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You can find a RationalWiki page and a RationalWiki group on Facebook; see Fun:RationalWiki Facebook for a description of the latter

Facebook has horrible ads that claim your friends have a crush on you. How yuk is that?

Facebook (or Meta as it is known post-2021 to avoid negative feelings associated with the old name) is a social media platform and stalking tool for approximately everyone in the bloody world who has regular access to the internet. It started in 2004 as a special elite website for students at Harvard, where its founder Mark Zuckerberg (1984–) was studying at the time. It gradually expanded to other educational establishments through 2005 before welcoming the uneducated masses in 2006.^[3]

It reached peak popularity with the addition of online gaming, notably the 2009 launch of FarmVille, an espionage tool^[4] that filled up everybody's feeds with stuff about wheat. FarmVille incurred the wrath of white nationalist Oscar Yeager, owner of the blog "Day of the Rope" (both names are references to books by William Luther Pierce), as eggs laid by black chickens are worth more points than those laid by white chickens. Or, as Yeager put it, eggs laid by "nigger chickens" are worth more than eggs laid by "Aryan chickens".^[5] But that was just the start of it.

Since all the yoof moved to Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, Facebook is 90% occupied by elderlies posting antivax screeds interspersed with a ton of advertising for everything from your neighbor's old bicycle on Facebook Marketplace to right-wing political propaganda. The remaining 10% of Facebook is occupied by employees of eastern European and Russian troll farms goading the elderlies into yelling at each other by posting propaganda that sows racial and religious discord.^[6]

Privacy[edit]

Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuck: just ask
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they "trust me"
Zuck: dumb fucks^[7]

Facebook often receives a shitstorm of attention regarding its "privacy" settings, which people are generally too stupid to use; they're actually quite powerful and useful, from being able to easily restrict what you share with certain friends to sending you a one-time password via text message if you're using an unsecured connection that you don't trust. The privacy controversy really developed in November 2007, when the staff launched Facebook Beacon, in which Facebook's partner e-commerce websites, including eBay and Travelocity, provided the site with news of all your purchases (the partner websites knowing you are on Facebook because you have cookies from the site stored on your browser disclosing your identity to these other websites). Incredibly, Facebook then broadcast news of every purchase you made off-site to all of your "friends", initially without even requiring the user to first opt-in to Beacon. Needless to say, a public outcry rapidly arose over this practice, and Beacon's "opt-out" status was quickly reversed. Facebook's integration with other websites has continued to be relentless, but it's mostly less creepy, and mostly used by social-media nerds.

Although Facebook is no longer the most popular site among young people, it's still a site where people of all ages can inadvertently publish their interests, foibles and deranged conspiracy theories, whether it's students adding their boss as a friend while they still have a profile picture of them being a drunken lunatic at a stag party, or elderly relatives revealing their fondness for antisemitic conspiracy theories. But in short, with Facebook privacy, if you don't want it public, don't fucking put it on the site in the first place; this includes the people who post their phone numbers to "public" groups.^[9] Facebook makes it difficult to delete your account and data permanently, and even when it does get deleted, there's no guarantee it isn't still in the database somewhere.^{[note 1]} Although it's possible to delete everything by request, it's easier and quicker to just post some random anti-religious screed, to engage in openly racist diatribe, or start posting porn in order to get banned by the administrators. To make it easier for people to come back, Facebook administrator-gnomes prefer "deactivation", which basically is the same as deletion, but it keeps your data on the server in case you want to come back (how nice!). The site also engages in a little emotional blackmail by telling you how many of your friends will "miss you" when you're gone.

Users...terrible, terrible users[edit]

Since Facebook replaced MySpace as most people's social networking site of choice, some long-term users have noted a trend towards puerile harping and frivolity. Basically, all the people from MySpace came over to Facebook because they were sick of how crap MySpace was, turned Facebook into MySpace, and are now getting sick of how crap Facebook is now that they've turned it into MySpace. To get an idea of the average IQ of a Facebook user, just check out the complaints every time they make a change; with the "news feed", for example. Following a change from a feed that featured selected highlights of what your friends have done (which could be controlled via an options panel), they switched to a "live feed", which just threw everything at you as it happened. There were many complaints and groups demanding for it to be switched back. A later change altered this "live feed" into a news feed (nearly identical to the first "news feed" incarnation) and people still complained, although in fairness, many of them were directed at the absence of any form of notification. If you ever needed proof that people are just plain scared of change that they don't understand, check Facebook.

