Facebook is a love/hate relationship dilemma
On one hand Facebook is very useful for keeping in touch with friends, and finding news (via them) that I wouldn’t otherwise probably find.
But there are some things about Facebook, or that Facebook do, that I really really struggle with.
- It’s a time vampire – this is 100% totally my own fault, it’s easy to get sucked in and I suppose proves how good the platform is at being ‘sticky’.
- Two faced morals – on one hand Mark Zuckerberg is always posting about the good that FB does, “connecting the world”, his free internet initiatives and how he and his wife donate to their local hospital.
But this moral approach doesn’t stack up when you see FB continually exploiting UK taxes for their own benefit. They have now racked up a £10m tax credit after having previously paid just £4,000 in corporation tax before that.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/09/facebook-uk-ends-up-11m-in-tax-credit-despite-global-profits-of-5bn
You can’t have it both ways, either you have a moralistic ‘doing good’ stance or you don’t. - They pay minimum wage to content moderators – moderators who have to watch some pretty horrific stuff on behalf of the rest of us – the burn out from doing this ‘work’ deserves a lot more than minimum wage.
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ - a) FB board member Peter Thiel donated $1.25m to Donald Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/18/donald-trump-peter-thiel-support-facebook
b) Oculus [owned by FB] founder Palmer Luckey was involved in helping create lots of anti-Hillary media content during the election.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/oculus-palmer-luckey-funding-trump-reddit-trolls - FB allows advertising targetted against ethnicity and the Trump campaign used this during the election.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/27/13434246/donald-trump-targeted-dark-facebook-ads-black-voters - Fake news – despite denying it as just 1% there is growing evidence that the amount of fake news (pro-Trump, anti-Hillary) during the election may have been substantial – I’m sure this will be fixed in time but nonethless a pretty dire situation.
I’m seriously considering leaving the platform, add in that FB pages are also now pretty useless (with the reach throttling) the negatives are beginning to heavily outweigh the positives.
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