Back in 2008 one of my nieces emailed me a link from her FB account which claimed that candidate Obama was a secret Muslim. I told her back then to withdraw from that evil BSing place, as far as I know she never took my advice. FFB. They are changing their name later this week to what? To Fakebook I hope, more fitting and accurate.

I think Facebook morphed into something way bigger that Zuckerberg or anyone could have imagined.

I remember him stating he wanted to get back to the original purpose, which was for friends connecting with friends. Of course this is after all the law suits being thrown at him.

I do have an account, the original purpose was for my DD’s. Once, one DD was out of the country and her phone wasn’t working. I was grateful she could communicate with us on FB.

I have a handful of people on my list.

I joined once many years ago and thought it was awful. Did I want to be friends with a woman who babysat our cat long ago? Honestly, how did FB make that connection??? It was creepy, and I unjoined right away.

I understand it must be a lifeline for some, keeping in touch with family, but we do ok with phone calls, texting.

Does everyone here understand that Facebook owns Instagram? Everything you do on both is tracked by the same company.

Zuckerberg stoled much of the computer code and the facebook idea from Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss brothers so facebooks actions aren't surprising considering he started as a thief to begin with.

For those who live in a cave and not knowing this I'll leave you a link.

Account of thief mark befriending others to steel their stuff

FB is not special. FB is a media company that maximizes profits by manipulating its audience. You can't fix that in a country with the 1st Ammendment. The audience must wise up.

I use FB for my neighborhood closed group, a neighborhood closed Freecycle/borrow/trade group, the city's page, the local closed buy/sell group., a moderated, closed genealogy group, and a closed family group. I find these valuable enough to put up with the privacy invasions that I know FB commits.

Before I retired, I had to be on my work unit's FB page as well, since that was the primary mode of communication between co-workers as well as from management.

I have very few "friends" - some family members from a different branch than the above mentioned group, a few former co-workers, a few former neighbors.

I never ever post anything on my personal page and haven't filled out my profile. I have the highest privacy settings set - no one outside the group that I post on can see my posts, supposedly.

I never use FB to log into any other site, and if that is the only option for the site, I skip it.

I ignore all ads and nearly all non-group posts that appear on my feed - the exception being only one or two non-political topics.

Like Raee, I think that minimizing FB use is a valid alternative to boycotting it altogether. I certainly never chose to use FB if I have another valid alternative.

Would someone please explain just exactly what 'evil' Facebook is promoting?

I get a lot of enjoyment out of the FB groups I belong to. And in all the years I've used FB, not once, not ever, has it, or anyone on it, ever forced me to participate in anything I didn't want to participate in.

Rusty

I use FB for my neighborhood closed group, a neighborhood closed Freecycle/borrow/trade group, the city's page, the local closed buy/sell group., a moderated, closed genealogy group, and a closed family group. I find these valuable enough to put up with the privacy invasions that I know FB commits.

This type of use of FB always baffles me. What is wrong with a good old fashioned ListServ?

Rusty, FB wants to maximize engagement, which it does by throwing the most extreme views at people, which shift public opinion and sentiment. In India, FB's biggest market, they are accused of promoting the ruling party and spreading anti-Muslim sentiment, leading to violence. The work of determining how best to maximize engagement is done by Artificial Intelligence.

https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-over-ignoring-hate-speech/a-59610062

Facebook in India has been selective in curbing hate speech and misinformation, particularly anti-Muslim content, according to leaked documents obtained and revealed by The Associated Press news agency on Sunday.

The report, which was also published by various media outlets worldwide, is based on disclosures made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to US Congress by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's legal counsel.

PS Remember the genocide in Rwanda? That was fueled by media as well, just not digital media, good old radio served to stoke hatred, fear, and murder.

From Concordia University in Montreal:

During the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, radio broadcasts played an important role in inciting ordinary citizens to take part in the massacres of their Tutsi, and moderate Hutu, neighbours. Two major radio stations transmitted hate propaganda to the illiterate masses--Radio Rwanda, and Radio Télévision des Milles Collines (RTLM). Radio Rwanda was the official government owned radio station. Under the second Arusha Accord it was barred from continuing to disseminate hate propaganda. This led the Hutu Power circle around President Habyarimana and his wife to found RTLM as a private radio station. RTLM became immensely popular as a young, hip alternative to the official voice of the government. It played popular music, and encouraged the public to phone in and participate in radio broadcasts. Amongst its listeners, RTLM attracted the unemployed youth and Interhamwe militia.

https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-radio-transcripts.html

I too have FB and use it as well mostly for the various groups....not that I have ever been on an awful lot, but, I've been weaning myself off of it...its' too big a waste of time, IMO. Friends wise, a lot are from here and a few others that are in real life-total-77...nothing in comparison to some, I s'pose.

