Is Facebook good for the world?

There are few things as unattractive as desperation. PR people mostly know this, and mostly avoid looking desperate, so when a company starts flat-out asking their customers whether the service they provide is actually a good thing, it's a pretty good indicator that they know how much trouble they're in. And Facebook is in real trouble, so we probably shouldn't be surprised that they're seeking some validation... and have settled on their addicted, Stockholm-syndrome suffering users as the place where they're mostly like to find it.

From CBC News:

When some Facebook users log into their accounts, a poll appears under the heading "We'd like to do better" with a statement that says "Please agree or disagree with the following statement: Facebook is good for the world."

The reply options range from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree."

While Facebook has asked users for feedback before, the timing of the poll raises questions as the company faces mounting pressure from regulators, advertisers and investors over its recent data privacy scandal.

Facebook spokesperson Lisa Stratton told CBC News that the company has been doing these surveys since 2015 and this specific question is not new.

Of course, we now know that Facebook have been fucking up more-or-less constantly since 2004, so the idea that they've been fishing for compliments since 2015 shouldn't be too much of a surprise. 2015 is also when Facebook were becoming aware of the scale of the problem posed by Cambridge Analytica, so Stratton's assertion that this is all just routine ring rather hollow.

Asking users if Facebook is "good for the world," especially in a context where actual experts are voicing concerns about the damage that FB is doing to the social fabric, is unlikely to provide FB with any new or useful information, but I don't think it's intended to; like everything else that Facebook does, this appears to be a purely self-serving PR exercise.

Because it is purely a PR exercise; there's no way that we'll hear about the result if FB's users mostly disagree with the "good for the world" wording. We'll only hear if respondents mostly agree, and Facebook have been utterly impervious to the disapproval of their users since the day Mark Zuckerberg started the company. Facebook, Inc. don't care, and have never cared, what their users actually think of them; all they care is that the addicts/hostages/users keep using. Their users' happiness is as irrelevant to Facebook as those users' privacy, security, or safety... or their lives.

Facebook is trying to assess "whether its utopian aim of uniting the world's population has been overshadowed by the minutiae of its controversies," said Daniel Bader, managing editor of website Android Central.

Facebook's problems are baked into every part of the company's DNA, from the sketchy philosophy of its founder,  to the dodgy business practices that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the first place. It remains to be seen whether repeating a lip-service PR exercise that they've been running routinely since 2015 will make any difference at all, but it shouldn't.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#DeleteFacebook