The Facebook problem
As someone who works in the tech industry, and values truth and honesty and my rights to free speech, free expression and privacy, it concerns me that Facebook is still being used as a trusted source of news, or a trusted source for anything for that matter. Facebook’s business model is to serve you content that will keep you engaged and keep you viewing content paid for by their advertisers. That’s it. Facebook uses what it knows about you, from your posts, comments, clicked links, pictures, friends list and private messages (that’s right), to target your emotions, especially anger, fear and jealousy, in order to keep you on their website and their apps. There is no incentive to serve you the truth or a range of opinions on a particular subject, because their goal is simply to keep you coming back. After all, the truth tends to be more boring than conspiracy theories and sensationalism.
We all like to think we aren’t susceptible to these deceptions and the echo chambers they result in. To be sure this isn't unwittingly happening to us, there are a few things we can do to keep our conversations diverse and open minded. We can speak to our friends and family in person about current events and new information we learn about. We can use multiple news sources from different platforms and from the entire political spectrum (I like to use New York Times, Leader-Post [local Regina, SK news], CJME [more local Regina news], and CBC News, as well as Reddit as an aggregator of a myriad of sources). Best of all, we can completely avoid Facebook for any kind of news or information (I have done well without it AT ALL for over a year now).
I know some of you already don't use Facebook and I'm sure most of my smart friends family and colleagues are already on the same page as me but please do your own friends, family and colleagues a favour and remind them of these truths about Facebook. From fueling the anti-vaccination movement that is seeing measles outbreaks across the world, to stoking anti-Rohingya rhetoric in Myanmar resulting in 10s of thousands of innocent lives lost, to the rise of divisive, anti-immigration and nationalist movements in the West, fueled by trolls from Russia and elsewhere in the world, resulting in increasing hate crimes, and stalling progress on climate change, corruption and income inequality, Facebook has been one of the biggest detriments to an educated and informed democracy that our ancestors have fought and sacrificed their lives for. We all owe them and our future generations a duty to ensure we don’t screw this up by being dismissive and complacent. Democracy as we know it is still young and it and all the conveniences we get from it can disappear in an instant if we don’t constantly fight for it.
There is a lot more to this than what I can fit in a short blog post but if you would like to learn more about what is going on at Facebook, I welcome you to listen to this great podcast by Sam Harris interviewing Roger McNamee, a leading figure in the tech world for over three decades and someone who was once an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
If you would like to go a step further and delete your Facebook, click here to learn how to. Don’t forget that Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook as well, and will all soon be integrated into one single platform, so you might want to consider deleted these accounts as well. Signal is a good, secure and open-source alternative to WhatsApp.
Ridding your life of Facebook, Inc. will be tough at first, but I guarantee that your life, like mine was, will be better off without Facebook and that traditional methods of sharing things with your friends and family (such as using email, letters or in-person) are far more healthy and will be much more meaningful.