Eh. I like FB. I use it just for close friends and family to stay in touch and share photos. I would miss it greatly.

I can't justify supporting this now widely known evil. There are other ways to communicate with family and friends besides FB and Instagram. It doesn't matter that you 'only use it' in some limited manner -- you're still boosting its numbers, same as subscription numbers are used to sell ads in newspapers and magazines. Don't kid yourself; you're supporting it every time you click onto its web of lies and political disruption. The 'boy wonder' has been happy to ignore critics and even his company's own 'watchdogs'.

Yes, there are other evils, but citing them -- "Everybody's doing it." -- doesn't diminish this one.

It's not evil. My goodness. I have no wish to stop using it.

I won't be quitting. I love staying in touch with family and friends this way. I don't use any other social media except FB and the KT. I use Ad block for FB so i don't see any ads and have most news sources blocked. I play 3 games on FB, Klondike, Bejeweled Blitz and Words With Friends. Most of the time if I am on FB I am playing a game.

Chisue, conveniance over morality is not an unusual stance. Claiming to not see how FB purposely harms democracies world wide, and stokes violence is willful ignorance and gets no pass from me. When I say others do it, I mean that as a call to vigilence, not an excuse for moral flabbiness.

PS As one if the Founding Fathers said (Jefferson, I believe:)

The people who wish to be ignorant, and free, want what never was, and never shall be.

This thread would be quite comforting to Zuk, not so much to a Founding Father.

This thread reminds me that we get the democracy we deserve, the one we are willing to work for, or not.

I'm not a Facebook user but the thing about the listserv approach is that you get bombarded with emails that are difficult to refer back to and can get bulky.

Zalco, it was indeed Jefferson, and the exact quote is:

If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.

So I never used Facebook. I did discover a couple years ago that someone was using my email address and name on Facebook. Through a lot of red tape and aggravation, I finally got access to it. No posts,and all the suggested friends were Arab and Indian people. My identity has been stolen multiple times so I guess it should not have been so disconcerting but it always is when you discover another aspect of it. Anyway, I did request that it be deleted, which they stated would take 30 days. I never went to check if it actually was deleted, as I would have to log back in and I was afraid that if I did that it would sign me back up.

There is good and bad aspects of everything when dealing with humans. Facebook and others like it can keep family and friends connected, or tear them apart. Its all in how the individual uses it.

As far as those stories and false facts,well people believe what they want. Easily duped idiots are everywhere, on and offline. Facebook is just one of many platforms. Shut it down, the same people would just move to another platform.. You would have to shut down the whole internet, and it still would not stop false information from spreading.

Its not that serious.

I like Elizabeth Warren's approach of breaking up Facebook.

E warren on breaking up Facebook

Thank you so much, Bookwoman for that correction. I appreciate it tremendously.

I don't use my real name on FB, and my photo is nowhere. I post photos, jokes, and will sometimes ask advice. I have less than 100 'friends' some irl and some virtual, as here.

This is tough. I dont want to support a monopoly that disseminates lies, misinformation, hatred and worships the almighty dollar above all else. But…

I love the occasional posts from my son, I located three college friends I had lost completely, I enjoy our local community page and have gotten so much information there ( great Admins).I enjoy the Buy Nothing group and local sales. There are two support groups that have been enormously helpful.

I wish people would be more careful about posting pictures of their children.

By the way, Facebook owns Instagram, so that is no safe harbor.

I think that anyone that thinks FB is evil probably has never even used it before....silly....my FB activity is about as evil is coming here and reading these posts. That is to say it's not evil in the least bit!

Further to what Zalco posted above:

How Facebook Failed the World

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-failed-the-world/620479

...the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources. Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.

If I want to send a pic of my lunch to family and friends I'd just attach it to an email. Don't need no FB to be an idiot.

I had to unfriend a lot of people on FB over the last few years because of a certain person in the headlines who held an important job in the US. People I had known for decades. Otherwise nice and seemingly intelligent people lost their minds with their over-consumption of 'news' from what I'll call the dark side. They were not consuming legit news on FB. Rather, they had signed up to follow FB pages set up to glorify this certain person with an important job. Many of these pages are funded and or produced by enemies of our gov't, but my friends would not believe this. They felt they had found their 'kind' and this was a meeting of the minds. These otherwise good people went down a deep rabbit hole of lies and deception; believing it all and turned themselves into hateful miserable people.

