The Problems With Facebook

The Problems With FacebookNote: While this is Facebook-specific, it could also be applied to all subsidiaries of Meta Platforms, Inc. These include Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Mapillary, and Workplace. It's recommended that you don't even create an account with them, and if you have an account with any of them to delete those accounts. I will also go over how you can safely use a Facebook account without giving any of your real information to Zuckerberg, thus preventing him from becoming a NYC slumlord.The Problems With FacebookIf you're coming here from a certain social circle within NYC, you know I used to post rather prolifically on Facebook. Before I get into why you should stop as well, I'm going into a brief timeline from when I posted "drunk" as my first status update there to the day I decided to delete it.

2007: I didn't think much of it at the time. I don't think anyone did. Social media was already taking off thanks to MySpace, which was in steep decline at the time for some reason. I did notice the "real name" policy but didn't think much of it.

2011-2014: The Great Zuccening. Multiple people, myself included, were forced to stop using our preferred sobriquets. This hit multiple communities hard, including drag queens, the transgendered who stopped going by their dead names, and Native Americans (with names like "Donald Walking Eagle" being flagged as "false").

2016: Cambridge Analytica started up its activities and managed to get multiple fascist memes on people's timelines, mine included. It was later discovered that Zuckerberg practically sold them the data through various games played on FB.

NOTE: Steve Bannon - yes, THAT Steve Bannon - was on its board of directors.

2017: The bonkers Qanon conspiracy theories leap from 4chan/8kun to Facebook to time with Dolt 45's fraudulent ascendance to the White House.

2018-2019: Zuckerberg was put in the unenviable position of having to explain technology to the elderly folk in Congress when he was called to testify about Cambridge Analytica.

2020: Covid-19 a.k.a. the Trump Mumps ran rampant around the world while the doofus in the White House at the time kept telling everyone to drink bleach. Facebook refused to remove articles from right-wing sources about hydroxychloroquine while removing articles related to Cambridge Analytica. They also kept allowing misinformation about the 2020 Presidential election to proliferate on their platform. Oh, and some people were planning events in DC the first week of January 2021.

2021: The terror attack on the US Capitol happened on 1/6/21. Multiple events were found to have been organized via Facebook. Zuckerberg has since been forced to remove Mango Mussolini from the platform for a minimum of 2 years (they let him back on their surveillance platform in January 2023 and had previously released a statement saying they weren't going to fact-check him...and you know what THAT means). In addition, WhatsApp's "privacy" policy had been updated to get it to aggregate just as much data as the rest of Meta's properties. In late June, I finally had enough of Zuckerberg's bullshit and deleted my profile.

If the timeline above isn't enough, consider the following:

The biggest tell is the street address of Meta HQ: 1 Hacker Way

They will use the email address you used to register with Facebook to track you and build a profile, which is a stalker's dream come true

Meta (Facebook's parent company) suffers at least one data breach a month (meaning your data will likely end up in the hands of some stalker, thanks to the profile they built up)

That last point is the perfect segue to mention how the FBI can read WhatsApp messages in real time (which proves that they lied when they claimed WhatsApp is using the Signal Protocol...guys, just fucking use Signal)

They have this annoying tracking pixel which hackers have exploited to steal data from various institutions, including health care facilities

It's been well documented that Zuckerberg thinks of everyone who uses his phishing services are "dumb fucks"

Zuckerberg does not want his own half-robot spawn using his phishing products (probably to avoid thinking of them as "dumb fucks," too)

Zuckerberg himself uses superior alternatives to WhatsApp (this one was discovered in the wake of - well, lookie here! - a data breach), as it collects your metadata (any truly end-to-end encrypted messenger won't know who you are)

The algorithm was designed to be addictive and keep you on the platform as long as possible (this is what they call an "infinity pool")

Even if you select the deeply buried "recent articles" you're still going to see a discombobulated, ad-riddled news feed

I've personally witnessed people too far down the Zuckerhole defend Facebook in an extraordinarily rabid fashion (not unlike the stories of Jim Jones's followers opening fire on the Congressional delegation on "Flavor Aid Day," chronically abused people defending their abuser after being threatened to do so, or prisoners suffering from Stockholm Syndrome)

