Copyright 2011-2019 Richard Stallman released under Creative Commons Attribution Noderivs 3.0 unported (original in stallman.org)
I have never had a Facebook account. There is a Facebook account called “Richard Stallman”, but it is an impostor.
Putting the photo of someone on Facebook (or Instagram) contributes to surveillance of that person. Please don’t post any photos there that include me, and I suggest you avoid posting photos of anyone else too.
The “metaverse” is *another place to spend money on things, except in this place the empty promise that buying stuff will make you happy is left even more exposed by the fact that the things in question do not physically exist.
The article informs us that Facebook is thinking about ways to track and profile people in its metaverse even more than they are tracked in the physical world.
Comparing Facebook to a doomsday machine: its power over the world is too great, so we must get rid of it before it wrecks things.
I am proud that I never had a Facebook account. But if you did have one, it is not too late to delete it.
If you feel your organization needs a “presence” in Facebook see this page.
If you feel you need to be used by Facebook to find out about parties at your school, you might look for someone in your circle who isn’t ready to break ties with Facebook, but who is willing to take note of parties via Facebook and send messages to a list of Facebook-rejecting friends to inform them.
Here’s a good article to present many of Facebook’s injustices to your friends.
Housing Bias
Proposed Replacement
Real Names
Censorship
Privacy
Ads
Psychological Harm
Taxes
Racism
Control of media
Attacks on Democracy
Miscellaneous
Permitting Violence
Facebook Allowed Violent Posts by Man Charged with Ilhan Omar Death Threat.
Housing Bias
Facebook imposes bias on showing housing and employment ads even if the advertiser does not ask for any.
Proposed Replacement
I think Facebook should be eliminated entirely and replaced with an index of people. People would create records in the index under their names. Your record — if you make one — would give other people a way to contact you through various methods of messaging.
You could include a small amount of information about yourself to help people tell if you are the person they are seeking to contact, rather than another person with a similar name. Their messages to you would carry various contact coordinates in case you decide to respond.
It would do nothing more than that. It would not be allowed to do anything more, or have a special relationship with any other communication system.
This would provide a chance to decentralize the web again — but taking advantage of that chance would require other changes.
Real Names
Facebook requires useds to use their ‘real’ (the name they normally go by as defined by Facebook) on the site or risk having their accounts suspended.
Facebook is not your friend. Its ‘real name’ policy is enough reason to refuse to let it use you, but there is so much more nastiness in Facebook.
Even as Facebook oppresses real useds with its “real name” requirement, it is easy to buy and run a realistic Facebook account that is completely fake.
Facebook spontaneously asked its useds questions trying to expose useds who had not given their real names.
Facebook with its ‘real name’ policy makes itself the arbiter of other people’s selves.
Under pressure from cross-dressers, Facebook said it would relax the ‘real name’ policy and allow people to use aliases, but only if they are generally known by those aliases or if they were victims of certain types of abuse or stalking.
This relieves a very specific acute problem, but does not enable ordinary people to use Facebook without being tracked.
However, reportedly Facebook has not really changed the policy.
Even if Facebook makes this change, it will be unacceptable because companies and the state will be able to connect the account with your real identity. In order for the site not to mistreat people, it must let you have one account to show your boss and your parents, another for your friends, and others for various kinds of political activism.
Facebook continues to close the accounts of people who go by unofficial names.
What happened to Koko the clown demonstrates why it is very foolish to talk with your clients through Facebook or to keep any important information in a Facebook account.
Facebook makes a practice of asking its useds* to rat on their friends who use aliases.
People who don’t dare identify themselves feel compelled to be used by Facebook, so they register under pseudonyms, which makes them vulnerable to blackmail by those who threaten to report their real names to Facebook.
These people feel compelled to be useds of Facebook because their friends and relatives are useds of Facebook. In other words, their friends and relatives are victim-coperpetrators: initially victims of Facebook, they contribute to its wrongs by pressuring others to be useds of Facebook.
Don’t do this to others — don’t be used by Facebook yourself!
Facebook silently changed its search system to expose the existence of hidden accounts.
