First up: Mark Zuckerberg's thirsty op-ed, in which he opined that people didn't trust Facebook only because we don't understand them:
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a 1,000-word screed by Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s data collecting practices titled “The Facts About Facebook.” In it, Zuckerberg makes noise about the company being about “people,” and insists—as he has been for the majority of his company’s 15-year history—that we should trust it. Zuckerberg appears to think the primary reason users have little faith in the company’s ability to responsibly or ethically handle their data is because of its targeted advertising practices, about which he writes: “This model can feel opaque, and we’re all distrustful of systems we don’t understand.”I guess the apology tour is over; Zuck is back to his normal, condescending self.
Gizmodo's Catie Keck goes on to list a few of the reasons why people who understand Facebook just fine also distrust Zuck & Co., starting with FB's lack of transparency, continuing on through Cambridge Analytica, and ending with their scraping and then sharing data about their users (and also about people who've never used Facebook themselves) with advertisers, and other low-lights:
In 2018, we learned that Facebook was data-sharing with other companies like Microsoft’s Bing, Spotify, Netflix, and others in exchange for more information about its users. There were also the revelations that Cambridge Analytica data-scraping was worse than we thought; that Facebook was sharing shadow contact information with advertisers; and that turning off Facebook location-sharing doesn’t stop it from tracking you. That’s obviously totally aside from the George Soros conspiracy theory fiasco; its mishandling of Myanmar genocide; and its standing as a hotbed for rampant misinformation.
As with his year-end Facebook post—which I’ll note here also largely ignored the tsunami of public relations problems the company faced last year—Zuckerberg appears to remain bafflingly optimistic about the function of his company. To be clear, this is the same founder of Facebook who once called users of his product “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their sensitive information.Lots of links in the original article, if you missed some of those earlier "hits" when they happened.
So, not an auspicious beginning. Zuck wasn't done yet, though; not by a long shot.
Facebook's next move in their attempted make-over was to take WhatsApp and Instagram, both of which Facebook own, but which have largely operated independently of Facebook proper, and basically merge them with Facebook's Messenger, and also with Facebook's problematic technology, corrupt business model, and scandal-plagued public image:
Facebook, you may have heard, had a year riddled with scandals, data breaches, dwindling user trust, slowing growth, scrutiny from regulators, and plummeting morale among its own staff. Clearly the social behemoth needs a major comeback. But according to a report in the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to link messaging capability between Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram—three of its essentially balkanized services—already has workers confused and angry.
More centralized control over these mostly independent apps was already presaged by last year’s abrupt exits of Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, the founder pairs of Instagram and Whatsapp, respectively. All four were reported to have butted heads with Zuckerberg’s directives, which we now know involves stripping those apps of some of their autonomy.
Reportedly they’ll still operate as standalone products, albeit with a backend and social graph that’s interoperable, a change which, as Mike Isaac put it, “requires thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels.” Welcome to the rat king era of social media.The potential gain for Facebook? Fuck all, apparently, according to studies conducted by an analysis reported conducted by a WhatsApp employee. Winning!
So, with their major comeback stumbling badly out of the blocks, how did Facebook end the week? With another scandal coming to light, of course:
Newly unsealed court documents show that Facebook was aware that underage children routinely used their parents’ payment information to spend large sums of money on in-game purchases, and the company chose not to fix the problem. For years, it allowed for what it called “friendly fraud” because it feared implementing protections would harm revenue, according to the documents.
In 2016, Facebook settled a class-action lawsuit brought by parents of children who were tricked into unwittingly making purchases with real money while playing free video games hosted on the social media platform. [...] Documents related to the case were placed under seal because Facebook successfully argued that releasing them to the public could harm its business. Reveal, a publication run by the Center for Investigative Reporting, argued that these documents were in the public interest; last week, a judge granted Reveal’s request to release the documents.Remember when I wrote that there was no end of this shit buried beneath the surface of Facebook, just waiting to be unearthed? Yeah... I stand by that prediction. Facebook is an iceberg of shit, and two-thirds of the shit is still out of sight below the waterline. The Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives hasn't even started holding hearings on Facebook yet, either; expect a lot more of their shit to surface once that happens.
Oh, and the cherry on top? The fact that people are starting to realize that Facebook just isn't very good anymore at doing what people mostly joined Facebook to do. Take this piece by Paul Tassi at Forbes:
Facebook has been a villain for many reasons, many well-deserved, like its role in disseminating misinformation and propaganda around elections in the US and elsewhere. Or because of its invasions of privacy doling out user data to third parties all around the globe.
These are serious issues, but I think it’s important to keep sight of why Facebook is increasingly hated, abandoned and irrelevant in today’s internet landscape.
It’s just…bad.
It’s a bad social network, and it’s only gotten worse over time. Through all these stories, we’re fundamentally ignoring a basic tenet of why people aren’t using Facebook anymore. It’s just a very, very exhausting and irritating platform to consume and utilize, especially compared to Instagram or Twitter, which have their own problems, sure, but nothing like we see with Facebook in its current form. All these stories about Facebook’s great sins ignore its lesser ones, namely that it’s increasingly useless for what it was originally intended to be.
Seriously... if your New Year's resolution wasn't to delete Facebook, then I really don't know what to tell you. Improve your life, and the lives of the people around you, and jettison this shitberg.
#deleteFacebook