The days of Facebook dominating the social media segment are over. Mark Zuckerberg is undoubtedly a genius when it comes to technology, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that even tech wizzes can make fatal missteps. Over the past several years, Facebook has suffered from a series of relentless scandals, and its reputation amongst the general public has taken a major blow as a result. The company has been blamed for everything from selling user data to helping facilitate the spread of fake news and doing nothing to prevent blatant propaganda from being shared on its platform. A recent bombshell report from the New York Times reveals that that the image the company promoted for years — as an idealistic enterprise more dedicated to “bringing the world closer together” than increasing its own bottom line — was a carefully cultivated smoke screen. In fact, the story reports that in the formative years of Facebook’s growth, the company’s executives were ruthless and unsparing in their ambition to collect more data from users, extract concessions from developers and stamp out possible competitors.
Earlier this year, #DeleteFacebook was trending on Twitter after reports surfaced that the tech firm Cambridge Analytical took the information of over 50 million people on the website without their knowledge, allegedly using the data to help get Donald Trump elected. According to the report, the information was harvested by a third party through a personality quiz that granted access to users’ — and their friends’ — Facebook data. That data was then sold to Cambridge Analytica who used the information to build psychological profiles of voters and allegedly target them with content intended to influence the U.S. election. Since then, the revelations of just how unethical of a company Facebook truly is have kept coming. It’s safe to say that 2018 wasn’t Zuckerberg’s year.
This article from Paste truly says it all. Facebook doesn’t care about you. They don’t care about humanity. They don’t care about their supposed mission to connect people and make the world a better place. They just care about money, and a new New York Times report details in an exhaustive manner how far these Silicon Valley slumlords are willing to go in order to protect their fundamentally broken product. But we’re not completely helpless in the face of Facebook’s off-the-rails capitalism. Supply and demand—not capitalism—is the elemental economic principle which all transactions rely upon. Your personal information is Facebook’s currency. If you remove your personal information, Facebook has less currency. It’s really that simple. It will take quite some time and it will be a slow death, but a slow, painful death is what Facebook deserves.
