Still Evil After All These Years October 6, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Software platforms, Technology and Culture.Tags: Facebook, Zuckerberg
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I’ve been railing against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for a long time, to no avail (and no surprise). But I would like to be on the side of right, which Facebook definitely is not. And I’m not a billionaire, which Mark Zuckerberg definitely is, many times over.
But to quote the movie title, something’s gotta give.
Anyone who has read the expose by the Wall Street Journal, and watched the testimony by Frances Haugen, knows that Facebook continues to be evil. Worse, they used to apologize and say they are making improvements. As of two weeks ago, they are not even bothering with that lie. They are trashing Frances Haugen, and saying they are in the right.
I have never been a member of Facebook, and will never be a member of Facebook. I’ve been told that I have to be, for job, or to obtain information that organizations only post on Facebook. I’m sorry. You are the ones that are morally bankrupt, not me. And if you use Facebook, you are also morally bankrupt. You stand for nothing.
Here is Zuckerberg’s real problem. If you were already by far the richest person in the world, in your 30s, what is the rest of your life for? I obviously am not in that position, but I’ve tried to give it some thought.
I would like to think that I would try to be remembered as a kind and equable person who contributes positively to society. Do you really need another billion dollars? Yet it seems that Zuckerberg is not a particularly deep thinker. He has to know that his espousing of connecting people for peaceful purposes is highly flawed, but he does want that extra billion. He is driven by money, and by what money measures. So Zuckerberg doesn’t know what the rest of his life is about, except for acquiring that next billion dollars. To tell you the truth, I’m not sympathetic. He is not mentally well, and because of the power he wields, he needs to get his act together.
Facebook and Zuckerberg Offend Yet Again February 3, 2020
Posted by Peter Varhol in Software platforms, Technology and Culture.Tags: Facebook
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I admit that I criticize Mark Zuckerberg on a pretty regular basis. My primary defense is that he deserves it. In attempting to (yet again) redefine the scope and mission of Facebook and associated properties (Instagram, et. al.), he has said that he will use his own guiding principles. These guiding principles are:
- Free expression. In other words, Facebook users will be able to say whatever they want, within the scope of applicable law, without interference from Facebook. Get ready for a Facebook that doesn’t even bother to give lip service to truth.
- Privacy. Ah, not private from Facebook, who wants to monetize your most intimate details, but private from outside requests for transparency, including from law enforcement agencies.
So here’s the problem. Zuckerberg is welcome to express his personal principles, and I might even be in agreement with some of them (though I doubt it). The problem is that principles don’t get you very far when you’re trying to define workable solutions in the real life for millions of diverse users and other stakeholders. Real life, with multiple concerns and stakeholders, doesn’t easily lend itself to clean and obvious answers. His pious spouting of so-called principles is really a weak justification for exploiting the billions of Facebook and Instagram users to the max.
Tellingly, as I am writing this, writer Stephen King has bailed from Facebook with the same thoughts, that there is far too much obviously false information on the site, and that he has grave doubts about their desire and ability to offer privacy.
All this brings me to conclude that Zuckerberg has just one guiding principle in life – to make as much money as possible.
Face it, Facebook is a rogue company, led by a sociopath who cares only about himself. Yet so many people let it control so much of their lives.
Are Cell Phones the Cause of Society’s Schisms? January 9, 2020
Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture, Uncategorized.Tags: cell phones, communications, Facebook
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More broadly, we might ask this question of social media in general, since the phone is simply a proxy for a wide range of services. This intriguing article in the MIT Technology Review provides an anecdotal tale of a philosophy professor who, believing that he wasn’t communicating with his students effectively, offered extra credit to those who would give up their use of cell phones for nine days, and write about the experience.
While it doesn’t have the same academic rigor as Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation, it is a telling story of teens finding out that there is more to the world than is available from their phone screens.
And it’s not a new thesis, but stories like these also reinforce that there have been drastic changes in society and culture in a short period of time.
At one level, social media lets us engage many people without actually seeing them. When you look someone in the eye, and gauge their reaction in real time, what we say can be very different. When we don’t, negative messages seem to be magnified.
At another level, social media lets us pick and choose who we communicate with. Generally, that means we are less likely to be exposed to different ideas, and more inclined to believe unreliable or bogus sources. I would like to say that is our choice, except that it’s not clear we easily have any other choice.
What we have created is a massive societal experiment in which within a decade we have dramatically shifted the nature of interpersonal interactions. Whereas the majority of interaction was face to face, today it is largely remote. Where most interaction were one on one, we find that the remote interactions are more one on many. And where many of our interactions were casual encounters with random people, today they are with people we already know and associate with.
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook say it’s all for the good of society, and that’s what they stand for. They are too biased to offer an honest take, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. I will say that it’s instructive that Zuckerberg, while publicly promoting openness and sharing, has chosen to build his own personal estate behind walls. Let him live in a walkup for a few years; he never has, and never will. Live like your users live, Mark, is my final word to him. You have created this world; you are not responding to it.
