Facebook has become a cancer of society

At the moment, only the photos of cats are left in that good mood. Facebook has become a cancer of society, an element that corrupts even the healthy pieces of today and spoils them.

Sometime in the previous years, Facebook stopped adding value to our company. It may still work for some people, depending on how they use the network, but overall I'm convinced that the balance has been tilting down for some time. At the macro level, it does more harm than good.

It has long been said that Facebook has given those who were already crazy or paranoid a place to go. People who laugh in the real world when they open their mouths and tell their crazy theories on various topics have found each other on Facebook and, seeing that there are more, have validated each other in their paranoia and gained courage. to scream louder and louder from the "digital" balcony that Zuckerberg made available to them.

For a while this was considered the biggest problem, but I see around me that it has moved on to the next stage, the really serious one.

The fantastic spread of Facebook in all social and age categories then led to the corruption of the minds of ordinary people.

You see, most people are a kind of "blank slate", as they say, a free storage space, a blank slate. By this I mean that they see their normal life, raising children and going to work and going out in the park, as should happen in the bulk of a normal society, leaving advanced or niche issues to the experts or authorities in domain. As it should be.

These people, who did not know much about vaccines, 5G, the country's external debt, how a bank works, what interests China, Russia or the USA have in the world, what powers the president has or if the lives of children in orphanages would not be better in -a homosexual family and so on were suddenly exposed on Facebook to all the lunatics and conspiracies that they aggressively push into the public space.

And in the absence of alternative information, of some who contradict and dismantle all the madness in this world, those people believed them. Maybe not right away, but they saw them today, they saw them tomorrow, and if a lie is repeated many times, in the end it catches or at least seems doubtful.

That's why I say that Facebook has become a cancer, that is, a disease in which sick cells corrupt healthy cells, make them sick, and spread the disease.

It has also become a cancer due to a lack of information from the rest of the media. Televisions are preoccupied with tear-jerking shows, and the news is superficial and looking for anguish. Newspapers have become tabloids, and online "you can't believe what happened!", That is, they went into a clickbait.

YouTube? The most popular content is that in which influencers make fun of stupid videos, and the efforts are focused on being part of the activation of a detergent at a festival. Blogs? You will probably say that I am subjective here, but it seems to me that some are still trying, but the ability to reach people (reach?) Is small compared to other forms of content with potential for viralization.

Against this background, Facebook has added Messenger and WhatsApp for even easier sharing of content, although the one that goes viral the fastest is exactly the one that should have been hidden.

The results have been seen in the last 5 years. The “tabula rasa” people immediately fell into the trap set by the Cambridge Analytica profiling and targeting algorithms, as was the case in the 2016 US elections or in Brexit. In India, the state has asked Facebook to limit the possibility of forwarding / sharing on WhatsApp after several people were lynched by villagers convinced that the black ambulance had come to steal their children. Do innocent people die all over the world because of social media, or has life become an ordeal for them, and we still wonder if Facebook is a problem?

The best evidence of how corrupt our society is has emerged in recent days. Amid a scandal in which Twitter branded a message from President Trump as "false information", Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network should not decide whether something is true or not.

In the original , " I just strongly believe that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of the truth of everything that people say online ." So said Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire by taking advantage of the personal data of the people he gave a place to gather, and now he doesn't care if they are bombarded with lies and misinformation in that space.

It's like opening your house or your cafe to the public and saying that you don't care if people kill each other there, you just sit and watch them do that. OK, it's not your responsibility to the law, but that's not an excuse not to try to make sure something bad doesn't happen in your house. Irresponsibility cannot excuse indifference, not when you have billions of dollars at your disposal to handle things.

It could be said that Zuckerberg thus admits to being defeated by the avalanche of fake news, given that two years ago he argued the opposite, that platforms need to be more involved to prevent misinformation. It's not like that. I am firmly convinced that he really wants the money he earns by allowing fake news, propaganda, hatred and the pursuit of big corn, big pharma, big guns, big Russia, big anyone and everything that has an interest in changing people's opinions.

And since even strong countries often have an interest in changing the opinion of ordinary people about all sorts of seemingly unimportant issues, and so they invest in it, the money goes to Zuckerberg. There is no fallout from these issues. Facebook shares fell 24% in March 2018 amid the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with the company losing $ 134 billion in market value. On May 10 of the same year, less than two months later, he had already recovered the entire loss on the stock exchange.

I don't know if Zuckerberg is forced by the stock market and shareholders to take this position or if he himself strongly believes in what he says. What is certain is that the young man with the nerd face who invented in his home room at Harvard a social network through which people can easily keep in touch with the benefits of modern technology has been replaced by the businessman with political ambitions, and the space made to gather people to make them happier now he rather divides them.

There is also the possibility that Zuckerberg will have this position only when it comes to American society, that he does not want to upset Trump and scare the millions of dollars that will be rolled for the 2020 elections. had trouble unraveling Russian propaganda accounts , eliminating all sorts of groups and individuals who pretended to be members of the African-American community or American political activists. Or maybe he just took it in shape to show that he also takes action from time to time?

No, at the end of the article you will not find out that I deleted my Facebook account. I still have it, but I only use it a little and rather as a login for Messenger. A few months ago I realized that I had a period of about 3 weeks in which I had not entered Facebook at all and had not given any message there. It happens all over the world, there are various studies on how people have stopped saying personal questions there and it is limited to impersonally sharing an article or posting a photo.

I still have my account, but I don't care much about my Facebook activity. I'm thinking of starting to unfollow as many brand pages as possible, to unfollow people I don't know or aren't particularly interested in, and to try to force Facebook to be what it was in its infancy. Because before someone says the tired "if it's free, it means you're actually the merchandise sold", I don't mind Facebook gaining from me as long as I feel like I'm getting enough (interaction, connecting with other people, etc.) ) instead.