I do give credit for this to FB not policing their platform and holding pages such as these to a standard of transparency or even decency. They also followed news outlets that lean a certain way that tend to tell a different tale. I knew these people prior to this media and social platform. I knew them during and I don't know them after. It was a dark time period, to be honest, seeing this transformation in them. I stuck it out for a long time hoping they would return to their former selves. Then it progressed to putting these people on "unfollow", (makes it so I can't see what they are posting unless I purposefully go to their profile, but we are still FB friends) which then unfortunately had to further progress to unfriend as they unraveled further. I feel that the FB platform had a hand in the demise of their rationale. I will say that Jan. 6th, 7th and 8th were critical days in seeing where the mindspace of these former friends was. By Jan 9th, I had pressed the unfriend button so many times, I felt that I had lost a sizable chunk of my personal life history.

However, the FB that shows up on my timeline is not filled with that sort of stuff. It's nice to see what people I (still) know are up to and they, likewise like to see an update from me. I follow hobby, humor, health, cat videos, herbs and medicine, current events, local goings on, history, weather, areas of interest pages. I find it a positive influence in my life, as I set my FB up this way to be a good investment of my time when I choose to spend time there. Some pages disappear, or I discard some after a while, others I find along the way and add them to my newsfeed. The pages I see are of my choosing, and so are the pages of my former FB friends. Big difference in what we all see on FB. So there's that.

Here is the EW video, which I agree is worth watching

I haven't read all the posts yet.

I have FB page. wall posts consist of people yearly saying happy birthday! to me. I just hate it. Sooooooooooooooooo much.

A program on NPR the other day was talking about the algorithms they use and issues around them. One said that they use the law from 1996. Says they can't be held liable for what people post. His argument was "ok, fine but the second they use an algorithm they reposting, are just like a news paper, and can be held liable. Makes sense to me. For sure simpler than law makers trying to say what is and isn't ok in algorithms and what not.

Not a fan or member. I have a few friends who use it and some use it for their businesses.

I have hobbies and interests groups which have migrated to FB (“Meta”). unless they are open, I dont follow them.

I have alwalys been repulsed by M. Zuckerberg and since _______ by Cheryl as well.

Many of my forebears fought and bled for our nation (Revolutionary War and onward, and wars before that). My father was torpedoed by the best & served in the Atlantic and Pacific.

My FIL flew in thin, low oxygen, icy air over the Himalayas; and flew dangerous missions over Burma Road, North Africa and Italy. Uncles were killed and maimed. I have a photo of a great uncle, a Lt Col for the Union in tattered used clothing; and a copy of a hand-written letter to his commander asking if he might please be granted permission to take a very short leave to visit his dying mother six states away. I am heart broken when I read of these sorts of sacrifices. (And here, there truly were ”good people on both sides.” A reknown U-boat captain who looked like actor Sam Neil, spared my father and his shipmates as well as the crew of a nearby torpedoed Australian ship.) My father, an officer, returned with such shattered nerves that the simple sudden noise from a dropped pie pan would send cortisol racing through gis blood. Fortunately, he usually only cussed a loud blue streak. He understood he had shot nerves and ”war neurosis” but had a young family to support and understood the blight of labels. But, as with Holocost survivors, such profound trauma from such death-grip experiences are not contained with the most proximal victim. His family and domestic animals became secondary victims of the hypervigilant ”shell shock.” One can only imagine what my great uncle felt and experienced in the Civil War, or my other ancesters at Concord and Lexington.

I am not a flag waving sort, but I vote and believe in community and public service (as my parents did). I love my country, democracy; and US and world history.

People who participate in moves to usurp the will of legitimate voters or who support hate-filled, ignorant treason, get scratched off my friends list — even faster if they are fanatics, idiologues, naive conspiracists, truthers combined with an abundance of mental health issues and facistic cult following. Too irrational, crazy, scary and unpersuadeable. I’d rather teach a spider calculus.

I can live without Facebook (“Meta”). I can’t be the only person who has met a Mark or Cheryl before.

Consumers and peaceful protesters have (potentially) a lot of power.

I use Instagram to keep in touch with family. While part of Facebook, I don't have the visual distractions of that site.