The depressive effect of being used by Facebook is directly traceable to its “real name” requirement and stopping people from having multiple accounts.
Young People Hate Facebook Because It Forces Them to Have a Single Identity.
Censorship
Political Censorship
Facebook and Instagram removing posts with mentions of abortion pills.
There are many more reasons to reject Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook is quietly pressuring its independent fact-checkers to change their rulings.
Facebook has developed a chat system for coworkers which allows the company to censor words of their choice. For instance, “unionize”.
Facebook has frequently removed postings about protests (both planned and ongoing), political satire, and various political issues. Specific examples are given below.
Facebook has imposed political censorship on Instagram, bowing to Russia.
Facebook cut off accounts of researchers examining its political ads and misinformation on the platform.
Israel bullied Facebook into imposing tight censorship on criticism of the occupation of Palestine.
Facebook deleted the news item announcing a major protest against Monsanto.
Facebook blocked a page announcing a protest in Russia obeying orders from the Russian government.
The order says the protest is illegal. In a tyrannical state, protests are generally illegal.
Facebook has yielded to Turkey’s religious censorship, just as previously it yielded to China’s political censorship.
Facebook has developed software to allow various countries to directly control censorship of what useds in that country can see.
Jim Wright forcefully condemned the pressure put on Americans to endorse all the bellicose or dangerous “responses” to the September 11 attacks. Facebook censored it, apparently for political reasons.
This shows the danger of depending on facebook.
Facebook deleted without explanation the page of a publisher in the UK that had posted articles about publications that criticize Erdoğan.
The article shows that Facebook has censored on behalf of Erdoğan before.
Facebook has a history of blocking the posting of links about certain controversial political issues.
Facebook blocked the account of activist Shaun King after he posted a racist email that was sent to him.
2018: A black manager for Facebook quit, and posted on Facebook that Facebook had treated black useds and black staff badly and had censored blacks’ postings.
Facebook deleted his post, saying it went against “community standards”.
Algorithmic filtering can affect history, not just hide history. Facebook’s filtering algorithm suppressed news about the riot by uniformed thugs in Ferguson until after it became national news.
Facebook censorship guidelines have been leaked. They include political censorship catering to various countries that do not respect freedom of speech.
Facebook has censored political satire aimed at the UK unemployment agency and associated organizations, apparently at the request of a target of the satire.
Facebook deleted posts that presented evidence of individuals’ use of shell companies, evidence coming from the Panama Papers.
This resembles Amazon, which famously shut down Wikileaks’ virtual server because Wikileaks didn’t have US government authorization to publish leaks.
Facebook has censored a number of French anti-racist campaigners.
Sincere and honest political activists talk about Facebook’s shutdown of their pages, which were labeled as spam.
Instagram (one of Facebook’s mouths) deletes postings simply for containing photos of General Soleimani.
This reflects badly on the freedom of speech which the US defends.
Facebook has a rule against incitement to violence, but it decided to ignore the rule when the bully does it.
Journalism
Facebook took down a negative movie review because the movie company claimed the review was copyright infringement.
Facebook banned a video made by the Swedish Cancer Society about breast cancer because it showed cartoon figures with circles as breasts.
It got Facebook to accept the video by putting in squares for the breasts.
The real problem here is not that Facebook draws the line at the wrong place (though it does). It is that Facebook has so much influence that organizations such cancer charities feel obliged to publish through Facebook.
Facebook censored an ACLU post about censorship.
Facebook deletes postings for obscure reasons, and even denies deleting them. It is not safe as a platform for journalism.
By the way, I cannot understand why people make a fuss about just how they find out that someone they loved is dead. Compared to the fact of that person’s death, such details seem insignificant.
If Facebook achieves its goal of becoming the main publication site for journalism, it will be a new chokepoint for censorship.
Facebook wants to present itself as a virtual town square … a censored one.
Facebook deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake.
That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance.
However, the problem here goes deeper. It is not good for human rights groups’ (or anyone’s) statements to be posted using a platform where statements are censored.
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie exposed how Cambridge Analytica misused the data Facebook gave it, so Facebook shut down his account.
