Since it was unleashed on the world, young people have suffered increasingly from depression and anxiety levels have shot up in adults. It is not a fun, benign platform for folks to share pictures of their pets doing cute things. It is a frequently nasty cesspool of misinformation, hate speech and trolling fertilized by unbridled corporate greed.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
When I was blocked from joining due to my last name, I decided to make no attempt to appease the Great God Zuckerberg by sending his minions my personal identification. If he's too fucking stupid to program his AI to recognize the Doolittle name, then he doesn't deserve my eyeballs or my data.
Speaking of data....
This arrived in my inbox this morning from Friends of Canadian Broadcasting:
Dear Nadine,
As you and I concentrate on our families' health and safety in the midst of this pandemic, a small news item popped up under the radar: Facebook is suing the Canadian people. Maybe they thought we weren't paying attention.
Here's some background. Last year, Daniel Therrien, Canada's privacy commissioner, ruled that Facebook broke the law when it allowed our private information to be sold to Cambridge Analytica without our consent. That's the firm which led Donald Trump's misinformation offensive online.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his lackeys, and his lobbyists have decided that the Privacy Commissioner, an officer of Parliament, shouldn't be allowed to tell them how to treat Canadians' private information. So they're going to court to sue Canada – you and me – for having the nerve to govern our own country.
This is just the latest example of US tech companies pushing us around. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix: they don't follow our rules and they don't pay our taxes. So while you and I band together to ensure that Canadians make it through this crisis in good health, these outlaws are suing us so for the right to keep screwing us.
We can't let Facebook and other foreign tech companies decide what our laws should be. We must stand up for our values and our sovereignty.
Facebook and Google have decimated our media. They've claimed the content of Canada's journalists and creators as their own. They take it, for free, and make billions of dollars selling ads. Meanwhile, Canada's creators, artists and journalists are going bankrupt in huge numbers.
Enough. It's time for Canada to stand up for itself, and impose stringent regulations and taxes on foreign owned tech giants.
Send a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau now
By sending your message now, you're making it clear that you want Canada to stand up for itself. Thank you.
Best regards,
Daniel Bernhard
Executive Director
FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting
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Zuckerberg is an asshole, but I'm not going to write PM Trudeau about this when he has enough to deal with right now. And battling the false information being distributed through Facebook about COVID-19 isn't helping matters.
But I will post this as a Public Service Message to my fellow Canadians. When you find yourself reading ripped off news items on Facebook, just remember the lawsuit your nation is facing in the middle of a pandemic because of this billionaire asshole, and conduct yourself accordingly.
What can you do?
Don't click on any ads you're shown. That cuts right into Zuckerberg's revenue by driving advertisers away when they realize Facebook doesn't produce a return on investment. Use the platform to connect but give away as little information as possible. Don't take any surveys. It's like having a private conversation on a crowded train. Talk, but in a lowered voice.
And if you can, delete your account and liberate yourself from the swamp. Your mental health will thank you. Lots of people function brilliantly without Facebook. But if that's not possible, resolve not to give them a penny in clicks or links or the content they crave.
If 19 million Canadians (the number of Facebook users in this country) abruptly ceased to use the platform and profits tanked, Zuckerberg would get the message.
Don't fuck with us. We are not that nice.
