Violet Blue:New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose spotted that the "top 10 stories on Facebook over the past 24 hours" were all from Fox News, "Blue Lives Matter," and similar sources.
Meaning: the slant of all stories in FB's "top 10" (surfaced to the masses) were pro-police and Trump's agenda. Roose documented that FB's daily specials were "about Trump declaring antifa a terrorist group," he wrote. "One is a feel-good story about a trucker cleaning up after vandals, another is about an officer calmly listening to protesters, one is about violence against law enforcement," tweeted Roose. "If Facebook was your sole news source," he correctly noted, "and you saw only the most popular links on the platform, you'd think that what happened this weekend was a violent, unprovoked attack on law enforcement by a left-wing terror group."
While Roose documented that, other news outlets repeated the message of a new NYT piece called "Facebook Employees Stage Virtual Walkout to Protest Trump Posts."
This turned into the false depiction that employees walked out because they disagreed with Zuck over this one policy decision.
They did not.
Let's be clear: the average salary for Facebook employees is between $120K and $155K, average among those I still know who work there is $250K. The so-called protesting employees requested a day off and put an auto-response on their emails. This is no "last straw" situation that actually means anything, as press reports are depicting, like these ghouls deserve a cookie for suddenly inserting a "conscience" chip into their emotion emulators. This is a risk-free gesture. Meaningless. But making Facebook seem like a house divided serves Facebook's PR perfectly, like when a president puts children in cages and his wife makes a benign comment about the importance of child safety, and press goes "oooh look there are two sides in this."
There are not. Every single system within and around Facebook and every person working there, past and present, have blood on their hands today. They know all the reasons why. Even worse that it would be this one thing that made these soul eaters take a cutesy day off from their (ahem) white-collar jobs.
They're still keeping the machine running while Mark Zuckerberg tells them we will be greeted as liberators.
For many years, I've been saying the following:
If you work for Facebook, quit.
It is morally indefensible for you to use your skills to make that company more powerful. By working there, you are making the world an objectively worse place. I'm sure you can find a job working for a company that you don't have to apologize for all the time.
You can do it. I believe in you.
But as the world literally burns, it's time to go farther:
If you work for Facebook, you are a white supremacist.
If you have a "friend" who works at Facebook, cut them out of your life, like you would your racist cousin.
You can do it. I believe in you.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
And if you still have a Facebook account, it's time to delete it.
Seriously.
I just flat out stopped using mine in 2015, and - hoo-boy - did it do wonders for my mental health! Of course, that meant that what info I'd already shared on the site in the preceding five years was still being sold to advertisers and Cambridge Analytica. Hell, the only reason I didn't go back to delete the account was because I likened it to a recovering addict going back to a bar.
But in 2018, I finally went back to kill that fucker off for good. I did go through the "Archive" option, which was supposed to save all of your posts, photos, videos, etc. It did save all the media, but only got, like, a month's worth of posts. I didn't miss 'em. (I deleted my Twitter soon after, which I hadn't used since 2016.)
I can't imagine ever going back now. As much I cringe knowing everyone I know is still on it, I do try to remember the addiction factor involved. It's so part of everyone's
dailyhourlyconstant routine that's it's just flat-out tough for them to break it.Worse, not having a Facebook account does not stem the tide of your personal info flowing into their coffers. Even if you never had one in the first place.
This is turning into the worst timeline ever.
And so one-bit thinking does its awful work again.
Does not having a facebook account stop them gathering information about you? No. Does it reduce the amount they can gather? Yes. (What happens in the limit where no-one has a facebook account? where one person does?) Does each person who stops having a facebook account make things a little better? Yes.
We live in a world of real numbers, or at least a world of rationals: not some idiot world of booleans where everything not completely true is completely false.
Facebook is the largest advertising agency in the world. In history. The dike that should be keeping your info from them has a thousand holes in it, and you only have 10 fingers.
If you think not having a Facebook account and never clicking on an ad keeps you any more 'safe' from tracking, you're woefully undereducated on the subject.
I'm not saying do nothing, do what you can, but if you've logged onto the Internet at least once, it's too late. Facebook knows everything about you already, even if they can't put a face to your name.
What you are saying is both wrong and extremely harmful. One-bit thinking kills people: stop it.
Why one-bit thinking is wrong. Every person who stops having a facebook account reduces their ability to track them, and everyone else, by some amount, and that amount is not zero.
Define a function T(n) which is their ability to track people as a function of the number of people who delete their accounts, from some baseline (say today). Then there's a corresponding ΔT(n) = T(0) - T(n): the change in their ability to track people as a function of n. Three things are obvious: ΔT(0) = 0, there is an N such that ΔT(N) = T(0): they can no longer track non-users if they are bankrupt for instance, and ΔT(n) is essentially strictly monotonic. In particular ΔT(n) doesn't remain constant up to some critical value of n and then fall off a cliff, which is what the one-bit thinker believes. ΔT is certainly not linear – it's probably closer to some exponential thing – but it is monotonic decreasing. That means that ΔT(1) is a small negative number. It may be ever so small, but it is not zero: each person who deletes their facebook account hurts facebook's ability to track everyone, including them, and thus also hurts facebook a little bit.
