Farewell, Facebook

 

So the whistle-blower has now testified before Congress and the British Parliament and held firm to her story, despite Facebook's attempts to discredit both her and her testimony.  This should be no surprise to anyone who has followed the story, or indeed the growth and decline of the platform.  Sure, it has billions of users, but the service it now provides and the way it works has changed very much for the worse.

I've had enough.  I'm off.

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Mark Zuckerberg created the platform and founded the company when he was a spotty teenage undergrad at Uni - he never did complete his degree.  It was all very altruistic: a way to maintain contact with friends and relatives, have a bit of fun, organise dorm parties, exchange bright ideas and unused stuff no longer wanted, and have a good old on-line natter.  It worked, so well that it quickly outgrew its home Uni base and spread to other college faculties and then national and international - by which time the Boy Wonder had dumped his co-creators (paying them off, only to be sued for millions more later as the market value of the company soared) and moved out to the West Coast where all the tech action was and remains.  He had also expended his vision and dreamed of world domination - he wanted everyone in the world to sign up and be on the platform all day every day.  He spouted off about how the users could find groups of like minded individuals, and Change The World.  He did that alright, once people like al Queda and ISIS and the Leave Britain campaign figured it out.  Which is not to say Leave Britain was a terrorist organisation - it was no more than a very tech savvy political campaign group that utilised the power of the internet much better than the Remain campaigners did, dragging Britain out of the EU and thus changing the EU and the world in the process.  Zuckerberg must have been very happy that the user data allegedly bought or stolen (depending on who you believe) by Cambridge Analytica and passed on to Dominic Cummings and his mates Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage yielded such spectacular results and proved his prediction correct. FACEBOOK REALLY COULD CHANGE THE WORLD.

It also made him shedloads of money.  As the market value soared, so did his net worth, and the monstrous growth of ad-driven revenue - the real open secret of Facebook's success - dwarfed anything generated by other social media companies (indeed, any other company except maybe Amazon and Apple).

This is when the thing came off the rails, at least in my humble opinion.

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It hadn't taken long before the conversations and interactions I was having with my Friends and Family began to be swamped by garbage.  But it took a while before the pictures of cuddly cats and dogs, old cars and motor bikes, useless surveys planted by advertising companies masquerading as users aimed simply at harvesting yet more data, and memes that were often meaningless or obscene and only rarely funny, began drowning out the good stuff I wanted to see.  

Then the Groups started invading my space.  I joined a couple of work related ones, in the hope that I could find more customers for my fledgling consultancy, but in two, maybe three years I got precisely no interest.  Zero.  Nothing. Not a nibble. And I got really bored of other Group members either complaining that contractor rates were depressed, the system wasn't the same as it used to be (I should bloody hope not!) and whatever happened to Old Joe Soap, what a character...... I left the groups and shortly thereafter the industry itself.  I retired.

The hate speech, already evident, also started proliferating.  This was about 5 -6 years ago, when the so-called Migrant Crisis was causing panic and dismay across Europe, and the Orange Oaf lied his way into the White House using the internet in a way not dissimilar to Leave Britain except with more abuse and racist bullshit to please his redneck support base.  The effects of both events are still being felt today, even if the geography has moved East and the Orange Oaf shown the door (and still fighting tooth and nail to convince everyone he was hard done by).

I had made the mistake of responding to some of this crap - initially arguing with a Brexiteer Friend (who is no longer on the list), and then adding my fourpennorth to the political arguments raging around migrants and Trump.  I neither regret nor retract one word of anything I wrote then, but my received abuse went through the roof.  It was no longer the friendly banter between close(ish) Friends on opposite sides of a discussion, no matter how big the topic under debate was, and morphed into the most vile abuse from total strangers, people I had never met, were never likely to meet and frankly had no desire to do so. 

Since then, my Feed (or whatever it's called these days) is awash with stuff.  My use of the platform has correspondingly shrunk, because I'm no longer interested in it.  On a normal day, I get perhaps 50 new posts hitting my page.  Of that, the majority - maybe 35 or 40 - are memes that in most cases remain unfunny and uninteresting. Often I get the same one from two or maybe three different sources.  Of the remaining posts, half a dozen are appeals to help find a runaway or someone who has conned a sweet shop out of a few quid or something similar, or an appeal to "share this beautiful photo to keep Princess Diana's memory alive" or something equally mawkish.  Perhaps two or three are actually from a Friend or Family member with something interesting to say.  Instead of spending an hour or more a day looking at Facebook, I now dip in and out, maybe 5 or 10 minutes (maximum) each time, perhaps three times.  

And it's still too much.

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Since the whistle-blower has clearly stated that Facebook's algorithms are designed to specifically highlight and disseminate content that could be controversial or unpleasant, and provided documentary evidence to support the claim (the company of course denies it), there is no doubt in my mind that this is not the cool, altruistic link-all-mankind dream project that Zuckerberg originally launched.  I knew that was the case anyway, because I've seen the changes already - as I've written here.

She clearly states that the algorithm does this specifically to enrage people who read this stuff, encourage them to make their own contributions, and maybe click an ad or two, join a Group or so - and thus increase Facebook's revenues and hence Zuckerberg's fortune.  Since he has veto over every decision made by the management team this is clearly something he knows about and supports.  

She also suggested that spreading this kind of content could very well negatively impact a user's mental health, that Facebook knew this but cares more about profits than their users' well being.  This is particularly so with Facebook's acquisition Instagram, apparently.  It's not an app I either use or understand - like Twitter, I just don't get it - but I'm familiar with it because someone close to me uses it and has had personal issues with its content.

As I'm a bit mentally fragile myself these days - another story altogether - I'm finding it increasingly upsetting too, and getting more riled up, more angry, about some of the stuff than ever before.  To give a simple example: the other day something popped onto my Feed concerning the current crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus.  It shared a link to a BBC News website story that was essentially accurate, about the German people's reaction to the relatively few refugees that have managed to get across the border and cross Poland in their attempts to enter Germany - a reaction depressingly brutal.  But what really upset me was the reaction of the Facebook users commenting.  It was angry, supportive of the extreme right neo-Nazi group the story was about, and praising the governments of both Poland and Belarus for their actions.  Even Merkel was slated for her part in this (she has none).  I only read maybe 10 out of 200+ comments, and not one showed even the slightest knowledge of what is happening on that border: every one was racist hate speech, pure and simple.  I made a post (I couldn't help it!) trying to point out some of the facts, expecting to be slated for it.  To my surprise, no-one bit. In one sense I'm happy about that, but at the same time the border tragedy is still unfolding and forgotten already by Facebook.  It's yesterday's news - except for the poor penniless sods stuck in a cold wet forest with no-one to turn to.

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Anyway, that's it for me.  I am closing my Facebook account. Oh, I know it's not the only culprit in this whole social media circus that I have no doubt whatsoever will continue to cause untold harm to millions until or unless somebody finds a way to reel in the companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever, and makes them tone down the hate and police their platforms properly.  And that opens up an entire and even more difficult argument about free speech and censorship and government interference and service vs profit......and I'm not sure that one will ever be solved.  We've come too far down the slippery slope to get back onto the higher ground, it seems to me.

I'm sure I won't miss it.