Are We Moving Quickly Enough—And Breaking Our Culture Sufficiently in the Process?

“Move fast and break things” is the mantra of our technological age. It’s the operative motto for Zuckerberg’s Facebook ( now named Meta) and he claims it's more worthwhile to make mistakes and disrupt technologies along the way than to play it safe at a slow and steady pace. One might quite logically ask the question of for whom is it more worthwhile and what is the cost of the worth.

Certainly breaking stuff proved profitable for Zuckerberg, making this most-times-child, sometimes-adult among the richest men in the world. But the shiny stuff he so eagerly and carelessly broke turned out to be more valuable than his tinker-toy social media experiment, things such as truth and privacy, trust and safety. Zuck as much as invented the concept of ten-thousand friends and no one to have coffee with, as well as not a soul to call when life disappears down the toilet at 2am.

What about actual ownership of what you post on Facebook-Meta?

At the present moment, Facebook owns all the data that its users generate on its website. This means that the images, content and even contacts that you have on Facebook are actually legally the property of Facebook. This is mentioned in the terms and conditions of their agreement which users generally do not read.

Really? Put me down as one who has never waded through the FB Terms and Conditions. So, my 539 ‘friends,’ the people who actually know me and who I put there, are actually ‘owned’ by Facebook.

‘Fraid so.

And all the posts of my blog that I put up a couple of times a week (including this one) are owned by FB as well?

I guess.

Facebook’s crimes are legion, but its major victims are the young and vulnerable

For the isolated, the lonely, the kid who struggles under the burden of low self-esteem, Facebook is an addiction. Addiction is treatable, but only if the victim realizes his or her loss of personal control.

(dataprot.net) “Internet harassment is not only real and damaging, it represents a threat to the most vulnerable among us: children. Cyberbullying statistics show the high cost of online harassment. From increased depression and suicide rates to social anxiety and alienation, the pain and consequences of online harassment are as severe as they are undeniable.

“Cyber bullying statistics from 2017 show that Instagram leads online platforms in bullying, with 78% of young people using it and 42% of them experiencing cyberbullying there. Second place belongs to Facebook, with 60% of young people on the platform and 38% of them experiencing online harassment. Snapchat comes in third, with 76% of young people using it and 31% of those experiencing bullying.”

Instagram is owned by Facebook (Meta).

Facebook's operations have also received coverage

(Wikipedia) “The company's electricity usage, tax avoidance, real-name user requirement policies, censorship policies, handling of user data, and its involvement in the United States PRISM surveillance program and Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal have been highlighted by the media and by critics.

“Facebook has come under scrutiny for 'ignoring' or shirking its responsibility for the content posted on its platform, including copyright and intellectual property infringement, hate speech, incitement of rape, violence against minorities,  terrorism, fake news, Facebook murder, crimes, and violent incidents live-streamed through its Facebook Live functionality.”

Good god, that a large enough list for you?

We know that Facebook’s claims to filter hate speech are a lie at worst and ineffective at best

(Time Magazine) “Facebook tells TIME it has functional hate speech detection algorithms (or “classifiers,” as it calls them internally) in more than 40 languages worldwide. In the rest of the world’s languages, Facebook relies on its own users and human moderators to police hate speech.

“Unlike the algorithms that Facebook says now automatically detect 80% of hateful posts without needing a user to have reported them first, these human moderators do not regularly scan the site for hate speech themselves. Instead, their job is to decide whether posts that users have already reported should be removed.”

And, in India…

“In Assam, the global advocacy group Avaaz has identified an ongoing campaign of hate by the Assamese-speaking, largely Hindu, majority against the Bengali-speaking, largely Muslim, minority. In a report published in October, Avaaz detailed Facebook posts calling Bengali Muslims “parasites,” “rats” and “rapists,” and calling for Hindu girls to be poisoned to stop Muslims from raping them. The posts were viewed at least 5.4 million times. The U.N. has called the situation there a “potential humanitarian crisis.”

“Facebook confirmed to TIME that it does not have an algorithm for detecting hate speech in Assamese, the main language spoken in Assam. Instead of automatically detecting hate speech in Assamese, Facebook employs an unspecified number of human moderators around the clock who speak the language. But those moderators, for the most part, only respond to posts flagged by users.”

Well, of course you and I are not in India

Nor is Zuyckerberg and who the hell cares if some Hindi girls are poisoned for the very reasonable idea to keep Muslim boys from raping them?

Young people are being bullied to tears, and sometimes suicide, by a fun little social experiment a kid at Harvard invented to get college kids together. It was a boy-child’s genie and it escaped from the lantern. Nineteen years later, the kid holds court among the richest humans walking the earth and is still committed to “moving fast and breaking things.”

Unfortunately, the ‘things’ that are broken are people and mostly children, with a few national elections thrown in just for the fun of it.

(Washington Post) “Many who had worked on the election, exhausted from months of unrelenting toil, took leaves of absence or moved on to other jobs. Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of election-season measures that it had used to suppress hateful, deceptive content. A ban the company had imposed on the original Stop the Steal group stopped short of addressing dozens of look-alikes that popped up in what an internal Facebook after-action report, first reported by BuzzFeed News, called “coordinated” and “meteoric” growth.

“Meanwhile, the company’s Civic Integrity team was largely disbanded by a management that had grown weary of the team’s criticisms of the company, according to former employees.”

But the high-fives, it soon became clear, were premature

“On Jan. 6, Facebook staffers expressed their horror in internal messages as they watched thousands of Trump supporters shouting “stop the steal” and bearing the symbols of QAnon — a violent ideology that had spread widely on Facebook before an eventual crackdown — thronged the U.S. Capitol. Many bashed their way inside and battled to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of President Biden’s election victory.”

How’s that “move fast and break things” mantra working out for you, Zuck?