By OM MALIK
One vote doesn’t seem like much. On its own, it hardly matters at all. But if you think of yourself as part of something bigger — America, let’s say — then that one vote can make a difference. Many votes together can change the course of history. If you don’t make good use of your vote, you enable those who would abuse our ideals to come into power, maintain control, and destroy what we value.
Facebook is no different. You might be one person with just one account, but you are not powerless. Being a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithmic empire is a choice. If you believe that Facebook is causing long-term damage to our society, and you don’t agree with their values or their approach to doing business, you can choose to leave.
I left Facebook under two years ago, but I remained trapped in Zuck’s hell on earth. Instagram and Whatsapp had a major control on me for some stupid reasons. No more. I disagree with the company, and its leaders so much that I won’t spend any of my attention or energy on its platforms. My mother will have to actually call me on the phone. My friends will have to email me. And you will have to come to my homestead on the Internet to see my photos and visuals.
I have made my choice, and I encourage you to make yours. If you disagree with Facebook and its policies, leave. You might be one account, but if you are one among millions, you will make a difference. Let go of the need for traffic or attention that has kept you coming back to the hell on earth that is Facebook. While you are at it, get off Instagram, and use something other than WhatsApp. Otherwise, you are just endorsing Zuck’s way of doing business — and it is a dirty business.
I made the mistake of joining Faceache about ten years ago and almost immediately regretted it. I cancelled, but it took months of emails and complaints for them to stop bothering me, and I wonder if they are still tracking what I do. I consider that Zuckerberg is a genuinely evil person, responsible for aiding and abetting bigots or every kind: read this and weep – https://revealnews.org/article/inside-hate-groups-on-facebook-police-officers-trade-racist-memes-conspiracy-theories-and-islamophobia/.
As Malik says, if enough people quit, it might persuade the money men to dump him and put someone more responsible in his place. Bu I doubt it.
I’ve been using the Privacy Badger add-on in Firefox for years. Almost every time it breaks a page, it’s because of something linked to or originating with Facebook.
“Extremists Are Using Facebook to Organize for Civil War Amid Coronavirus” (Tech Transparency Project report 4/22/20) https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/extremists-are-using-facebook-to-organize-for-civil-war-amid-coronavirus
Facebook used extensively to spread neo-Nazi music : An Al Jazeera investigation identified some 120 pages belonging to bands with openly white supremacist and racist views. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/exclusive-facebook-extensively-spread-neo-nazi-music-200710075507831.html
Video (with musical soundtracks) https://twitter.com/AJIunit/status/1281536134544228358
“Advertisers Are Boycotting Facebook. Will It Last?” https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/advertisers-are-boycotting-facebook-will-it-last/ AdExchanger asked media agency executives: Why and how this boycott might be different?
“Facebook boycott gains momentum” https://thehill.com/policy/technology/504225-facebook-boycott-gains-momentum The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense launched the Stop Hate for Profit campaign last week, calling on companies to pull their advertising dollars from Facebook for the month of July.
“Ben & Jerry’s the latest to join the #StopHateforProfit Facebook ad boycott” https://abcnews.go.com/Business/ben-jerrys-latest-join-stophateforprofit-facebook-ad-boycott/story?id=71425786
“Verizon is the biggest advertiser to join the Facebook ad boycott so far – Over the company’s handling of hate speech and its moderation failures” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/25/21303717/verison-facebook-adl-ad-boycott-instagram-north-face-rei-ben-and-jerrys
A number of digital ad agencies have also begun advising clients on how to participate and one, i360, has publicly expressed support, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Influential advertising firm urges clients to boycott Facebook
Also: Omnicom-owned ad agency Goodby Silverstein joins Facebook boycott https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/goodby-joins-facebook-stophateforprofit-boycott.html
Goodby Silverstein appears to be the first major ad agency to join the campaign.
The agency’s clients include the likes of BMW, HP, PayPal, Pepsi, Doritos, and Adobe, although these companies have not joined the boycott themselves.
Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion as Firms Boycott Facebook Ads https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-27/mark-zuckerberg-loses-7-billion-as-companies-drop-facebook-ads
Facebook advertising boycott list: Companies halting ads include Unilever, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Ben & Jerry’s (June 27) https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/06/27/facebook-ad-boycott-hate-speech-biggest-brands-verizon-coca-cola/3270335001/ Nearly all of the social media company’s revenue comes from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Shares of Facebook dropped more than 8% on Friday.
The hard truth about the Facebook ad boycott: Nothing matters but Zuckerberg https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/26/tech/facebook-boycott/index.html
“Disney Pulls Facebook Ads for Disney Plus Amid Boycott Over Hate-Speech Concerns (Report)” https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/disney-plus-pulls-facebook-ads-hulu-1234710445/
“In the first six months of 2020, Disney spent $210 million on Facebook ads for Disney Plus in the U.S. alone, per ad-analytics firm Pathmatics as cited by the Wall Street Journal [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-slashed-ad-spending-on-facebook-amid-growing-boycott-11595101729 ]. In addition to pulling Disney Plus ads from Facebook, the media conglomerate has dropped Instagram advertising for Hulu (which Disney now controls), according to the WSJ report. The report also said other Disney divisions are “reexamining their advertising on Facebook,” and noted that ads for ABC and Disney cable networks including Freeform “have all but vanished from the site.”
“How Facebook wrote its rules to accommodate Trump” (Election Law blog) https://electionlawblog.org/?p=112640 “Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.
The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.
And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.”
Source: Washington Post June 28, 2020. “Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/28/facebook-zuckerberg-trump-hate/
A Facebook executive in 2016 warned the company that taking down all instances of political misinformation would unfairly target conservative users of the social network, The Washington Post reported on Thursday. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/483890-facebook-exec-in-2016-warned-taking-down-misinformation-would
“How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/
“Outright Lies”: Voting Misinformation Flourishes on Facebook : While the social media giant says it opposes voter suppression, the data shows a stark picture: Nearly half of all top-performing posts that mentioned voting by mail were false or misleading.” https://www.propublica.org/article/outright-lies-voting-misinformation-flourishes-on-facebook
“Elizabeth Warren wants answers on Facebook’s fact-checking loophole : Controversy over Facebook’s handling of climate misinformation is drawing scrutiny on Capitol Hill. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/16/21327049/facebook-factchecking-climate-science-elizabeth-warren-opinion
“Conspiracies Are Thriving on Anti-Lockdown Protest Facebook Pages – Misinformation and conspiracies about the deadly virus have found a home on groups and pages planning and promoting anti-lockdown protests on the social network.” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884yea/conspiracies-are-thriving-on-anti-lockdown-protest-facebook-pages
“Facebook’s Pandemic Feuds Are Getting Ugly” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/facebook-reopen-north-carolina-masks/613978/
“Zuck off”: Doctors, nurses, scientists rail against Zuckerberg : Backlash against Facebook’s policies continues. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/zuck-off-doctors-nurses-scientists-rail-against-zuckerberg/
“…the protest from hospital staff is just one front of the opposition that Zuckerberg and Facebook are currently facing. More than 1,000 companies have stopped buying ads on the social media platform as part of a Stop Hate for Profit campaign. The campaign accuses Facebook of a “long history of allowing racist, violent, and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform.”
Separately, 260 scientists funded through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) or the CZ Biohub wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg last month urging him to improve Facebook’s policies on hate speech and misinformation. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLn4nyIMYIdAZ-XwEdKNfFR73yi_YStCPWOK4YxHSbo/edit
“The spread of deliberate misinformation and divisive language is directly antithetical” to the mission of CZI, they wrote, which is stated as using technology to “‘help solve some of our toughest challenges—from preventing and eradicating disease, to improving learning experiences for kids, to reforming the criminal justice system’ and ‘to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.’”
Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook” : “At worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war,” he added. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/former-facebook-manager-we-took-a-page-from-big-tobaccos-playbook/
Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company “took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset” and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society.
Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content.
House Committee on Energy and Commerce / Testimony of Tim Kendal (9/24/20) https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/09.24.20%20CPC%20Witness%20Testimony_Kendall.pdf