at the time that "...the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."
Facebook has not changed since then. There has been one scandal after another stemming directly from this cavalier approach to your privacy. Each time, Facebook makes the most minimal changes possible to tamp down the bad PR, and often reverts to prior behavior once the TV cameras have wandered on to the next new thing.
Why? Because your personal information is Facebook's product. Ostensibly, it looks like their purpose is to allow you to keep up with your friends and family over time, even if you move away and don't see each other any more. But in reality, the product Facebook produces is you. What you do on Facebook is sliced and diced in a thousand different ways and sold to advertisers for them to engage in microtargeting and, often, finding marks for scams. Facebook doesn't care. It is all money, either way. Even the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for which Facebook settled for $5 billion so that Zuckerberg would not be named, happened while the value of the company increased 25%. In that environment, $5 billion is chump change, just the cost of doing business, only 4% of their profit in a single year.
Same with Trump. He drives followers to the platform, and more so the more insane he gets. Those users are as monetizable as any others, perhaps more so as they are given to buying gold coins and survival buckets and all manner of other things to tide them over through the racial apocalypse.
Facebook found it extremely difficult to take down posts by Trump and his acolytes that were flat out lies. But it has no difficulty taking down posts that point out uncomfortable truths that Facebook would really rather you not know.
So lets see if they take this one down.
1 comment
Like
Comment
Share

1 comment

  • Paul Camp
    I keep thinking I should just dump Facebook like my friend Amy did. At the end of the day, it is Zuckerberg's evil empire. But they do know what they are up to. They are well aware how very difficult it is to cut ties with long time friends. You will n… 
    See more
    May be an image of 1 person

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tis for Today in 1925

Today is the birthday of the author and illustrator Edward Gorey, born in Chicago, 1925. His stepmother was the woman playing the guitar during the Marseillaise scene in Casablanca. The New York Times credits bookstore owner Andreas Brown and his store, the Gotham Book Mart, with launching Gorey's career: "it became the central clearing house for Mr. Gorey, presenting exhibitions of his work in the store's gallery and eventually turning him into an international celebrity." Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following.[7] He made a notable impact on the world of theater with his designs for the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Scenic Design. In 1980, Gorey became particularly well known for his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! ...

Bend and Stretch. Reach for the Stars. There Goes Jupiter, There Goes Mars...

On this day in 1976, during an interview on BBC Radio 2, British astronomer Patrick Moore announced that a very rare planetary event was about to take place—that Jupiter and Pluto would soon align in relation to Earth, and their combined gravitational pull would momentarily override Earth's own gravity and make people weigh less. He called it the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect, and said that if people jumped into the air at exactly 9:47 a.m., they would experience a floating sensation. Moore signaled, "Jump now!" over the airwaves, and within minutes the BBC switchboard was flooded with calls from people who claimed it had worked. In 1957, the BBC TV show "Panorama" ran a segment about the Swiss spaghetti harvest enjoying a "bumper year" thanks to mild weather and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil. Many credulous Britons were taken in. In 1998, Mark Boslough fabricated a press release claiming that the Alabama legislature had legally...

The Simpsooooooons.

On this day in 1987, the longest running prime time sitcom in TV history debuted. The Simpsons began as a video short on The Tracy Ullman Show. Two years later it was spun off on its own and has now aired more than 650 episodes. It has received numerous awards. The Simpson family has their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Matt Groening has said that his goal in creating The Simpsons was to offer audiences an alternative to the "mainstream trash" they were watching. And while the show often tackles heavy-hitting topics like religion, climate change, poverty, gun control, and nuclear power, its silly jokes and occasionally coarse humor have put some people off. In the early '90s, President George H.W. Bush encouraged Americans to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. First Lady Barbara Bush called The Simpsons "the dumbest thing she had ever seen." But to be like Simpsons may not be so bad after all. The characters embrace and reflect...