In the meantime, are cell phones good or bad? I will offer that they are a tool, and it is the apps that we choose to use make them one or the other.
When A Grab for Revenue Looks Like Conspiracy November 14, 2019
Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture.Tags: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy, Facebook, google, Twitter
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As I’ve explained on several occasions, I don’t believe in conspiracies, despite their current popularity. They simply go against rational thought. Ten thousand people cannot possibly keep a secret about Roswell, and Area 51. Kennedy was killed by a single deranged gunman, not a cabal of the Russians and the CIA (aside: I love the cartoon from the early 1990s, where two Kennedy assassination researchers were examining photos of November 22, 1963 – “Look! There behind the grassy knoll. It’s . . . Bill Clinton!”).
My thesis is that the only way that three people can keep a secret is if two are dead, and that logic is impossible to argue against.
So I generally believe in what those in positions of authority say about controversial events. It’s simply too hard to make up a credible alternative.
Yet a surprising number of people believe in aliens, a Kennedy conspiracy, or, well, that vaccines are deadly (or at least deadlier than no vaccines). In some of these conspiracy issues, there are reasonable questions that science doesn’t have definitive answers for, but that is the nature of science. Science is rarely definitive, and allows for alternative theories backed with rigorous science.
But not with vaccines. The only anti-vaccine study that even pretended to be scientific was immediately discredited and was eventually withdrawn from the medical literature. Yet that doesn’t stop people from referring to it ad nauseum. Other cited studies are bogus, unrefereed, or made up, and all refer back to that original, discredited study.
Why was it discredited? It was performed by a group paid by lawyers suing vaccination manufacturers. The sample selection was biased toward those children already diagnosed with autism, whether or not they had vaccines. Fast-forward thirty years, and no unbiased study has found a link between vaccinations and autism or other childhood afflictions.
Let me repeat. No unbiased study has found a link between vaccinations and autism or other childhood afflictions.
Yet Google, Twitter, and Facebook are still accepting money from anti-vaxxers for advertisements that cite this, as well as bogus research on the health detriments of vaccination. Google and Twitter claim that they don’t, although the above link demonstrates conclusively that they do. Facebook, the money machine that it is, proudly accepts such advertising, although it claims to place such advertising lower in its priority list (whatever that means).
Folks, wise up. Google, Twitter, and Facebook aren’t here to let you search for information, share your thoughts, or keep in touch with people you don’t even remember. They are here to help sell you stuff. And if they have to bend the bounds of logic to do so, well, let the buyer beware.
About Facebook and Free Speech October 18, 2019
Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture.Tags: Facebook, free speech
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I read Mark Zuckerberg’s commentary on Facebook and free speech with a measured amount of incredulity. Measured, because it was about what I expected him to say. Incredulity, because with Facebook standing for fake users, made up news, fake ads, political influencing, and the dark underside of the Internet, he has the chutzpah to claim that he is all about free speech, and the rest be damned.
Free speech is a wonderful ideal, and rallying cry. I would love to be able to claim a free speech mulligan for anything said online.
It’s not that easy. Especially today and in the future, when speech is not just limited to face to face. We tend to say things online that we would never say in a live setting. And can do so anonymously, or even with a pseudo identity. And we can make up things, and manufacture news, and it is accepted by many readers.
So if we let everyone say anything they want, in any identity they want, we end up with people with the time, money, and clout who say whatever it takes to get attention. They can slur individuals without evidence, make absurd claims without proof, and bring discord and division to people who should know better.
So this is where free speech gets messy. When so-called free speech includes lies, slurs, insults, unwarranted accusations, and more that can potentially reach millions of people, it is dangerous to individuals and society. We try, imperfectly, to mitigate that danger through laws governing bias and hate, but the likes of Zuckerberg battle against both honesty and integrity, in the name of the almighty dollar. You heard me correctly; Zuckerberg has no personal or professional integrity.
And that means that Facebook has no desire to mitigate such danger. Zuckerberg knows this, but his advertising dollars are more important to him. In a sense, he is propagating his own set of lies in order to achieve his goals of money and power. And he is succeeding, despite the cost to society.
I debated writing this at all, because no one has listened to my screeds of Facebook in the past. And Zuckerberg certainly has a much broader reach than I could ever hope to achieve.
I don’t believe that Zuckerberg is naïve to the subtilities and practical limitations of free speech in the Facebook era. However, he is highly cognizant of the profits he makes by allowing anything, whether or not truthful in any sense of the word, to be given the same credence as real news and facts.
And don’t kid yourself; the MSM still delivers the vast majority of truth that is published. Facebook is not a news creator; they have no reporters or editorial staff. They get their “news” from those whose interest it is to manufacture it, and to pay for it.
The only other thing I will add is that we (well, not me, because I have never used Facebook) enable Zuckerberg to pervert free speech into whatever he wants in order to make money. Remember that the next time you log on.