Why Algorithms ruined Facebook.
Black market, psych-ops and all you Zombies !
Facebook is now a vast digital wasteland of the rotting and the fake. What was once an Eden for people across the world to connect with each other and share ideas has now become a Dopamine pumping digital prison, where people spend billions of hours of clock time mugging up psychologically targeted advertisements and irritating fake news, the likes of which can even sabotage elections in democratic countries. As evident from the Zuck hearings held recently, the US Senate, as well as the people don’t even know how Facebook works, or they don’t care at all. They just don’t seem to get the notion that goes “If you are not paying, you are the product”. At this point of our existence, the fine frontier in between business and exploitation, between security and fraud, between order and chaos has blurred together into one hell of an armada, hauling the strangely robot-like CEO to DC where he was met with gazes full of suspicion, resentment, and disgust.
That was long overdue and he had it coming.
Then comes the algorithms.
The birth and rise of Facebook is the creation myth of our information era. Newsfeed seemed nice at first. The rate and the quality of the posts were staggeringly refreshing and entertaining, and on a collective scale, people scrolled miles down their touch screens, wanting more and more, hopelessly addicted to the way information was put before their eyes. With each millimeter we collectively scrolled, Facebook’s deep learning algorithms collected more and more data about our information consumption patterns, and learned the way we intake data — and sorted out that beyond all the complexities of a 4 billion-year-old evolutionary product, our species is freaking addicted, and that our dopamine centers put up impressive thunderstorms whenever we scroll through the newsfeed — and their algorithms could pick up the surges in our hormones.
Our hormones became the input vectors for their training phase, and their neurons got backpropagated across the layers again and again until they became the perfect tools for a 21st-century digital terrorist.
Facebook is no more the silly hot-girl-voting site which trended inside Harvard once in an eventful fall; it has become the default connection channel for billions of people. There is too much at stake.
A mechanical, monotonous newsfeed.
Slowly but surely, our newsfeeds got invaded and eaten up by money-hungry algorithms, converting its raw organic beauty to a preposterous race to dominate and monetize our gazes and scrolls. The algorithm-curated, lifeless, ad-driven updates at the top of the page started to become spiritless day by day. But instead of people abandoning the social network, it did something terribly astonishing- thanks to the network effect- it started to backpropagate our human neural patterns. It was transmigration from machine intelligence to human intelligence, algorithms training people instead of the opposite. We got schooled and taught what was worth our time. It was the very first step in converting us to data-processors, addicted to profitable presentations of big data. With each scroll, the algorithms trained us what to consume, how much to consume and when to consume. Slowly, we all became the information-hungry zombies Facebook wanted- wandering in this digital wasteland, addicted to data with an ever-quenching thirst to consume more and more until our thumbs physically disintegrate from scrolling for too long. The amount of addicting data overloaded the logic center of our brains that was responsible for asking the question — “What tangible utility do I gain from each of these scrolls I make?”
It was at this stage Facebook grew into what it was always supposed to be. From a social network to a prison where people spammed each other, where people wasted their entire lives staring at other people’s life. The algorithms slowly programmed the users into exhibitionists begging for likes and psychopaths filled with egos.
Once it got an upper hand in wrongly convincing us about the worth of information we ingested- it gave rise to an entirely new era.
It could make us believe whatever it wanted. It could make us believe that Global warming was a Chinese conspiracy and Trump is a good president. Lies such as Earth is flat. Vaccines are bad. Earth is the center of the Solar system. The flat earth society started to send out pseudo-scientific statements to thousands of its followers with just one click. Facebook could collectively fool millions of people and couldn’t be held accountable for. There were no regulations whatsoever. It contributed so much toward making humanity dumber; in such scales that its ill- effects outweighs its contributions.
