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Call me obtuse (or something worse), if you wish, but I simply do not get the mantra about Facebook wielding immense power — a mantra being parroted by every talking head and stenographer-journalist in the universe right now: that millions are getting their information from Facebook, and Facebook is spreading disinformation, duping those millions into trashing their country.
I find it telling that those who make this argument as a way of calling for Facebook to be regulated or broken up or taken out and shot, often find a way to let us know that the people being duped are us, not them. They don’t use Facebook, we do. Their minds aren’t crippled by reading a false news item, ours are. They don’t get all their information from Facebook, but the little people do.
Facebook is a platform on the Internet, not a publisher. When I get information via Facebook, which I sometimes do, it is by following a link to a source of information that someone has posted there. I am offered all kinds of crap — and not only by right-wing Trumpeters, but left-wing idiots, religious zealots, racists, misogynists, scientists, philosophers etc. — and none of it comes from Facebook. And nobody makes me read it or click on it. I have been using Facebook for many years and have not changed my politics, religion or life one iota because of it.
Fox News, on the other hand, is a publisher. The information it conveys is filtered, blended and pureed until it all tastes the same — a right wing, delusional, chicken Trumpling. It has been well documented that long-term use of Fox as a sole source of information not only affects behavior, but actually depresses IQ. With extremely rare exceptions, a Fox viewer will never be exposed to a liberal point of view. Happens all the time on Facebook.
Yes, I know about the dreaded Facebook algorithms. They respond to the products and information you look at by giving you more of the same, in order to keep you engaged longer. If you favor right wing propaganda, your news feed will soon look like Fox News. But it will be by your choice, just as it is your choice if all your Facebook friends are snarling, AR-15-waving, liberal-stomping militia creeps.
There are still people running around with their hair on fire about how Russia, using Facebook prominently among other platforms, interfered with our 2016 election. They posted millions of false news stories! They staged hundreds of false events! They spent over a million dollars a month in 2016! They…they…
Here. Breathe into this bag. Every one of these stories documents what the Russians attempted to do. You have to be pretty good at scouring the Internet to find the couple of studies that have been conducted seeking to measure what they actually accomplished. Which was very close to zero. Turns out people’s brains don’t turn to mush just because they see mush. Again, that’s a personal choice.
Why should that surprise us? Jeb Bush spent $150 million dollars in the 2016 primaries and couldn’t get into double digits in the polls. But there are people seriously contending that the Russians put Trump in office with one-tenth of that amount of money? Please.
I think Facebook is perpetrating a huge and successful scam. People don’t go on Facebook because they want information, they go on Facebook to tell other people what they think. Or to look at kittens. Companies advertise on Facebook not because it works, but for the same reason companies use for most of what they do — everybody else is doing it. One of the many seamy things bubbling to the surface in the current brouhaha about Facebook is that it may have been falsifying its advertising results data all along.
I wrote here in 2017 [Digital Advertising: The Rise and Fall of Crappy Crap] that Procter and Gamble, one of the world’s biggest spenders on advertising, began to wonder if the $1.5 million per day it was putting into digital advertising was doing any good. (Question No. 1: Really? They didn’t know?) So they stopped it for three months. And nothing happened. Sales did not drop. Nobody noticed. I don’t know the rest of this story — I think it was strangled in the crib.
There are many, many existential threats to America rising fast in all directions from here. Facebook is not one of them.
I could respond at great length but instead provide one link to consider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwfJDqerGM
” … left-wing idiots … ”
Love to know who they are, and what kind of idiotic nonsense they are spreading. I mean, I’ve been searching for traces of them for more than 40 years and I have yet to find any.
They go on Facebook apparently. Too bad. I’ve never been on Facebook, don’t even know what a page looks like, so I guess my life life quest will remain unfulfilled.
Censorship. It’s an intriguing concept. I for one wish there wasn’t quite so much it. I know my life would be so much better off if this were the case. But it is not the case.
You see, because of censorship, I have become a pariah, and not just to kit an kin but to all, as I subscribe to a theory, that like gravity* has overwhelming evidence on its side, yet I am censored in all ways and in all places if I bring this theory up, because it makes people … “uncomfortable.”
It’s tough action. I just want a fair hearing. Let me weigh the evidence of the theory in public, is all I ask, and on my word, if it is found wanting, you can stone me to death. But this will never be allowed. ANYWHERE.
And yet somehow perhaps the craziest and dumbest* theory of them all, RussiaGate, still goes on! Billions spent, millions of man hours put in, hundreds if not thousands of main stream media types without a shred of evidence spewing nonsense for years at a time on every public and private platform imaginable, and they do not face censorship. ANYWHERE. How can this be?
It’s galling, to say the least. The truth is, such an absurd dichotomy makes one yearn for a time that probably never was, and take it from me, that is the worst kind of yearning one can have.
*While it is not nearly as crucial to the destiny of humans as gravity, the theory itself is far more crucial to that destiny than the actual “Theory” of Gravity.
**If we’re talking so called “Conspiracy” theories, then yeah, right from the get-go I thought RussiaGate was a far dumber theory than the combined theories that Sandy Hook and the Vegas mass killings were staged events undertaken by powerful left-wing idiots, seeking as they always do, ways to reduce or eliminate gun freedoms.
If Congress were calling social media CEOs on the carpet to tell them to censor at their behest that might be a problem. Perhaps not though as Congress seems to be the bi-partisan private property of Global Capitalism.
There is also the “public square” case where unions prevailed against mining companies who owned the towns and so the public square where they forbade organizing. You Twit Face have arguably become a figurative public square.
I agree that the whole hoopla over Facebook is overblown. I’m an old codger and a liberal (more or less) yet I enjoy my Facebook page. I only have 40 or so ‘friends’ – mostly folks I’ve known for decades. I also enjoy the topical posts that seem to cater to my interests. I don’t recall getting any Russian backed Trump ads – in fact I don’t think I got any political ads at all. In any event, I don’t pay much attention to ads in general. The problem isn’t Facebook; it’s the inability of humankind to evolve quickly enough to keep up with applied technological innovation…a problem that’s been plaguing us since the onset of the industrial revolution.