SUMMARY:
Consumers, often in polls, say they want responsible brands and brands that share their values, but that’s largely bullshit. How do you, for example, explain Facebook’s repeated lying and spreading false information? Where is the mass exodus to hold Facebook accountable? What consumers say and actually do are two very different things.
Sources of news and information on the far right generate the highest average number of interactions per follower, more than any other partisan group on Facebook, even extreme views on the political left, NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project reported.
That’s not all. Zuckerberg got another letter, this time from 13 environmental groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace, asking the company to commit to monitoring climate disinformation and releasing reports, among other things. “Climate change disinformation is spreading rapidly across Facebook’s social media platform, threatening the ability of citizens and policymakers to fight the climate crisis,” the groups wrote.
Bob Hoffman even took Facebook’s arrogance further:
TechCrunch reported that according to emails and other info unsealed for the first time in a court case…
– COO Sheryl Sandberg knew for years that Facebook was over-estimating the reach of FB ads.
– Facebook’s product manager for their tool that estimated “potential reach” warned the company that it was making fraudulent representations to advertisers.
– An email from one employee asked, “how long can we get away with the reach overestimation?”
– In 2017, Sandburg “acknowledged in an internal email she had known about problems with potential reach for years.”
– Although they knew their reach estimates were bullshit, they refused to implement fixes proposed by employees.
Facebook resisted correcting their lies because fixing the problem would reduce their “estimated reach” by 10% and significantly impact revenue. When a proposal to correct the lies was rejected, the executive proposing said, “It’s revenue we should have never made given the fact it’s based on wrong data.”
The court case in question seems to be based substantially on absurd claims reported here back in 2017 when Facebook claimed it reached more people than actually exists.
“Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder… who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda, and conspiracy-theorizing… Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow.”
“Today, we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health,” Murthy said in a press conference, adding that “modern technology companies” have allowed misinformation and disinformation to spread across their platforms “with little accountability.”
Surgeon General
According to NewsGuard, Facebook is “still programming its algorithms to send users down rabbit holes of anti-vax propaganda.” Specifically, “Facebook continues to recommend broad networks of anti-vaccine and health misinformation pages to users.”
Yet with all the misinformation, users can be banned for calling someone a putz for saying that liberals are responsible for the latest COVID surge.
I’m hoping that eventually, someone unites the online community to Facebook’s lies and deception, which leads to a mass exodus of users. I know, however that won’t happen because too many people are addicted to Facebook, and in the process, they continually give Zuck and Sandberg a pass and permission to treat them like a washrag.
