As if everything we’ve seen and heard about Fakebook wasn’t enough, now there’s this:
Sorry in advance if this is offends GOP folks. I just don’t think something like this represents a positive development for democracy, regardless of the party pulling Zuck’s strings. At least not in the context of what Fakebook truly is…an unethical global (or near-global) monopoly powered by surveillance capitalism and run by an amoral Android.
I think you may have hit on the problem in an oblique manner. A huge number of people in my family have never had a computer, which they were responsible for. Before smart phones, they emailed and did some word processing. Once they all started getting smart phones, they didn’t use them for much but emails and maybe a little word processing. When smart phones came along they used the phone, maps, and maybe text messaging. When FB came to mobile it spread like a virus though my family. The Zynga games addicted them all, so a lot of them are addicted to games that are not on FB but they found out about on Facebook. None of them understand why I only maintain a fake profile so I can stay in touch with them. They discount it as, “Sam has aways been rather odd.”
Maybe we should have a separate Facebook Horror story thread, but here is mine.
Way before MeToo, I quietly and thankfully away from the press took down a man, who had been systematically abusing his position of power for years. He got off pretty easy, with no jail time. He did threaten to kill me, so I moved to Hawaii. The good thing about Hawaii, is that the authorities know when someone comes into the state. Still, I was pretty careful to make sure that no one but family knew my exact location.
I used a mail drop in Honolulu, when I actually was living in Pearl City. My sister put out enough information that if you looked around Pearl City he could have narrowed my location down to the neighborhood I lived in. I lived in a predominately Filipino area, so tracking me down with a photo might have taken him a day or so. I had to move into Honolulu, so that if he did come after me I would be lost in the crowds.
I asked my mother not to tell my sister anything about me and never share photos with her. I knew that Mom was the source of the leak, since the first thing I did when my sister joined Facebook was to block her, when she sent me a message reading, “Who are you and why are you using my baby sister’s photo?” I was using a fake profile then because of the man, and the photo I used was me at 18 months old. Mom was great and my location in Honolulu wasn’t revealed.
Eventually I relaxed and realized that the man wouldn’t likely be coming after me after so many years, and had a Facebook page in my own name.
After my mother died, the same sister used my mother’s Facebook account to attack me. I didn’t see the posts, but my aunt did and warned me, so I made sure I never had to read them. They were bad enough that my relatives were sending me direct messages saying that they knew that what my sister was saying was lies.
Boy it was hard to block my Mom, even though she is gone. My sister has in the past used her husband’s Facebook to get at me, but he seems to have a stop to that, so he is still in my friends. The family group page is another matter, in past few weeks she has taken to using it as a way to get messages through to me.
I only go on Facebook occasionally, and am good at ignoring her when she tags me in things. I wish i could get rid of Facebook completely, but there are too many people who only communicate that way any more.
Facebook is my portal to my less tech savvy relatives. I did kill the account I had used for years after downloading what I could and taking screen shots of everything my mother ever said to me over Facebook. Before killing it completely, I moved all my friends and family over to a fake account.
Though it has the name I go by socially, all the info about me is fake. It is mainly a link to my blog, where if anyone cares about me more than a random click they can go to see my photos and catch up with where I am and what I am doing. I keep it completely public, so that I am not tempted to post things I shouldn’t.
My fake profile makes me so unattractive to advertisers, I get very little advertising on my page.
Your story gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “the right to be forgotten”. It just highlights the many doors and windows into people’s lives that social media companies have forced open, and the lengths that many have to go to ensure some semblance of safety and privacy.
I know there are some valid arguments against this, but Robert Reich makes a good case for breaking up Facebook & Twitter in this article. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/02/facebook-twitter-donald-trump-lies?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I have found that blocking sources of negative shares is a good thing too. You can not follow the people who use their own words to be negative (not many of those for me.) For the ones who just mindlessly share negative stuff, whether they are agreeing or disagreeing with the headline, I block the source they are sharing from. That blocks it across all my friends. I only have I didn’t have any Facebook apps on my mobile devices, until I started traveling. Now I have to have WhatsApp for the airbnb owners. They all use it.
Well that’s something I hadn’t considered… Good idea!
The original platform that Facebook put together is now being exploited way beyond anyone’s belief and now if you use Facebook there’s a very high risk of being exploited either through your personal information or business whichever can hurt you the most at this point if you use Facebook use at your own risk. Facebook it is now Fakebook. I would guesstimate 80 to 90% of the information you get on Fakebook is questionable and could not be substantiated. Facebook aka Fakebook is evil. The service has no redeeming value whatsoever and has no purpose but evil. Facebook aka Fakebook has to be stopped. It has to go!