How Facebook’s algorithm for what articles to show to each used are chosen to increase profits, but they systematically disfavor thoughtful criticism of anything, if posted by those who can’t pay to get it seen.
I agree that Facebook should be regulated, but the purpose of the regulation should be to ensure that not very many people read news or commentary through that site. Or any other specific site.
Personal
Facebook arbitrarily censors and closes the accounts of prisoners.
Facebook did an experiment in biasing the filtering of useds’* news feeds (which are always filtered by Facebook in other ways) towards the emotionally positive or the emotionally negative. This experiment was widely condemned as “unethical” based on details, but this criticism was naive in that it disregarded the fundamentally unethical nature of Facebook.
Facebook deleted a photo of two men kissing, which was used to support a kiss-in in a pub that had shown bias against gays.
The person who posted it thinks that Facebook is not anti-gay, but rather than it is quick to censor whatever someone complains about.
While it might seem that the former would be worse, I think the latter makes Facebook really dangerous. Don’t use Facebook as a substitute for your own web site!
Facebook censored a photo of two men kissing, posted as a protest against India’s criminalization of homosexuality.
Facebook’s censorship rules are sometimes incomprehensibly strict. Many women’s accounts have been turned off for posting “men are scum”.
Some men are scum, but not all. It is unfair to generalize that statement to all men. People should ideally know better than to be sloppy in generalization, even if they are justifiably angry at grave crimes.
However, is it right to gag people for unkind sloppiness like that? Clearly not.
Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic.
There’s more about Facebook censorship.
Privacy
Personal Data
Reportedly it is possible to actually delete a Facebook account.
I would not suggest trusting Facebook to delete all the data it has about you, but you may as well try.
Facebook buys personal data from various data brokers, and correlates that with what it figures out directly about its useds.
Facebook advises useds that they can tell the data brokers to stop collecting data about them, but it doesn’t ensure that this really works. After all, no one will punish Facebook for false claims of that sort.
Facebook snoops on surfers via disqus comments: when a page uses disqus for comments, the proprietary disqus software loads a Facebook software package into the browser of every anonymous visitor to the page, and makes the page’s URL available to Facebook.
Facebook claimed to support “closed” groups and said it would not release the names of the members. Meanwhile, companies could get their names, and other personal data.
Facebook provided personal data to Mastercard.
The data was provided in anonymized form, but Mastercard could reidentify the data by correlating it with other data.
Facebook made a deal with Huawei to give it access to personal data of Facebook useds. This included useds who were customers of Huawei, and their “friends”. This even though the US government considers Huawei a spy for China.
Facebook did the same thing for other phone manufacturers such as Apple and Blackberry.
Facebook’s “conversation topics” experiment actively shows certain selected useds everything that their “friends” are doing.
A detailed, long list of the data Facebook collects about each used, for targeting ads. Facebook may collect other information which is not used for targeting ads.
Look at the way the article ends by considering it incredible that someone might not submit to this. Maybe Facebook has Peter Eckersley, but it doesn’t have me. Don’t be a used of Facebook!
Facebook stores a huge amount of data on each used. This can include:
- The time and location of every Facebook login
- All audio messages the used has sent or received through Facebook
- Every file the used has sent or received through Facebook
Facebook admits having presented audio recordings of conversation between useds for purposes of improving its speech recognition.
I think this is a secondary issue. The job being done is not malicious in its own right.
What I find more worrysome is that Facebook (or Google, or Apple) could transcribe conversations automatically and use the results automatically for purposes such as surveillance capitalism, censorship, and repression.
Facebook useds who download “all their data” are astounded by some of the kinds of data they find.
Facebook bought WhatsApp and committed not to combine that data with Facebook’s other data. Now it is going to do just that.
For Facebook, any commitment is meant to be broken, after a delay for people to forget about it.
The Facebook app obtained useds’ whole contact lists, either directly grabbing them or by tricking useds into agreeing without knowing it.
You have to expect a nonfree program to be malicious.
Facebook’s app has started scanning photos people take with their phones.
