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Facebook is a social networking service available from 2006 for potential account holders. It had gained one billion active users by February 2012.

Quotes about Facebook

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We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That's why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts. ~ Monika Bickert
Facebook has now firmly established itself as a hub on the internet, making it a destination for surfers to do multiple tasks such as communications, gaming, shopping, photo-sharing and information gathering. ~ Chris Green
  • Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned.
  • I think with all technology, people have an idea of how it will be used, but then it has a life of its own and people use it in all kinds of ways. In the same way with Facebook. I doubt when people first created Facebook they imagined it was going to help people in Egypt overthrow a dictator. So it does have a life of its own that we can’t predict.
  • On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg describes his personal mission this way: “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” There is no mention of ripping apart the social fabric. Tobacco companies once tried marketing like this: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!” The difference is, the media called them on it. A glowing cover story in Time magazine from 2014 opens with a photo of Zuckerberg surrounded by a crowd of poor children in India. “Our mission is to connect every person in the world,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying. The article does briefly note the obvious financial interest Facebook has in hooking every living person on social media. But the piece quickly moves on to suggest that “creating wealth and saving lives” are likely Zuckerberg’s real motives. When elites do focus their attention on Facebook, it’s invariably to demand the company exert even more control over its users. Following the 2016 election, there were widespread calls for Facebook to further restrict the news Americans are allowed to see on the site. According to the Washington Post, Barack Obama took Zuckerberg aside during a meeting of world leaders in Peru and begged him to impose greater censorship. Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California made the same demand. “You created these platforms and now they are being misused,” she said. “And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will.” If only Obama and Feinstein were as concerned about Facebook’s relentless invasions of the public’s privacy. Or about the millions of addicted users steadily degrading from its use. Or about the rending of the social fabric.
    • Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018)
  • Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests.
  • This power over our egos has granted Facebook what we can think of as bullying rights. It routinely attempts to bully people into compliance with its rules on the boundaries of free speech, using tactics such as arbitrarily blocking users or reducing the visibility level of particular posts and videos.
    • Malhotra, R. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds. New Delhi : Rupa, 2021.
  • The hard reality is that the more you interact with Facebook, the more control it will assert over you. The company’s tactic is to encourage people to comply by intimidating them enough to internalize Facebook’s way of thinking. Users are reluctant to walk away from the platform because they have invested time and energy in it and are unwilling to abandon their relationships.
    • Malhotra, R. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds. New Delhi : Rupa, 2021.
  • A big part of Facebook's pitch is that it has so much information about its users that it can more effectively target ads to those who will be responsive to the content. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet.
    • Christopher Matthews, (January 15, 2014). "More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled Facebook Since 2011". Business.time.com. Retrieved April 22, 2014.
  • Now let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began 5 years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill. What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth.
  • Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts.
  • I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues.
  • Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.
    • Richard Stallman, Facebook is a surveillance engine, not friend: Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
  • I have one friend whose Facebook updates are exclusively complaining about Facebook.
  • The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place.
    Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)

Quotes from Facebook

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A big part of Facebook's pitch is that it has so much information about its users that it can more effectively target ads to those who will be responsive to the content. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet. ~ Christopher Matthews
  • We stand against all forms of hate including hate targeting the Muslim community. We do not allow people to attack anyone based on their race, ethnicity, national origin or religion, and we remove this hate speech as soon as we become aware of it...Facebook “appreciate[s] feedback from governments, experts and communities as we work to keep our platform safe.
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