Dismantling Facebook — Step 1
If there is an immediate digital revolution we need, it is to dismantle Facebook
Two days ago, Nov 7th of 2017, Guardian published a story on what Facebook is up to after making Trump win the election. It wants to be the Hugh Hefner of Social Media. Initially, I thought it was a spoof. Then, wondered whether it was April 1st. No, the news is true. They are rolling this out in Australia, then to US, UK etc.
Unashamedly, Facebook has developed a program, where women can send in their nude pictures. Facebook then claims it will make a digital footprint of the pictures, then goes onto say it will destroy the pictures, but with this, the plan is to create a safe internet for women. They didn’t specifically say women, the news talks about revenge porn. Revenge porn affects only women. Yet to come across a case, where women posted nude pictures of ex-boyfriend and something happened later, like the man lost a tooth or something?
Facebook’s ultimate idea about preventing revenge porn by first making women send nude pictures, comes directly from Mark Zuckerberg’s dormitory days. First of all, how did they ever test this program? They fed nude pictures of women to test their program?
What is Facebook trying to do? It needs data. It is data hungry. It now has your thoughts, your tribulations, your trauma, your likes, your stories, your pictures, your kids pictures, your hate — everything. It doesn’t have your body yet.
Enters Zuckerberg with his dormitory ideas of shaming women. He created Facebook to shame women. Facebook has been doing that spectacularly, and has lied again and again that they are Gender Sensitive.
According to Guardian’s report “Per the leaked guidelines, “We should put all foreigners into gas chambers” is flagged (as it should be) but, “To snap a bitch’s neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat” is totally fine.
We all know the patriarch that is running Facebook now. No matter of Leaning in will help. Zuckerberg in an interview talks about Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command in Facebook, as “someone who checks whether we all have had lunch before a meeting”. Get the idea of dorm-boy’s gender justice?
In 2015, I came across the absurd policies of Facebook while going through online violence myself and had written about it The Hoot.
Facebook tries to ‘play government’, gives mobs the right to control opinion and causes complete havoc in an already faulty system. The resulting violence leads to deaths. With no understanding of the sensitive cultures it is getting into, Facebook behaves like a theocratic fascist government asking for identifications and then later publishing the identities without any concern for the vulnerabilities of these profiles.
Facebook fails in Simple Maths
Recently, there was a flood of #metoo hashtag in Facebook. In observing the count of hashtags, Facebook was aggregating, an interesting thing, was noticed. The aggregate counters were getting reset constantly.
The screen shots how the counters get reset or decreases as the time progresses.
There is no rhyme or reason why Facebook was doing that. Either it could be a faulty algorithm, or it was done on purpose, or it had some logic behind resetting. We do not know.
That exactly is the problem. We do not know. Facebook creates, dictates, destroys, deconstructs.
What exactly does Facebook Sell?
Facebook asks us for identity, real name, and we don’t know how faulty its algorithm is or we don’t know what goes behind Facebook thought. Facebook has put out some tall claims, and everything was proved as a farce. Algorithm, language moderators, Fake News. Everything.
With all its faulty algorithm it has the audacity to come up with asking for women bodies, in order to save us from revenge porn. Facebook exonerates sexual harassment and gender discrimination to another level. If a woman does not send her nude pictures to Facebook, there is a 100% chance Facebook will not remove her nude pictures in a revenge porn. The blame is on the woman, of course.
Later, you walk into a police station to complain about revenge porn, the policemen will ask you “Didn’t you send your nude pictures to Facebook yet?”, The Courts, the State all will encourage this massive nude picture harvest. After all, they are dismayed that women who own their bodies did not come up with this great idea first of all. To make them men ‘behave’ , we women need to bent over backwards of course.
Slowly it will roll out to India too, as the largest user base of Facebook is India. The Government wants your biometrics, Facebook wants your body. It is unbelievable how crooked Facebook’s business model is, one of the largest Corporations and brands, with never a clear product strategy, but a bunch of content, generated by its users themselves, with selfies, with notes — data more than enough to kill you.
What does Facebook sell you? It sells you to you
In 2017, We still have two disasters to society. Donald Trump as US President, and we have a new Hugh Hefner — Mark Zuckerberg, who I am sure thinks of himself as a feminist.