The article says “camera”, but that word is misleading; cameras do not have a Facebook app installed in them. This applies only to phones and tablets.
I suspect the face recognition is done by sending the photos to a Facebook server. If so, the server could do other things with those photos. It could save them and send them to Big Brother. From now on, when people want to snap me with a mobile, I will verify it does not have a Facebook app installed before I say yes.
Facebook’s mobile app snoops on SMS messages.
Using the Facebook app on a portable phone tells Facebook about any phone calls and texts.
When useds log in to a site through Facebook, Facebook gives the site access to lots of information about the used.
If this is what a site demands from you, you should not touch it anyway!
Facebook, as an ‘experiment’, collected the text its useds started to enter as status updates and ultimately did not send.
Facebook also announced it planned to track mouse movement even in the absence of a click.
These work by means of malicious Javascript code.
Pages that contain Facebook “like” buttons enable Facebook to track visitors to those pages. Facebook tracks Internet users that see “like” buttons, even users who never visited facebook.com and never click on those buttons.
The ACLU has a way of enabling users to click a Facebook “like” button, which avoids this problem. Its pages have a link called “like us on Facebook” that leads to a Facebook page where it is possible to push a “like” button for the ACLU. But if you don’t follow that link, Facebook gets no information about your visit to the ACLU page.
This page gives details about how much Facebook tracks people’s browsing, which applies even to people that don’t have Facebook accounts.
Facebook’s tracking of useds through cookies combined with Like buttons violates EU law.
Facebook has turned on automatic face recognition on photos.
Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in photos for people who are the used’s friends. However, it might run the algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.
I ask people not to post photos of me on Facebook. You might want to make the same request, for you and your children.
Facebook goes to great lengths to hide some privacy settings. Apparently it wants to claim useds have that option while making it so hard to find that people won’t use it.
Facebook exposes lovers to lots of information about each other which can stimulate jealousy.
Innocent-seeming text posted on Facebook could cause you lots of trouble, due to development of systems to deduce things about you.
Facebook has automatically pushed useds’ @facebook.com email addresses (which they never asked for) into the contact lists in other people’s phones.
The lesson here is that it is a fundamental mistake to trust a company such as Facebook to give anyone data about you. It will give them the data it wants them to have, not the data you want to give them.
Facebook collected its used’s phone numbers for “security” but uses them for advertising.
How did Mari Sherkin end up on a dating site unwillingly? Facebook opens browser windows showing other companies’ sites, which trick Facebook useds* into agreeing to let those companies get their personal data from Facebook.
Facebook’s app listens all the time, to snoop on what people are listening to or watching. In addition, it may be recognizing their conversations.
Cambridge Analytica collected data about 50 million useds of Facebook and used them in violation of Facebook’s rules, and perhaps in violation of British data protection law.
Rules are frequently broken; therefore, any organization that collects personal data which then are misused cannot excuse itself by saying “That was against our rules”.
Facebook looks at Facebook Messenger chats, but that’s supposed to be ok since it is only for certain purposes.
Facebook saves all videos that useds make — even videos they say to delete.
Facebook asked US hospitals to give patients’ data to Facebook.
The data was going to be “anonymized”, but Facebook planned to “match it up” with other data — which probably means to reidentify it.
Facebook and Google joined with ISPs to defeat a privacy initiative in California.
Facebook made deals for phone and computer manufacturers including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung to access data about its useds and their friends as well. These deals seem to still be operative.
When Zuckerberg testified to Congress, he said Facebook had stopped doing this years ago. Apparently he lied.
Facebook erroneously made millions of users’ private postings visible to all useds.
Everyone makes mistakes, so I won’t reproach Facebook for the mistake itself. However, this mistake demonstrates the folly of using a single system for both publication and private communications. They ought to be separate systems.
Facebook’s new “smart camera” offers people the opportunity to completely surrender the privacy of their home to that company. Perhaps it will help others wake up to the danger.
Internal Documents Show Facebook Has Never Deserved Our Trust or Our Data.
No system deserves such trust.
Facebook used trickery to get personal data of Android users.
Facebook got “consent” to upload call logs automatically from Android phones while disguising what the “consent” was for.
