So many smart and timely articles have been published recently about the terrible and dangerous ways Facebook is acting that I thought I would share three that I happened across today without even seeking them out.
The first article is from BuzzFeed News about how Facebook partners with the anti-democratic government in Cambodia in silencing dissent.
Excerpt:
When Facebook first came to Cambodia, many hoped it would help to usher in a new period of free speech, amplifying voices that countered the narrative of the government-friendly traditional press. Instead, the opposite has happened. Prime Minister Hun Sen is now using the platform to promote his message while jailing his critics, and his staff is doing its best to exploit Facebook’s own rules to shut down criticism — all through a direct relationship with the company’s staff.
Facebook has also dramatically reduced the reach of independent media in Cambodia after it decided last year to silo off their content as part of a controversial experiment. The company said this month it would make similar changes to News Feeds for users worldwide.
The second article is from Gizmodo and is about how Facebook spies on you and can track you by the dust on your cell phone camera lens. Really? Yes, really.
Excerpt:
It might assume two people knew each other if the images they uploaded looked like they were titled in the same series of photos—IMG_4605739.jpg and IMG_4605742, for example—or if lens scratches or dust were detectable in the same spots on the photos, revealing the photos were taken by the same camera.
The third article is from Vanity Fair and it touches on the potential downward spiral that is ahead for Facebook. I certainly hope Facebook faces a downward spiral and I do believe it is in trouble with users in Europe and in the United States but it may be overly optimistic in predicting a dramatic drop off in users like Myspace experienced. Facebook has long sought to increase its user base in Asia and that is where their growth, if they see any, will come from. I hope people in Asia are wise enough to avoid the Facebook trap.
Excerpt:
When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
I have none of those applications on my phone and when I did I never allowed them to access my contacts because it was none of their damn business. I haven't had the Facebook app on my phone in years.
I'm still torn on having a Facebook account at all at this point, I don't ever use it but still it exists and that bothers me. I have deleted it before and then joined again six months later with a new account. This time if I delete my account it will be permanent with no going back.
Updated to add 1/15/2018:
Today in Davos at the World Economic Forum, George Soros made a speech on the dangers of Facebook on the human mind and the threats to society. Here's an excerpt from an article about his speech in the Guardian:
“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”
In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”.
“The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’. There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”
Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.
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