I joined FB 13 years ago and also belong to Instagram. The algorithms for me are all animal-related. Right now I'm watching View from My Window where people send photos from all over the world of the view they see every day. The pyramids, the ocean, quaint Swiss villages. Interesting stuff. Lots and lots of bird photos from all over the world which I share with friends. And of course many cat sites. FB IS for old people though and Zuckerburg must know that. Neither of my grandkids ever go there. They are on Instagram or Snapchat. Two of my long-lost college roommates are 'friends" all these years later. I unfriend any person who turns out to be a member of the lunatic fringe of anti-vaxxers or supporters of someone I wish never existed.

Lily, your grandchildren will most probably partake of the Oculus universe. Zuk's investment in virtual reality has been game changing. He sells the headsets at a loss, the developer community is thriving and creating a most compelling future, which FB will own.

I use FB much like lily316 above, plus for getting real-time neighborhood news and connecting locally to 'buy nothing' (therefore waste nothing, which I like).

I've heard some of the serious criticisms of FB, but haven't listened to the ideas for breaking it up, so have no opinion on them.

A snippet of Kara Swisher's opinion piece intoday's NYT:

Let’s just cut to the chase: Who’s going to replace Mark Zuckerberg as C.E.O. of Facebook?

Before you go, “Whoa there, Kara,” let me just say that the horse is already out of the barn, whether the famed entrepreneur knows it yet or not.

He is not going to go in quite the same way that we’re used to seeing leaders exit the stage — up and then out. Because of his controlling stock, Zuckerberg will continue to wield all the real power at Facebook for as long as he wants. But the era of his being the adored dear leader and cultural touchstone at the company is effectively over.

Facebook staff members used to be considered the most docile in Silicon Valley; no one ever leaked. But the endless stream of internal employee communications contained in the many thousands of documents provided by the whistle-blower Frances Haugen makes clear that a number of rank-and-file Facebookers have had it. One wrote, “It’s not normal for a large number of people in the ‘make the site safe’ team to leave saying, ‘hey, we’re actively making the world worse FYI.’”

Haugen has managed the rollout of the revelations as if it were the invasion of Normandy. The effort has been highly coordinated, from the big reveal in a Wall Street Journal series to her plain-spoken “60 Minutes” interview and the recent creation of a consortium of news organizations, which includes The New York Times, to examine the documents.

She has also projected moral clarity. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee and British Parliament, she said enough to be devastating but not so much that she tarnished her sincere and pristine image. Telling a Times columnist that she’s not relying on any organization’s financial support because she made some well-timed cryptocurrency investments is the chef’s kiss of the whole affair.

But Haugen is not the point here. She has shown us that the management of Facebook has been tone-deaf and uncaring about the harm that its own research showed its products were doing, despite ensuing pleas from concerned employees.

While past accusations that Facebook and Zuckerberg care about profits and growth over safety sometimes fell flat — Wall Street certainly hasn’t had a problem with the company — it’s a message that’s less easily ignored now. It comes at a moment when there’s uncertainty about the future of democracy. Whether you are on the noisy right or left or just quietly miserable in the center, there is a sense that something is awry in this nation and this world and someone or something must be to blame.

It wouldn’t be fair to put the woes of humanity entirely on Facebook’s shoulders. But it is unquestionable that it is handing powerful tools to the obviously malevolent and not doing enough to mitigate the inevitable damage. That’s the parental equivalent of giving a knife to a toddler and hoping for the best. “History will not judge us kindly,” wrote one employee about Facebook’s handling of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

And as the documents show, the company is not just negligent; it is actively making things worse. For example, it removed safeguards it put in place before the U.S. elections that limited misinformation on the platform. So Facebook is not the hey-we’re-just-a-platform player it likes to pretend it is.

(Emphasis mine.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/zuckerberg-facebook-ceo.html

And for thise who missed today's earnings call with Zuk:

Facebook expects to spend more than $10 billion on AR, VR and related hardware as well as the development of metaverse apps and services this year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during the company's Q3 earnings call Monday that the company will ramp up investment in the area, and warned that it won't see a return on that investment any time soon.

"I recognize the magnitude of this bet," Zuckerberg said. "This is not an investment that will be profitable for us any time in the near future."

Zuckerberg argued that Facebook had to build out a lot of fundamental technology first before it can rake in any meaningful returns with AR and VR. "Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people," he said, adding that he hoped to reach that goal by the end of the decade. That's when it could also become "a real business story," Zuckerberg said.

"The metaverse will be a successor to the mobile internet," Zuckerberg said. "It will unlock a massively larger creative economy [...] than what exists today."

