Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/04/mark-zuckerbergs-15-year-fac.html
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Mouths-for-eyes suggestion: Show Zuck* holding up a sheet of glass with his eye-mouths and mouth-mouth pressed up against it.
*(or Trump, etc. but in this case, Zuck is helpfully already holding his hands up in the air)
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Ugh.
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Yes, journalists, why can’t you be more positive about the ways Facebook has turned a blind eye to ethnic violence and used its influence to affect democratic elections? Always so negative!
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What if there was a corporation that welcomed criticism?
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Or a country.
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I was just thinking of the two different reactions from Google and Facebook after their Enterprise Developer licenses were pulled by Apple: Facebook didn’t even apologise, refused to acknowledge that it was violating Apple’s terms, whilst Google pulled the offending app even before Apple retaliated, apologised publicly, and tried to make all the right noises.
This isn’t to say Google is good, oh no. Only to point out the sort of culture that rules at Facebook, where their reaction was almost contemptuous. It is not a healthy company, and the sick culture comes from the guy at the top.
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If you’re in the mood for a nice breakdown of Zuck’s fuckery…
The title is a tad more click-baity than the actual content, perhaps?
But, considering Myanmar, maybe it isn’t so off-base at all.
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His rhetoric seems very similar to all the 90’s idealism around the internet democratizing information, bringing power to the people, etc. Except Zuck actually made it happen. And, gee, whaddya know, that power was all fine and good in the hands of nerds like our favorite boingboing bloggers, but when we ACTUALLY democratize it and give anybody with a facebook account the ability to amplify information that they “like” to their (generally like-minded) “friends,” we end up with ethnic violence and a resurgence of Nazis and antivaxxers alongside our lolcats and other wonderful things. Paging Alexander Hamilton…
But I think what really rubs us wrong about Zuck is not so much that he unleashed this beast on the rest of the world. It’s that he still holds the friggin’ leash himself, but seems unwilling (not just unable) to prioritize the actual good of the world over his company’s profit growth.
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Fifteen years ago today, I launched the first version of the Facebook website from my college dorm.
[…]
Within a couple of weeks, two-thirds of Harvard students were using Facebook almost every day. In the next couple of months, students from other places emailed me and my roommates to launch at their schools, and we opened at almost 30 schools. Within a year, more than one million students were connecting on the site. In a couple of years, we were working on making the service available to everyone.
[…]
As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society – from government to business to media to communities and more – there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasize the negative, and in some cases to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy.
He built the first prototype not to connect people, but to help Harvard dudebros objectify women. The next iteration was to allow Harvard students to network. Then he expanded to allow students from the Ivies to network, and then college students at top-tier universities. It wasn’t until 2006 that he started allowing the hoi polloi on.
The intent in the early days was not to replace traditional hierarchies, but to re-inforce them. Once he changed the narrative and advertising business model from that to wanting to connect everyone (and not out of idealism), he threw responsibility out the window.
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Sounds about right; the first time I ever heard about facebook was in 2005, when I saw my college-aged kid brother on it, and asked what platform it was:
Him:
“It’s a social network for talking to other college students.”Me:
“Ugh, that sounds awful.”
Man, I hate being right sometimes.
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There are a actually a bunch of those, as evidenced by what’s stated – in so many words – in their official mandates. And corporations always live by those mandates.
The above is from an idea I have for a fantasy novel; something I’ve been tinkering around with. 
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I’ve been hearing that for [checks watch] 25 years now, give or take a few weeks.
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Go zuck yourself, Mark.
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