Imagine a world without Facebook. Imagine a world without Instagram. Imagine a world where it may be a bit more cumbersome to get friends together, but where your social life wasn’t harvested for click-bait fodder and Bannon-esue efforts to destabilize the union. Imagine it, because Zuckerberg just threatened us with it.
In a clumsily formulated warning in its latest annual report, Meta (the new found Zuckerberg umbrella corporation) suggested that it might shut down Facebook and Instagram all across the European Union. Just like that, with a snap of his humanoid digits. Leaving millions of Europeans stranded without the capacity to envy their neighbours’ vacation pictures.
But why would the draconian Big Data giant bless us so? Well, because the European Union has had enough with Facebook’s peddling and meddling. And as of July 2020, with basis in the the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from 2016, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU citizen private data won’t be adequately protected in the US. In short; the EU consider the US to be a dystopian surveillance state and won’t have them oogling Europeans hither and dither any longer.
And turns out that Facebook can’t (or won’t) do business unless they spy on their users and are allowed to sell their personal data to the highest bidder. Go figure. But they wouldn’t do that? Right? Zuckerberg wouldn’t gorge himself on the stolen integrity of his users by supplying it to government agencies and Machiavellian political interests, would he? Meta, and its Facebook and Instagram tendrils, wouldn’t do us dirty like that, would they?
Well, yes, they would. And they have. Facebook sold the private information of millions of users to feed the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns of 2016. One might even say that Facebook single-handedly put Donnie on the US throne. That same year, Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica, a political advisory company that was (or was not) hired by the Brexiteers of the former European Union province of the United Kingdom. And just last year, the US Congress demanded that Zuckerberg come and testify after the whistleblower Frances Haugen told the world that Facebook feeds on hate and fear.
It is as certain as the implosion of real estate bubbles that Facebook and Instagram will harvest and sell your personal data for their fiscal benefit and your societal downfall. They have done it, they’ve never shown remorse for it, and thus; they will do it again.
If they can’t function without social life vampirism, then I think it’s fair to say that they’re a vicious boil upon society and should do us all a favour and shut down their services. Maybe we’d be better off without them. Maybe populists will have a harder time spreading disinformation and fear. Maybe I won’t have to envy the look of beaches at sunset that I’ll never get to visit. And maybe the return of phone books isn’t such a high price to pay for the exorcism of the hate-goblin Zuckerberg.
/Sebastian Lindberg 8/2-2022
WastedWords 