Facebook has also become an intellectual cesspool for religious glurge-pushers,^{[note 2][10]} as well as a rather vicious, manager-bullying, toilet paper-hoarding, woo-pushing, vaccine and mask-denying species that forces all of these views onto her poor "little angels" (around whom she thinks the world revolves): the dreaded Karenii antimaskus. This rather annoying type of white boomer mom will often whine about how oppressed they are by radical liberal communist BLM vaccine mask deep-state antifas, and how "anti-Karen is code for anti-white".^{[citation NOT needed]}

Jesus himself endorses Facebook,^[11] and according to The Onion, so does the CIA.^[12] However, the Daily Mail has a long-running hate-on for Facebook,^[13] as its editorial staff thinks it may cause cancer. To see the best, or perhaps worst, of the site, visit lamebook.^[14]

Oh, what a tangled web we weave[edit]

Facebook's web of entanglement^[15]

Destroying democracy in the name of profit[edit]

Zuckerberg has indicated that he has a desire for total monopoly of service, something that is anathema to democracy.^{[citation needed]} When informed by future Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa that 97% of Filipino internet users used Facebook, Zuckerberg responded, "What are the other 3 percent doing, Maria?"^[19] Facebook's near-monopolistic penetration of the Philippines and feeble monitoring-practices enabled Rodrigo Duterte's troll armies to use "violent, threatening, often sexualized online vitriol" to falsely discredit legitimate journalists.^[20]

Russia has also endorsed Facebook for its ability to destroy democracy. Despite then-President Obama warning about Russian dissemination of fake news on the site during the 2016 election, Facebook ignored him.^[21] By 2017, Zuckerberg began to own up to Facebook's culpability in Russian interference,^[22] admitting that Russia had purchased over 3,000 ads to influence the election and to sow racial and religious discord.^[23] The Russians used Facebook's "Custom Audiences" tool to target specific messages to specific audiences.^[24] (In March 2022 a Russian court declared Facebook "extremist" and banned Meta,^[25] so expect no more problems from that quarter.)

In 2018, it emerged that Cambridge Analytica illegally obtained data from Facebook, which it used to sway voters in the 2016 election towards Donald Trump.^[26] Facebook was directly responsible for the data breach, but due to shortcomings in the British legal system, the maximum fine was a puny £500,000 - an amount which the site makes every five-and-a-half minutes.^[27]

Facebook has proven to be an extremely useful tool to autocrats around the world by allowing state-hired online trolls that support authoritarian governments to use the site to harass opposition and human-rights organizations, sow division, and undermine opposition and independent media. In a memo obtained by Buzzfeed News, one former Facebook data scientist claimed that she "found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions", but the site "simply didn't care enough to stop them".^[28]

Facebook was also used to help incite the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, even though the company had restrictions on "stop-the-steal" content. With simple keyword changes, would-be insurrectionists were able to evade the mediocre protections Facebook had in place and use its "groups" feature to coordinate plans. Once the protections were evaded, Facebook's response to pro-insurrection posts was to display advertisements promoting body-armor, firearm accessories and other tactical products.^[29] The issue of groups being used in this manner was known within the company long before the riot happened. The Wall Street Journal obtained an internal Facebook document which data scientists created in August 2020. According to the document, "70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying and harassment." One of the top groups in terms of engagement "[aggregated] the most inflammatory news stories of the day and [fed] them to a vile crowd that immediately and repeatedly called for violence". According to company sources who spoke with the Wall Street Journal, Facebook management responded to this report with a shrug.^[30]

Supporting hate in the name of profit[edit]

Facing increased criticism for its facilitation of fake news and its influence upon the 2016 election, Facebook hired the Republican opposition-research firm Definers Public Affairs or the PAC America Rising to… generate more fake news! This time it included anti-George Soros fake news, which generally comes off as thinly-veiled antisemitism.^[31] This is bizarre to say the least, because Zuckerberg has controlling interest in Facebook and is himself ethnically Jewish.

Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the Australian behind the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks in New Zealand, used Facebook to livestream part of the shooting that killed 50 and injured 50 more at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre.

Facebook's notorious permissiveness regarding fake news, as well as a lax, tolerant attitude towards hate speech (including the increasingly inflammatory, appallingly racist rhetoric of Donald Trump), caused several problems for the company in 2020. Before then, conservative social media (playing the victim, as they usually do) loved to decry that Facebook was "censoring" racist "conservative" posts.^[32][33] By 2019, however, compared to its competitors, the social media giant was taking a more "hands-off" stance concerning posts displaying key elements of modern "conservatism" (e.g. racism, hate speech, far-right murder plots^[34] and the like). Bullshit media sources such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller were given prominent exposure in news feeds. Unlike their competitors, Facebook refused to prohibit politicians from using micro-targeting (which can easily be used to spread disinformation).^[35] Key players in the company, such as board member Peter Thiel^[36] and vice president of global policy Joel Kaplan^[37] (who threw a celebratory party for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh after his confirmation),^[38] are said to be more aligned with Trump's ideology, and are thus responsible for this shift in direction. However, it's had consequences for the company.

Shortly after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, Trump went on Twitter and tweeted "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a violence-glorifying and inciting phrase infamously first uttered by Miami police chief Walter Headley during riots in 1967.^[39] Trump then posted the same phrase on Facebook. Twitter correctly flagged the tweet for glorifying violence, but Facebook did nothing, as Zuckerberg believed that the phrase had "no history of being read as a dog whistle" for violence by vigilantes.^[40]

As a result of this inaction, on June 1, 2020, hundreds of Facebook employees (many working remotely due to COVID-19) staged a "virtual walkout" over the inflammatory posts of Trump and Zuckerberg's reluctance to do anything about it.^[37]

In June 2020, several prominent social advocacy organizations (including the ADL, the NAACP and others) likewise were fed up with the bullshit on Facebook, and started the campaign Stop Hate for Profit.^[41] This campaign advocated that corporations advertising on Facebook should boycott the company due to their lax stance on hate speech, racism, harassment, voter suppression, and even climate science denialism.^[42] By July 1, over 500 companies had joined the boycott.^[43]

Unfortunately, since the site is largely funded not by major company advertisements but by small businesses,^[44] and a significant chunk of advertising revenue comes from scams and disinformation,^[45][46] Facebook's response to this boycott was to not change a damn thing.^[47]

In December 2022, Facebook cracked down on a number of Socialist and otherwise left-wing accounts due to their promotion of anti-fascism, while simultaneously permitting an ever-increasing far-right extremist presence on the site.^[48][49]

Promoting genocide in the name of profit[edit]

In Myanmar, military personnel posed as normal people just like you, average citizen, while "exposing" the nefarious deeds of the evil Muslims and their plans of conquering the world.^[50] The main targets of these lies were the Rohingya, one of the country's Muslim minorities and one that has been marginalized for decades, who were falsely accused of a variety of crimes, including massacres of other populations. Of course, the military played both sides into a state of fear that only they could solve. The tally is over 200 villages burned, an unknown amount of deaths and rapes which may be in the thousands, and over 800,000 Rohingya that fled the country, the majority going to neighboring Bangladesh.