While I'm on the topic of people down the Zuckerhole, Facebook tends to dull critical faculties

In many third-world countries, WhatsApp is the default method of communication because of the way cell phone service providers price gouge for SMS rates (kinda awkward, given the above point about how the FBI can read messages on there)

While I'm on the topic of third world countries, in most of them "Facebook" has become synonymous with the internet. Given their already obtrusive misinformation, this is a genuine problem when trying to educate specific demographics

The algorithm isn't the only thing addictive about Facebook. People are so addicted to getting "likes" that they get depressed every time they go back to their "boring" real life and thus driving them back to their digital abuser

Their claims that they're going to make E2EE the default on messages in Facebook are laughable at best, especially in the wake of the clusterfuck in Nebraska

The "real name" policy threatens to dox people (something Elon should be complaining about, given his wrong opinion about the Twitter bot that tracked his fucking jet)

While I'm on the topic of the "real name" policy, it goes against the advice of law enforcement agencies who say to not use your legal name online

They still require a phone number, which gives them an extensive digital phone book. Which would be very bad during the monthly data breach

Social media in general drives up teen suicide rates as a result of unchecked cyberbullying

People within my own social circles have gotten doxed because of their Instagram pages, causing them to delete those pages

Facebook has helped facilitate genocide in Myanmar against the Rohingya peoples, allowing their buggy algorithm to stoke fear and cause torture, rape, displacement, and ethnic cleansing.

Facebook was forced to apologize after it translated multiple posts by Palestinians to imply that they're terrorists

Zuckerberg ~~was able to bribe~~donated $500,000,000 to Harvard University, who subsequently disbanded the team studying Frances Haugen's Facebook Papers.

Now that I've addressed a small number of the problems with Facebook, I'm going to address some of the arguments I hear all the time about people who don't want to delete that abusive platform."I never use it, so what's the harm?" You're still part of the problem by having an account you don't use."Big Tech already has my data, so what's the point?" You can take steps to take your data back, but that's another article."Everyone I know is on Facebook!" I seem to recall something everyone's parents used to say about your friends and jumping off bridges. You're giving in to peer pressure at this point, and that argument reminds me of all the anti-drug media I used to see in the 1980s where a good kid winds up down a rabbit hole of drug abuse, behavioral changes, and destitution (except in Facebook's case it's textual abuse and Qanon instead of drug abuse and destitution, respectively)."I need it for my business!" No, you don't. You're just believing the first three stated arguments.The only ones making any real money off of social media in general, and Facebook in particular, are people who are already well off. These so-called "influencers" are there solely as eye candy to get more poor dupes, suckers, and (as Zuckerberg says) "dumb fucks" on the surveillance platform to get even more money. Meta is a publicly-traded company, after all, and they have to keep growing and growing in order to appease the evil stock market gods. The last time I checked, "growth for the sake of growth regardless of how harmful that growth can be" was the definition of cancer. Yeah, that's right. I'm comparing Zuckerberg's surveillance media to cancer. Because it is.That also ties into what's known as the Network Effect. That is defined as the value/utility a user derives from a good or a service, depending on the total number of users are using said good or service. Once the Network Effect gets too large, it evolves into the Bandwagon Effect. Again, I'm recalling that one hypothetical conundrum parents used to tell their children about all of their friends jumping off of bridges. I also recall the phrase "Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's right, and just because something's right doesn't mean it's popular." Meta's properties are definitely indicative of the first half of that phrase.There's more. There's much more. I will update this whenever I feel like it, and that will probably be semi-frequently.If you need help deleting your Facebook page, the Techlore team made a very comprehensive video on how to do so.One amusing thing I keep hearing: "Oh, I'm not on Facebook, I'm on Instagram" and then "Instagram isn't Facebook." This is completely and utterly false, as implied by the header of this very page. Go ahead and read it again. Instagram IS Facebook, Zuckerberg is trying to get the two apps to interoperate as you're reading this, and if you look at the settings menus of both apps you'll see that they're nearly identical to one another. Anyone who says "Instagram isn't Facebook" is only deluding themselves.I used to have instructions to safely create a Facebook account up here but Facebook is apparently not allowing new accounts to be created. You're not missing much.Back