Facebook became an ill-informed mass hallucination driven by biased algorithms that favored whites over blacks. Being a billion dollar industry, it chose to ignore the terrible human bias of the programmers entering its bloodstream. Instead of us determining the worth of information- so that we could decide what to intake and what not to, we got wined and dined by these algorithms to rearrange our neural information pathways, where Facebook’s algorithms trained us to do their bidding by changing our perspectives and narratives about what we should see and spend our time on. Billions of Dollars were spent to inject habit loops into our brain’s neural pathways- and soon, everyone began waking up with phones in their hands, staring at the red notification dots. The dopamine center of our brains got programmed around these little red dots, captivating our attention. Soon, no notification was needed to get people online. People started doing it on their own. It was machines programming humans so that they could in turn increase Facebook’s advertising revenue.
This happened all the while making us think that we are the decision makers in choosing what data to believe and what not to. Those algorithms were successful in providing us with the illusion of choice.
The fake motto.
Facebook’s user base has become a wasteland to which algorithms unloads shit- and Facebook basically gets paid for it.
Facebook wants to know where people spend their time on. It was recently exposed that they collected call logs, message details, and other user meta-data to determine how people spend their time. They partnered with a company named Onavo to launch an app-lock called Bolt App Lock, which secretly monitored other app activities to know which other apps could be taking attention away from Facebook. Facebook even collects data on people who haven’t yet signed up. It looks like a disgusting wormhole whose mouth is sucking in all the creativity and originality from our world.
Facebook’s Moto is misleading.
If it really wanted to connect people, why it’s activities suspiciously suggest that they want people online 24 x 7 x 365, shut off from the world, staring into a screen whole day; spying on them when they use real phones or messages or even other apps to call each other? Why does Facebook really hate people communicating via other mediums?
It doesn’t want to connect the world. Period.
It wants people to connect only through Facebook, and it abuses your relationship by making your data wide open to compromise.
All you Zombies.
It is true that Facebook has accelerated and promoted the process of idea exchange and creativity showcasing, but it has crossed a forbidden line. It doesn’t want healthy, creative people on it- that would backfire on their monetization plans because creative people don’t want to be psychologically targeted. Facebook wants zombies and average people; those who are addicted to other people’s photos and life. It wants people who are vulnerable to its ads. It needs people to be hopelessly depended on their systems to be in touch with family and friends. It needs users as guinea pigs, to run psych ops on them to maximize their revenue. It needs the power to turn your day upside down with a little tweak in your newsfeed. It needs the power more than it needs money. It has grown so powerful and eccentric that it can start calling its users “ad-consumers” and not human beings. Facebook’s algorithms treat us all like robots trained and destined to consume their ads-and all their functionalities they boast about “connecting the world” are mysteriously designed and executed around this basic psychology- “how to make them see more ads.”
It is narcissistic to such levels that the founder had to write down bulletin points below the topic “How Facebook is good” and learn it by heart, in case senate decides to slut-shame Facebook. Their Moto is not to deliver value to the user, but to increase its stock price by confining users by its malignant algorithmic design designing us back. For Facebook, the probability of a user seeing more ads increases linearly with the time they spend on the site. So by doing everything in their power, they lure the users into a world of impressive facades and frauds, where every like and share, every interaction, every login and every swipe, were generating immense revenue for the behemoth. But like any systems, their machine learning algorithms were designed much away from human values and were driven by greed and trouble. Instead of transcending humanity, Facebook became a medium for fake news and psych ops.
An offline version of Facebook ready for Black Market.
Millions of applications have already siphoned off your Facebook data. When Facebook returns user data to app developers worldwide as a result to their Graph API Queries, Facebook returns the necessary data with a profile_id variable, which is a unique Facebook key used to uniquely identify each user. These unique “primary keys” can be used to merge multiple databases together from multiple developers, which are kept in separate servers Facebook has virtually no access to. These can be fused together to merge and recreate an offline version of the Facebook database, and it would be valuated at billions. Safety and privacy are just a gangland myths.
There is no reset button.
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