Facebook was confronted with its to remove hate speech that was targeted at Rohingya as early as November 2013 by documentary filmmaker Aela Callan in 2013 when she met with Elliott Schrage, vice president of communications and public policy.^[51] The meeting did not results in any action by Facebook. In December 2014, Matt Schissler, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Michigan, communicated with Facebook about the problem between March 2014 and March 2015,^[51] but little action by Facebook seemed to have resulted in the communications. David Madden, a tech entrepreneur who owned Phandeeyar in Myanmar, gave a talk in May 2015 at Facebook to an audience of a dozen to sound the alarm about the problem of hate speech against Royhinghas on the platform.^[51] The Rohingya genocide began in 2016. In 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate and falsely claimed that Facebook was "able to proactively remove tens of thousands of accounts that — before they — they could contribute significant harm."^[52] Shortly before the testimony, Phandeeyar and five other Myanmar groups blasted Zuckerberg for making a similar claim, stating "We believe your system, in this case, was us.^[51]

Once Facebook was forced to publicly acknowledge what it had allowed to happen, it finally took measures of banning a number of accounts and pages involved with the spread of fake news, pretending that the worst was over. By 2020, the company was accused of purposefully obstructing the investigation of its role in the genocide, saying the investigation was being "too broad" and that it would be too difficult for them to get the requested data.^[53] This kind of hate building isn't something that happens overnight, it takes years, and the military once had over 700 people working on the project at its peak.^[50]

Putting a price on your child's head[edit]

Despite simultaneously knowing and denying that social media is harmful to children^{[54][note 3]} and despite denying that they put a price on childrens' heads,^[56] internal emails revealed that Meta did indeed put a value on children that went into the calculus of how much to spend to protect them:

The lawsuit by multiple states' Attorneys General argues that Meta deliberately targets and manipulates teens to maximize profits:

Meta’s scheme involved four parts: (1) through its development of Instagram and Facebook, Meta created a business model focused on maximizing young users’ time and attention spent on its Social Media Platforms; (2) Meta designed and deployed harmful and psychologically manipulative product features to induce young users’ compulsive and extended Platform use, while falsely assuring the public that its features were safe and suitable for young users; (3) Meta concealed and suppressed internal data showing the high incidence of user harms on its Social Media Platforms, while routinely publishing misleading reports boasting a deceptively low incidence of user harms; and (4) despite overwhelming internal research, independent expert analysis, and publicly available data that its Social Media Platforms harm young users, Meta still refuses to abandon its use of known harmful features — and has instead redoubled its efforts to misrepresent, conceal, and downplay the impact of those features on young users’ mental and physical health.^[57]

Promoting pseudoscience in the name of profit[edit]

A typical response to deceptive advertising on Facebook.

Facebook allows advertisers peddling pseudoscience and quackery easy access to suckers customers who might be receptive to such things. Its bullshit detector will handily find all users who have expressed interest in various forms of bullshit, and will happily allow companies to exploit said users for profit. In April 2020, an investigation by The Markup (a non-profit organization focused on ethics in data-driven journalism) found that Facebook had allowed advertisers to specifically target users who expressed interest in "pseudoscience".^[58] In 2019, it was possible for Facebook advertisers to target people who believed in "vaccine controversies".^[59] In 2017, it was possible to target "Jew haters" with a Facebook ad.^[60] After each investigative report, the specific offending category was removed from the advertising target selection list.^[61] Despite this, in July 2020, the New York Times reported that merely posting that you have breast cancer on your Facebook feed will cause your timeline to be flooded with ads for quackery cures for cancer (such as colloidal silver, cumin seeds and questionable "alternative medicine" clinics).^[62]

Promoting conspiracy theories in the name of profit[edit]

In another sign that Facebook is happy to take money from any group that wants to advertise on its platform no matter how questionable, an internal investigation by NBC News discovered 185 advertisements praising, supporting or representing QAnon (a conspiracy theory designated as a potential domestic terrorist threat by the FBI in 2019). The advertisements generated $12,000 for Facebook within 30 days, and had four million impressions. Some analysts believe that private Facebook groups have played a key role in the growth of QAnon over the last few years.^[63]

Promoting fake news in the name of profit[edit]

