It’s now 2017 and I wanted to do an update about my general disgust of Facebook and reminisce about a few past articles on the ill fate of the global social graph. Part 1 and part 2.
Now with the post Trump election, people in the US, have finally realized that social media is a bit of a issue when it comes to news aggregation and content ownership. I think it’s a matter of time before social media companies are regulated as networks. It’s the only way this can go sanely, as they they have been irresponsible with people’s content and media from their beginnings. Facebook credits itself wherever it deems it convenient. They make ad revenue off of other people’s freebooted media, but then deny that they do when lets say someone murders someone on Facebook live.
My greatest fears were realized when citizens started believing in the algos and the silos of stories over apparent journalism. I saw this coming, and now we have a reality TV star as the most powerful human on the planet. I guess we deserve it for being that stupid as a whole.
We are on the verge of all the Russian collusion investigations. Hopefully the public will have the ability to remember the campaigns and election a year afterwards. People seem to forget about all those Macedonian High School kids that were paid $500 bucks for inflammatory articles that spread across social media. Sure the Russians psyops people bought ads under fake organizations, but the users of social media fell into their playbook and FB made banks out of it. Networks like The Facebook did nothing to stop these things as they were happening. Then they claimed ignorance but also never revealed what they made in Ad impressions.
Then there are those wonderful bots on Twitter as well. Maybe our A.I. future will just be decided politically by A.I. bots from opposing sides and parties while we sit back and chill on drugs our virtual docs have prescribed.
Another vector on this whole thing is the appearance from the shadows of companies like Cambridge Analytica in the UK who are matrixing multiple data sources to create individual profiles on something like 200 million Americans. They are proud of this. You might wish you didn’t innocently take that Facebook quiz a few years ago. You can’t untake that quiz.
The digital director of the Trump campaign confesses that they didn’t use psychographics from Cambridge Analytica but that’s not what the CEO said. So again, what do you believe? All I know now is that the unseen Svengali Robert Mercer is a significant owner, while Bannon was or is on the board. SO it’s all f*ckd and suspect.
I guess what is even more f*ckd is that the US is totally behind the curve as far as personal and privacy laws go for digital everything. The user has truly become the PRODUCT of the surveillance economy. At least in a place like Germany, you are opted out by default, while in the USA as always, FB makes it confusing not get your behavioral data housed and sold to a third party. Google of course is equally suspect, but their opt out features are slightly easier to manage.
But what about the data that you didn’t know they were tracking? Can you see it or delete it from their servers? I guess not. Now that Facebook is now worth half a Trillion dollars maybe they could make that functionality available.
I am very inspired by organizations like the Share Foundation who are dedicated to reverse engineering things like Facebook via their patents and literally spying on the spies.