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-metaverse-10-billion-dollars

Know anyone else capable of making this kind of investment, with a massive headstart in hardware? At some point citizens will have to realize what is at stake and take appropriate action, through a mixture of government and personal interventions. Media companies want our attention, and they do not care at what cost they obtain that attention. FB is building the playground of the future. I hope we can find ways of staying safe over there.

Facebook is an obsolete fad and will be replaced in time with something better., Fact.

Aol dialup, My space, and so many others came and went and so will facebook when someone else reinvents a bigger and better deal. Facebook manufactures nothing, contributes nothing and exists on nothing except popularity which can change overnight.

Speaking of new websites I see where the former guy now has a new website called "Truth". (English translation for Pravda). How fitting.

I have to say, I’m a big user of facebook groups, especially the local, private groups. I don’t know how I’ve set my settings, but I don’t see, or at least I am blind to, ads. I’m blind to the posts etc that are (not) news, unless it’s from our big-city newspaper.

I enjoy a number of FB groups that cover topics of interest, mainly things having to do with nature in my part of the world. I also follow the Trader Joe's fan page.

FWIW, Elisabeth Warren and Joe Biden frequently pop up in my newsfeed.

Oh yes, ^^ this reminded me about FB ads. I get FB ads for whatever has been spoken, texted, emailed, and in the last year, thought about. It could be anything under the sun. I also get ads for Houzz on FB. I don't get ads or suggested site for anything to do with a certain someone or his supporters though. FB must know I draw the line there.

Ovens? Funny smelling ash? Oh, nevermind, nothing to do with me.

You either support something like this or you don't. I don't.

Hope you're right about FB, Kevin, but I think we need some new regulations to prevent a repeat in a slightly different guise. Russia and China are not going to just quit trying -- not when they've had such successes with a Disneyworld populace.

FB revenue in 2020 was 86B USD.

From a purely scientific standpoint, when you take the human cost out of it, Facebook is fascinating.

I've watched the human impacts play out in my family. I've got a few people who are missing a few tools in their shed, and sadly they fell into the dark side of Facebook. We're talking about people who I still love, by the way. I'd give one of them a kidney if they needed one. However they're lacking in critical thinking skills and have fallen down hard into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and the "Sandy Hook wasn't real" stuff.

There is a continuum of badness - from benign obliviousness of obvious faults, to neglect (not doing anything about those faults), to playing to those faults to make money, and finally to proactively perpetrating violence against innocent people. I don't know exactly where Facebook falls on that continuum. However I do know that they are not good.

If you personally like Facebook and only use it to communicate with your family about baby showers and recipies, that's great for you on a solely personal level. But that doesn't negate the incredible volume of evidence that shows just how darned awful that platform is and the malevolent ways it is impacting humanity.

If the world shut Facebook down tomorrow, would that change anything? I don't know. It might be a case of the cat is out of the bag now. But they've gotten way too big, and are playing with forces that clearly they are not equipped to manage, so we darned well better try something before this whole world goes up in flames.

Well sea sea the present guy sure messed everything up real bad, nearly as bad as it can get. Sure which we had the other guy who held the CEO job. You must really like dysfunction and crisis. The present guy can't even handle the crisis of a bowel movement without help from a dozen hand picked VP's without raising prices.

Kevin, ???

vgkg said If I want to send a pic of my lunch to family and friends I'd just attach it to an email. Don't need no FB to be an idiot.

I agree. Thankfully my feed isn't filled with nonsense like that. I post food pics in food groups (Cooking Forum) and in my food groups that I belong.

Drove me crazy when a "friend' posted one night......I'm tired, I think I'll go to bed. Not as a comment, as a post.

Duh, just go, you don't need to announce it to the world. My world won't end if you do. smh.

... lacking in critical thinking skills ...

Sums up many problems with our culture. Education is one answer, but you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink. How can we make being smart -- as in capable of logical thought -- a desirable trait again?

Anyone interested inhearing a great discussion about regulating big tech/media companies may want to listen to Ian Bremmer of EurAsia Group/GZeroWorld in conversation with the CEO of the Atlantic (fun fact, Laurene Powell Jobs owns the Atlantic.)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Can Big Government still rein in Big Tech or has it already lost control? Never before have just a few companies exerted such an outsized influence on humanity. Today's digital space, where we live so much of our daily lives, has increasingly become an area that national governments are unable to control. It may be time to start thinking of these corporations as nation-states in their own rights. Ian Bremmer speaks with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic and former WIRED editor-in-chief, about how to police the digital world.

Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-world-podcast/podcast-brave-new-big-tech-world-nicholas-thompsons-perspective