In March 2021, the research group Cybersecurity for Democracy, a part of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering,^[64] published an analysis of 8.6 million posts and used likes, comments and other interactions on various sources, to determine what type of news and media was most engaging, from both a political and accuracy perspective. Far-right news sources classified as "misinformation" received considerably more interactions per thousand followers than any other category.^[65] Facebook's initial response to this study (which helped add to a considerable body of evidence that the site's algorithm favors misinformation no matter how harmful it is to society) was to state that internal data showed a vastly different picture than what Cybersecurity for Democracy found. (But of course, independent researchers aren't allowed access to this internal data... data transparency is not allowed at Facebook!)^[66] Later in August, Facebook decided that the best way to prevent those meddling researchers from creating unflattering reports was to disable the Cybersecurity for Democracy's accounts on the site.^[67]

Co-opting Snopes[edit]

Facebook entered into a cooperative agreement with the fact-checking site Snopes between 2016 and 2019.^[68] Facebook paid as much as $100,000 to Snopes in 2017 alone^[68] — small change for Facebook, which was making $220,000 per minute in 2021.^[69] The idea of Facebook entering into a cooperation agreement with a fact-checking site sounds like a good idea, except Snopes was being used for "crisis PR" according former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski, which was confirmed by past and present Facebook employees.^[70] Just imagine — Facebook bought Snopes' reputation for well under the average wage of a single Facebook employee^[71] to do something about the torrent of lies that Facebook produces.

Mark Zuckerberg[edit]

Just words on a screen

Mark Zuckerberg (1984–) is generally credited as the founder of Facebook, as well as fulfilling various corporate roles at Facebook, being CEO as of 2021. He is one of the world's richest people through his shareholding in Facebook.^[73] He has been the subject of a lot of criticism, much of it justified, some not. The 2010 film The Social Network mythologized the founding of the company, portraying Zuckerberg as a loner who was hated by women who set Facebook up for a combination of revenge and companionship, when he actually had a girlfriend at the time.^[74]

As someone of Jewish ethnicity, Zuckerberg has been the subject of antisemitic abuse and conspiracy theories, portrayed as one of the fictional Jewish overlords ruling the world, while also coming under attack for Facebook's failure to take action on antisemitic abuse and conspiracy theories (it only banned holocaust denial content in 2020).^{[75][76][77][78]}

One particularly colorful conspiracy theory is that Zuckerberg's real name is Jacob Greenberg and that he is the grandson of David Rockefeller. This has been thoroughly debunked.

He was criticised for his closeness to Donald Trump during the latter's presidency. There were claims of some sort of a deal between Trump and Zuckerberg in which Zuckerberg would let Trump continue to post lies and inflammatory comments on Facebook (which continued until Trump was banned after the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot). This was supposedly discussed in a 2019 meeting at the White House between Trump, Zuckerberg, and Facebook board-member and libertarian crazy Peter Thiel.^[79] According to Mother Jones, after Twitter started publishing factchecking information alongside Trump's tweets in May 2020, Zuckerberg called Fox News to say he wouldn't censor or factcheck the big orange Trumpster.^[80][81]

He and his wife Chan have been somewhat involved in philanthropy, collaborating with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to pledge in 2015 to give the vast majority of his wealth to charity at some point in his life (assuming Facebook doesn't go the way of MySpace). The New Yorker noted that his donations of stock could be offset against taxes on money he earned/received, as well as meaning that the government doesn't receive any earnings from Facebook shares held by his charitable foundation (in contrast to income from shares held by individuals or corporations, which is taxable).^[82] His actions include donations to Ebola and COVID research. The Zuckerbergs are also involved in more commercial research operations, funding biological research at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, and funding solar sail research for deep space exploration with the possibility of Facebook on Alpha Centauri in 20 years.^[83][84]

His attempts at charity are belied by his paranoia and misanthropy, oh-so-common among the billionaire class. In 2023, it was revealed that he was building a massive, blast-resistant underground bunker at his estate in Hawaii where he can escape the apocalypse.^[85] His family will be feasting on his beer-and macadamia-nut-fed wagyu cattle before and after the apocalypse if all goes according to plan.^[86]

See also[edit]

• Fun:RationalWiki Facebook
• Social media platforms

Notes[edit]

References[edit]