Is This The Ugly Truth About Facebook?
An interesting op-ed type piece on Facebook & Zuckerberg, seeking to assign blame to someone, anyone, everyone. An interesting perspective, built on the foundation of the British government recently having released some very interesting, insightful, & slightly sleazy internal Facebook emails. I doubt many of you remember the original company I'm about to mention, but before I migrated to Facebook many years ago, like everyone else, I was on MySpace for quite some time. But how many of you recall the revolutionary social media site that preceded both of those companies & essentially got this whole thing going? Friendster! Yep, does anyone other than myself recall Friendster? Were any of you ON Friendster? I was. I actually made a lot of friends, both digital & real life, through that medium. And it was original back then. Unfortunately, Friendster's demise was self-inflicted & quite unnecessary. Tons of their users created accounts for their pets & the informal name "Petster" was created. I knew a lot of people who invested their time, energy, & enthusiasm for that. But for some reason, the big shots at Friendster didn't like that, published a new policy banning pet accounts & deleted all of them overnight. Just like that, they lost tens of thousands of users, because around that time, MySpace had opened its doors & welcomed former Friendsters. I turned out to be one of them. Ultimately, I didn't want to leave MySpace, but as virtually everyone else in the world was & everyone seemed to be going to Facebook, I went along for the ride. But you know what? I never really liked Facebook that much. I never really felt fully comfortable there. Not only did I not enjoy playing the popular games, such as Oregon Trail & Angry Birds, but I didn’t like being inundated by so many … odd? … friend requests. (I obviously feel much more comfortable on LinkedIn, although I still turn down more requests than I accept.)
Facebook always had this cryptic quality about it, whether it was lack of information, announcements, continual security & privacy issues, the increasingly obviously targeted ads, & what’s really gotten to me over the past few years, the non-stop agendas being pushed on everyone constantly, most of which devolve into flame wars. I’m happy to debate & I’m ashamed to say I’ve been in my share of flame wars, but I really don’t enjoy them, & I don’t like to see what happens to so many people when they get to hide behind the anonymity of their computer & an Internet connection. Long story short, after well over a decade on Facebook, & with the last couple of years resulting in my getting more & more frustrated, I finally terminated my account a few weeks ago … and it’s been WONDERFUL! I no longer wake up fearing what I’ll see when I get on my computer in the mornings. No longer inundated with political & religious overkill in a number of increasingly extremist posts. Those comprised probably 85%+ of what I would see on my Wall every time I accessed Facebook. After awhile, it felt like I was being beaten over the head with extremist right & extremist left propaganda, & almost all of it was extremely negative & divisive. No more people attacking me for expressing a positive comment about a public figure or a criticism about a particular issue. No more flames for daring to defend my favorite hockey player for having a rare off night. I don’t need those types of headaches! I have too many “real world” ones to have to put up with that crap.
But back to the Brits. A lot of people have had issues with Zuckerberg & Facebook for many years for their murky & secretive -- & not always believable -- treatment of & approach to user privacy & security. And then when the biggie came out a number of months ago – apparently selling user data for millions of users to a specific company, at least one that we know about – not to say its alleged tolerance of accounts & posts that have appeared to push overtly radical agendas, as in potential terrorists or perhaps certain Russian professionals back in 2015-16, etc., the company may have finally crossed one, or several, lines where they had no business being. And with the release of these internal emails which seem to indicate Zuckerberg & his cronies’ scorn for their users -- the people who have made them millionaires & more -- does this revelation really come as a huge surprise for most people? Hasn’t this type of attitude been apparent all along?
I’m not going to criticize or judge you for being a big Facebook fan, if you are. We all dig certain things, & as long as they’re legal, it’s cool. But personally I’ve been hoping for more, well … an open source alternative, if you will, platforms, gathering places, etc., to emerge & somehow make things a little more “normal” again, like things once were a decade ago. Does that make me a Luddite? I don't think so. Does that mean technology has to backtrack? No. That means people & companies need to continue evolving, & perhaps that means going more horizontal rather than vertical, & incidentally it wouldn’t hurt if some people who are online would think about decreasing the hate & venom & increasing more positive tendencies. And frankly, I obviously know that it’s been trendy for quite some time for many entities in a variety of fields to often merge, reorg, acquire additional assets, etc., but in Facebook’s case, I might possibly be happy to see a rare replication of what the U.S. government did to AT&T a few decades ago in some capacity. But that’s just me. What do I know, right? And I write this with apologies to my many Facebook colleagues & connections here on LinkedIn. Incidentally, one thing I sometimes ponder is the long-term future & viability of Facebook & its current business model. As far as I can tell, there haven’t been that many websites that have had long shelve lives & I’ve seen my share of social media sites die quiet deaths, even ones considered largish, influential, often popular, but ultimately a fad that people move on from. And if you’re familiar with the statistics, it’s commonly known that Facebook has lost the current younger generation, which is busy going elsewhere to sites not populated by their parents & great uncles. And I don’t think that bodes well for Facebook.
The hyperlink to the article describing the British government’s release of these internal Facebook emails & some of the things I brought up early in this piece can be found below.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-biggest-culprit-in-the-facebook-debacle/
Scott C. Holstad, COO/CTO/CSO
WireMe Designs, LLC
December 6, 2018