In the past 15 years, Facebook has grown from college campus staple, to social media juggernaut, and now a poster child of corporate greed acting to the detriment of its consumer base. How did we get here with a corporation that is still in its adolescence?
February 4th marks the 15th anniversary of Facebook. After 15 years of innocently being encouraged to expose every minute detail of our personal lives online, there is no doubt we now firmly live in a post-private world with virtually no social filters of appropriateness or truth.
Like all teenagers, Facebook is arrogant and self-important in their defense of these often-questionable business practices. While profiting from all this sharing, they deny any responsibility for the truthfulness or appropriateness of what is posted and propagated–making atrocities like the Russian election interference possible. Never mind the premium paid access Facebook provides to firms it selects permitting active exploitation of your personal information without obvious consent.
FACEBOOK'S BUSINESS MODEL EXPLOITS YOU AND MARK ZUCKERBERG COULD CARE LESS
Some things are worth fighting for and respect for information privacy is one. Facebook cares that you share everything with them; but it does little to protect you back. They are a post-private parasite making money on what you share, actively trying to defeat global privacy rights and laws in complete self-interest, and maybe not really caring because they are still too young to realize the self-harm and abuse that unfettered erosion of privacy rights may cause.
We, as a democratic society, must act like the parent in the room and hold this teenager accountable. Otherwise, we can assume this trend will accelerate as Facebook and other platforms defend themselves legally to establish that they do not owe responsibility for the complete privacy of their members’ information. They will resist restrictions on their own behavior at all costs, as teenagers are wont to do, continuing to pretend they care about social good and the “progress of technology.” Instead, they remain foolishly committed to corporate self-interest at the expense of users.
Some things are worth fighting for and respect for information privacy is one. Facebook cares that you share everything with them; but it does little to protect you back. They are a post-private parasite making money on what you share, actively trying to defeat global privacy rights and laws in complete self-interest, and maybe not really caring because they are still too young to realize the self-harm and abuse that unfettered erosion of privacy rights may cause.
We must use insights gained from the first 15 years of mass social media engagement to become far more interested in information activism as a society.
A solid first step is teaching children and young adults information literacy to help them avoid lurkers and criminals on these platforms seeking undue influence over them for insidious reasons, only possible because these platforms reject responsibility for what is published on their sites.
A second step would be voicing what universal data and privacy protections we value as a free society and demand they be implemented lest we abandon uncooperative platforms like Facebook altogether.
Finally, it might be time to accept that unless we are prepared to pay for things online – such as social media platforms willing to protect user privacy – corporate greed will always prevail. We cannot expect these mega-profitable platforms to act in our interests if the only way they make money is by exploiting us. Because they will: no more proof of that is required than last year’s Guardian headline where Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, lamented that his company “only made $4.3 billion of profit in what he described as a ‘difficult year’ and he vows to make his network “good for our social well-being.”
If he truly means what he says, how much profit is he willing to reinvest to achieve that lofty goal? I ask, for it would require abandoning large swaths of his current very profitable business model for that to actually happen.
Regardless of his answer, there are critical questions for social media users to pose: what exactly do we want the next 15 years to offer us? If users leave Facebook behind in droves, protesting how the platform is behaving, it would have an instant effect. We can dictate what Facebook does; but only with collective determination rather than individual defeatism.
Facebook is worth nothing without users – think MySpace. We should use that power to ensure the future offers us all something different. While the rise was meteoric, the fall could be just as quick with a shift in consumer opinion on data privacy.
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Facebook has cornered the market for now; but there remains a tremendous opportunity for potential competitors to capitalize on the scraped knees of Cambridge Analytica and Russian election tampering, naming just a few…
It is time for Facebook to grow up. Adult users on its platform must demand that it behave and comply with its stated objective of making the world a better, more connected place in which to live and raise our kids.
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