Opinions don’t work well on Facebook. Over there, puppy and kitten videos reign supreme. I could post puppy photos all day long, never post anything controversial, get tons of likes and still be frustrated about Facebook. Why? Because puppy photos, benign comments, and “Hang In There, Kitten” memes are a saccharine substitute for real connections between people, in my opinion. That’s the lie behind Facebook’s “connecting people” concept: It’s not really about connecting people; it’s about creating worldwide addiction for us and profits for them. That’s my opinion, but it’s one that is shared by others closely connected to the creation of Facebook and it’s evil design for worldwide domination.
Facebook doesn’t care about human interaction. We interact with other humans only peripherally when on Facebook. Instead, Facebook cares only about our interactions with algorithms. The algorithms evaluate our level of commitment to the platform and hence our visibility to others. If we don’t post or react enough, we are downgraded and shunted out of our friend’s newsfeeds. The point of the algorithm is to spur us to keep using Facebook more and more.
In other words, we are caged hamsters in a spinning wheel. The algorithm is the wheel. Facebook is the cage. And no matter how fast we go or how much time we spend running, we never get anywhere. But we have great cardio.
Cleverly, in order to maintain our interest and distract us from the obvious futility of it all, Facebook entices us with the promise of instant gratification in the form of “Likes” and “Shares”. The intentionality behind the addictiveness of likes and shares is clearly meant to increase the time spent on Facebook.
But the problem isn’t just Facebook. Sure, Facebook is by far the largest of the social media platforms. But the problem is with all of social media. It’s evil. Oh, not evil in the “Fruits of the Devil” sense. More like, evil in the banal “We Will Decide What’s Relevant” sense. Facebook has algorithms, sexy, sexy algorithms. Those algorithms decide what you see in your feed; but perhaps more importantly, those algorithms decide WHAT YOU DON’T SEE. How many times have you posted something you thought was important for all your friends to see only to find out later that just a small percentage of them ever saw your post in their feed? It happens all the time because Facebook’s algorithm makes the call as to what appears (or doesn’t appear) in your feed.
But now that I think about it, maybe Facebook is evil in the “Fruits of the Devil” sense. In September of 2018 Facebook allowed a Sudanese member to auction a sixteen year old girl online. For fifteen days the auction was active and Facebook only deactivated the page after the girl was sold. In case you were wondering, the going price for a sixteen year old girl is 500 cows, three cars and $10,000 cash. Hmmm… I’ve known a few sixteen year old girls, and that price seems high.