Why it’s time to delete Facebook

I will delete Facebook on March 1. My world will become smaller and easier to manage, with a few genuine friends rather than a thousand faceless ones

Let me introduce you to John. He is very rich and owns one of the largest fortunes in history—yes, larger even than Elon Musk’s after you adjust for inflation. He became rich mainly by selling oil at cut-throat prices and driving his competitors bankrupt before buying them out. He was ruthless, predatory and monopolistic. At his peak, he owned 90 per cent of America’s oil refining industry.

John was also indiscriminately generous. Through a foundation bearing his name, he funded research and activities in areas like public health, economics and education that benefited millions. However, he also supported American and German research into eugenics, the pseudo-scientific notion that “higher-quality” human beings can be produced through controlled breeding.

Thanks to John’s support, the Nazis developed so-called racial hygiene programmes, which led to the forced sterilisation of people deemed ‘unfit’ and, later, the mass murder of those designated as ‘racially inferior’. Although John was not a Nazi nor endorsed their philosophy, the projects and research his foundation financed laid the groundwork for the Holocaust and the genocide of 6 million Jews.

Nobody remembers or even knows all this about John. His organisation, the John D Rockefeller Foundation, is seen as philanthropic and benign, making the world a better place by supporting food production and economic advancement, eliminating disease, providing educational opportunities and encouraging the arts.  

They distanced themselves from eugenics research long ago.

Now let’s meet Mark. He is immensely wealthy, like John, but I would find it impossible to find one kind word to say about him.

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As a horny sophomore at Harvard University, Mark created a website called ‘Facemash’, where his buddies could look at photos of female Harvard students and choose who was hotter. He acquired their photos by hacking into Harvard’s security network and copying their private dormitory ID images and data. Within hours, Facemash had 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views. The university shut it down swiftly and took disciplinary action against Mark, but by then he had tasted blood.

Four months later, in February 2004, he launched Facebook to steal private data on a global scale. Twenty years later, Facebook has 3.07 billion active monthly users, or 60 per cent of the world’s social media audience. 

Its sophisticated algorithms manipulate them relentlessly, feeding them misinformation, strengthening their biases and prejudices, and streaming conspiracy theories and fantasies. 

We are all addicted to Facebook. It is difficult to imagine life without it. Because it creates a false sense of community and sharing, we are quite unwilling to let it go even if it means that an opportunistic, ethically bankrupt American billionaire will harvest our thoughts and most personal details to enrich himself.

Today I get birthday wishes from people I have no connection with, friend requests from people who have nothing to say to me, endless cat videos, turmeric and garlic recipes to make me immortal, and borderline pornographic videos. I waste precious hours in the vacuous rabbit hole Zuckerberg has dug for us all.

But Mark Zuckerberg’s moral vacancy, greed and opportunism come at a price. People die.

In 2013, Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan released a personality quiz app called ‘This Is Your Digital Life’, which about 3,00,000 users installed. Clicking OK, they unwittingly allowed the app to collect data about their friends, reaping a jackpot of up to 87 million profiles. This was sold to Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that used it to create detailed voter profiles for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg earned billions from those political campaigns.

In Myanmar, Mark looked the other way while Facebook posts promoted hate speech and incited violence during the 2017 military crackdown that left over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims homeless, their women brutalised. A UN investigation called Facebook a “beast”.

In 2020, internal documents showed that Facebook moderated content only where the law required it, which was mostly in the US. If you were not American and did not speak English, Mark really could not care less what junk was fed to you or if your family perished because of it. Though over 90 per cent of its users were outside North America, 87 per cent of Facebook’s content moderation budget went to the USA and English-speaking Western countries. 

Even that became history a few days ago when Mark bent his knee to Donald Trump, kissed the ring and did away with all fact-checks and content moderation on his platform. Everyone can have their own truths and lies now. Long live George Orwell.

Many have used Facebook to achieve stunning good for others. They awe me but people like them always find a way to do their best, even without Facebook. But think: if Hitler started a grocery store chain in Mumbai where everything was half the price and the poor could get free meals thrice a day, should you thank him and become a customer?

I will delete my Facebook account on March 1. My world will become smaller, perhaps easier to manage, with a few genuine friends rather than a thousand faceless ones, and less mind-numbing nonsense. Those who want to reach me will find a way. They always have.

If you don’t purge evil, you endorse it, and it eventually consumes you. To Mark, I say: Change Facebook’s name. Call it Facepalm.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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