OK, how about just not using it?
I agree with you totally about what is bad about Facebook, but not about it needing to be gone. It does need to be regulated and people need to learn t how to be careful with it.
Way back when I started getting irritated with Facebook. I sent a message to all my friends and pseudo-friends telling them I was killing my account, but before that they would be getting an invitation from someone they didn’t seem to know with my nickname. I showed them the odd image that would be my profile photo. I killed my old account (after making screen shots of everything my mother ever wrote to me. She was so funny.)
Now I am a 90 year old woman, born on the first day of the year, who is:
Parole Officer at Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Studied at NodoCultura
Went to Colégio Hipocrates
Lives in Nowrangapur, Orissa, India
The adds that Facebook serves me now are very minimal, none are targeted. I have made myself worthless to advertisers. The fact I travel the world probably makes it look as if I am on a VPN which is too subtle for them to detect. The ads in my timeline are local ads, which don’t bother me. It is nice to know when roast chicken is on sale at Rico Pollo.
My main facebook page is kept completely public, so I only post things there that I would feel fine talking to a stranger in an airport about. I use it mainly as a link to my blog, where my stories of my adventures and my photos are kept. Trolls are just too lazy to go to my blog.
Living outside the US, you really have to have Facebook. Businesses don’t have webpages for the most part. If you want find out about events, see restaurant menus, and even make reservations, you have to have Facebook. Outside the US, my friends consider Facebook to be very public. Everything personal goes through facebook messages or WhatsApp.
Everyone uses private groups for points of interest to them. One of my groups has only 28 people in it , and it is very enjoyable, because we talk about our hobby. I administer that one, but all the groups I belong to are very well monitored.
When I get to a new country I look for private expat groups and ask to join. They are great. The other day I was tipped off to a two day water outage in the city I am living in right now. It gave me time to fill buckets for toilet flushing and make sure I had boiled enough water for drinking.
I belong to several groups that deal with issues. They are great because there are very lively discussions about those subjects. The rules of engagement are very clear and people who troll or go all outraged are kicked out. One of my nephews has a private group, that is just to post things about his very young sons.
Messing with FaceBooks algorithm is fun also. Poland was the first country in which I had to actively use FaceBook. When I got to Colombia I decided to do an experiment. I never said where I was on FaceBook. I put *** in place of the city name. The three months I was there I was still being served Polish ads. On the last week I made one post saying that I was soon to be leaving Medellin, and overnight my ads became Spanish ones.
One thing I made sure of, is that I don’t put any social media app on my phone. I only access them through the browser on my computer. I have to have WhatsApp on my phone since all my landlords communicate that way. I use Viber to communicate with family and friends.
As someone (with initials LL) Facebook is evil.
That went over my head. Could you tell me what having those initials does?
Facebook algorithm for feed curation may have meant your friends and family never saw your positive posts…only the “negative “ ones that then got the engagement. May be telling you more about Facebook than your friends.
I should refer to our Chief TWIT as Leo not LL, but Facebook is still evil.
There’s that
…
Yep, that went right over my head. Thanks for telling me.
Mine too. LOL
Filling for space
This is the 21st Century version of Marie Antoinette’s, “Let them eat cake!” How many people in this thread have already said, “…but everybody uses it so I can’t not,” often beyond their control, like for Air BnB the way @Captain_Sam is trapped into WhatsApp? By definition, there is no meaningful competition unless there are comparable alternatives. Creating an alternative that is actually private would almost certainly prove less convenient and less profitable, which means it will fail in the market unless government controls against that, at least until the harm to an individual user becomes so great that it outweighs their inconvenience from a more private solution. But the problem doesn’t stop there, because most users are too ignorant and self-absorbed to realize that something they like that’s monetarily free to them could be doing more harm than good, and so the narrative around calling for alternatives cuts those alternatives off at the knees by denying the chance for the network effect because the ignorant majority remains complacent thanks to that argument. It’s an immune-disorder of capitalism, and its symptoms are enough to kill the host of democracy.
As others have mentioned it’s very difficult to disengage yourself from Facebook if you have relatives or friends who use it exclusively and it is your only medium of communication.
But what you can do is lock it down. If you use it as a messaging platform remove the app from your phone. Leave your profile inactive.
I am not completely there yet but my account is mostly inactive. Sometimes I log in once per week or less for a few minutes.