This should be so obvious it doesn't need saying: obviously facebook's ability to track non-users declines as the size of their network of users declines. The tfb social network, for instance, ruthlessly acquires information on non-users of the network: it records every transaction its members have with every non-member. But it only has one member, so it only knows anything significant about a tiny number of people, and it's world-domination plans are thus thwarted.
It also should be obvious just by looking at facebook's behaviour even if you can't do the maths: if it makes no odds to them whether or not you have an account, why are they so keen for you to have an account?. After all, accounts are free to users but they cost facebook something to provide, so they must be getting some benefit from each person who has an account.
Why one-bit thinking is extremely harmful. Pushing the idea that doing, or not doing something makes no difference when it only makes a small difference is a catastrophically toxic thing to do. Maybe I'm unhappy about the way facebook behave even though I'm addicted to it, and look, here's MattyJ saying that, well, deleting my account makes no real practical difference, and I'm addicted, so, well, I'll just keep my account. It's just one more cigarette, after all. And, really, there's millions of people, what does my vote count for? Will it, really, make any difference if I vote? No, of course not: why should I bother?
And suddenly: Trump.
"Every person who stops having a facebook account reduces their ability to track them, and everyone else, by some amount, and that amount is not zero."
Extremely, extremely wrong.
Having a Facebook account simply hands your info over to them quicker and without any effort for Facebook. Not having or deleting your account just slows that process.
But make no mistake, regardless of your fancy math, the difference does absolutely reach zero over time.
Quit Facebook because they're evil, not because you cling to he very untrue notion that doing so somehow makes you 'safe' from their clutches.
Oh, I'm sorry for my 'fancy maths'. In future I'll be sure to stick with the kind of appealing non-reasoning halfwits like you, Trump, and the other fuckwits 'understand'.
Here's an experiment you can try. Delete your Facebook account, then reply here the moment all your tracking cookies and advertising tokens stop working, and you are no longer targeted or tracked by Facebook ads on all the sites you go to. I'll wait.
This way we'll never have to listen to your naive bullshit again.
I don't understand this take. Might not be completely effective at removing you from their clutches but it is plainly bad for Facebook each time an account is deleted.
How so?
They get to delete all your stuff, not pay for storing it, and they already have all your data. _That_ certainly doesn't go away. Except with all the ways they track non-Facebook account holders, now they have a (former) identity to add into it. Having a Facebook account just gives them a head start on identifying you.
Just a hint of what you're missing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoom-app-personal-data-selling-facebook-lawsuit-alleges/
Relevant quote:
"This information is sent to Facebook by Zoom regardless of whether the user has an account with Facebook."
This has been going on forever, with almost every website you've ever logged into.
DuckDuckGo "how facebook tracks non members". This info and these practices have been out there for a really long time. At this point, having or not having a Facebook account is irrelevant.
Alright, but you're making this too complicated. All other things being equal would Facebook prefer you have an account or not? I highly doubt it is not, so fuck them and cancel it.
I think what I'm trying to say in my too long and roundabout way is that you should be deleting your account due to philosophical, political and ideological reasons, not because this somehow reduces the value of the data they have on you. Because it doesn't.
I think I misunderstood your original comment as having a doom-and-gloom "why bother, they've got your info no matter what" stance. Sorry about that.
The problem you forget here is that Facebook doesn't sell data at all--it sells audiences to ads. Without you as the audience on Facebook, there are very few ways Facebook makes money with your information, even if it has gobs of it.
By the by, WIRED just updated their "Delete Social Media" how-to article from years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-delete-your-facebook-instagram-twitter-snapchat/
The new version is more thorough on how to kill your FB and includes a new section on how to kill off your TikTok.
Cut Facebook out of your life, like you would a racist cousin...
Where is the line? Is it OK to be on Facebook if it profits you financially?
One would have to check the advertising rates on Breitbart to see if there is a similar ROI for another advertising platform, to figure out where that line is.
Ah, so now we're only arguing over price.
Every time a Facebook account is deleted, a kitten kills God.
NY Times article on advertisers holding back on FB spending. Concludes with:
And ArsTechnica characterised this an an "internal revolt".
Right...
Doesn't DNA also have a FB page?
But I do feel bad for using social media, even when I think I do so carefully and it's a relatively fair deal. Mr Gotcha here isn't acting in good faith, but it's possible to act in bad faith on the other side as well. I can, for example, drink liters of Nestle-produced water every day and claim that I'm only doing so because that's just the way things are, man, and if things were different, I wouldn't be indirectly supporting natural resource exploitation by big business.
What I'm saying is I wish I knew where that line was, and I'm really not sure if me being aware of the issue or being vocal about it makes any difference whatsoever.
1. Your blog doesn't have a 'facebook' tag? Seems like an oversight. :-)
2. Thought you might get some joy from “Facebook Is Hurting People At Scale”: Mark Zuckerberg’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve Built. Or, if not actual joy, then maybe a glimmer of hope.
(via Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic blog)
Oh, those poor Facebook employees and their too-little-too-late feels. Pinboard: