The change — by punishment or by reward

Lifting up the art of falsehood is a dead end

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

I am one of those 2.19 billion users who post on your masterpiece of disaster called FB, and I believe the issues that I am going to bring concern a lot of people.

Let me first congratulate you on your magnificent performance when you testified in front of Senate. That was an exceptionally catching speech where you avoided masterfully telling the truth and lifted up the art of falsehood to a whole new level. I know that the Academy awards only movies, but they should consider giving you an Oscar for this documentary, and I am surprised if no one from Hollywood invited you yet to lead acting courses and to teach how to lie convincingly.

Although your performance was unforgettable, I am now approaching you for another reason. A few days ago, one of your 5-dollar-per-hour censorships blocked my account. I was shocked when I discovered the reason behind this act, i.e. in 2013 I published a joke where I mentioned the word “faggot”. Well, Mr Zuckerber, I rather expected some measures to be taken by your media after the debate in Senate, but not in this direction. I expected you to show more transparency towards FB users, the courage to tell the truth explicitly how you earn money from having our profiles; I expected you to be honest and share smart ideas how we can make this world a better place, even by using your social disaster called Facebook. Instead, I saw a policy that shows a lack of common sense.

There is an expression in law “ex-post facto law” — i.e. a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions that were committed or relationships that existed before the enactment of the law. It looks like your new policy is based on this principle which sounds quite dumb, in my opinion. FB is a privately held company, but you might consider that in the United States, Congress is prohibited from passing ex-post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. The states are prohibited from passing ex-post facto laws by clause 1 of Article I, Section 10. Mr. Zuckerberg, policies like this one will not prevent the usage of words like “faggot” and will not stop people to publish salty jokes. Instead, these will provoke them to be more creative and invent new phrases to replace the word that does not suit your censorship. From now on, you can consider yourself the inspiring pioneer of creating many new expressions in different languages.

Let me tell you my understanding about “faggot”. I would like to admit that I have a lot of homosexual friends and we have always treated each other with respect. Faggot is a state of mind. For example, when you state under an oath that you are not collecting the personal data of the users and then a PhD Student in Law Max Schrems shows in the documentary movie Facebookistan that FB not only collects all data and tracks the actions that you do there, but even when you delete your account, this information remains. Now, imagine for a moment, Mr Zuckerberg, that FB users are smarter than you. Imagine that they decide to pay you with the same level of “honesty” and instead of sharing real information about themselves they start to create fake profiles: for example, Giovanna from Italy becomes a John from Iowa and spreads fake information what she/he likes. Do you think that your advertisers will still pay for attracting fake profiles? How long are you going to keep the position of the third wealthiest person in the world if FB users decide to lift up their level of falsehood and post only false information? The advertisers will not be able to reach anyone from their target groups and slowly will go to other media. Imagine this idea becomes viral and people, disgusted with your behavior, decide to punish you and start posting fake preferences?

Another great lie we have heard is that FB is a free media and its only goal is to connect people. Oscar Wild wrote that “There is only one thing in the world worse than talking about you and it is not to talk about you.” Using the weakness of people to talk about themselves, you make them pay with the most important thing they have — information about who they are. If you do not collect and store this information, no one will advertise on FB, and you won’t be able to earn money from advertisers.

Let me give you an example of what is free. Ali Baba, in the beginning, was free, and Jack Ma did not have money to pay for his lunch. By the way, if Jack Ma reads this, as I am a big fan of him, I want to tell him that one of my dreams is to meet him in person. When he launched AliExpress, he started earning money, but he has never misled its clients.

Mr Zuckerberg, by punishing people and grinding the hypocrisy you cannot change this world for the better. Only for worse. Let me give you an idea of how you can transform this. Start to reward the positive behavior and let your censorship manage this process instead of falling into a depression by reading hate speech the whole day and watching violence pictures. Share your $70 billion and give to the people who are naive enough and voluntarily share real facts about themselves. Catch them when they do good things and reward until the good behavior turns into a norm in our world. If you like the idea, do not hesitate to invite me to be a strategic marketing manager and to make a new history.

Tanya Todorova,

A passerby