Facebook imposes location tracking on its useds, and location-based advertising too.
In my view, the mere fact that a used of Facebook cannot prevent Facebook from finding out per location and putting it in a data base is an injustice, a threat to the used’s human rights, and in some cases even per safety.
Facebook made a secret deal with Amazon to give Amazon access to Facebook’s data about users. A plague on both of those companies!
Facebook says its useds “own their own data”, but “their own data” doesn’t mean what you would think. It includes only some of the data Facebook keeps about its useds.
This is one reason why the demand that users “own their data” is fundamentally inadequate.
Facebook plans to integrate its three mouths — the services Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — so all the data they swallow goes to the same stomach.
Around 40% of gratis Androids apps report on the user’s actions to Facebook.
Often they send the machine’s “advertising ID”, so that Facebook can correlate the data it obtains from the same machine via various apps. Some of them send Facebook detailed information about the user’s activities in the app; others only say that the user is using that app, but that alone is often quite informative.
This spying occurs regardless of whether the user has a Facebook account.
Facebook allowed big companies (including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony) special access to its useds’ personal data, setting aside its supposed rules for use of that data.
Facebook requested, even occasionaly demanded, mobile phone numbers from its useds in the name of “security”, then treated them as personal identifiers for lookups and advertising.
Profiling People
Many US hospitals have installed a tracking pixel in their web sites, and various actions on those sites send identifying data to Facebook.
Facebook may be able to identify whether each of its useds is mentally ill or not.
Facebook can tell when its useds are asleep. Via Facebook, others can tell that too.
When Facebook sees two useds are in the same physical location, it may suggest that the two ‘friend’ each other.
This can cause lots of trouble for people in certain circumstances. But remember that the NSA is doing the same thing, and doesn’t let you opt out — except the way I do, by not carrying a mobile phone.
Facebook and Master Card will join forces to profile Master Card customers so banks can push them to spend more.
By doing this, Master Card is ratting on its customers. This reinforces the point that using a credit card enables others to take advantage of you. It also interferes with your efforts to limit your spending.
Don’t be tracked — pay cash.
Many things can be determined about a Facebook used*, with pretty good accuracy, from the used’s published list of “likes”.
If you do as I do, and reject Facebook, you are safe from this form of snooping.
How can we get the news items that interest us, without telling a server what criterion to use? Simple: download lists of items, and have software on our own machine decide which articles to show. This software can fetch additional articles (which it doesn’t actually show us) just to create a false trail.
Facebook’s new patent suggests that Facebook may be planning to use the computer’s camera to detect its useds’ emotions. It might already be doing so.
Facebook increased its visible use of face recognition.
Nothing stopped, or stops, Facebook from privately recognizing all the faces in photos, and selling that data as part of “anonymizied” records to other companies that can reidentify them.
Facebook facilitates age-discrimination in employment ads. Facebook has been sued for this.
Workers are suing Facebook for its age-discriminating job ads, as well as the companies that buy the targeted ads.
Facebook compiles extensive profiles about people that are not its useds.
If you resist other forms of profiling, such as carrying tracking devices, identifying yourself to web sites, and paying other than with cash, you will deny lots of data to Facebook as well as to the others that accumulate that data. What data nobody collects, nobody can get.
Facebook leads its useds into joining “private” medical patient support groups, but “private” is misleading since they aren’t safe from being profiled based on this.
Other People
Facebook predicts who new useds* know, based on their phone lists and email address lists. Along with the phone and email lists of all the other useds.
This is a measure of how complete and dangerous Facebook surveillance is.
It implies that giving your email or phone list to a company is mistreatment of everyone in that list!
The NSA tracks Americans’ social networks, and Facebook is just one of its sources.
Thus, if you talk about your friends in Facebook, you’re ratting on them. If you say that you saw John and Arthur, you tell the NSA that John knows Arthur. If John and Arthur are dissidents, or journalists, your information will help the government suppress dissent or journalism.
Facebook invites useds* to nag other useds to fill in their profiles with all sorts of personal information.
Facebook has a new trick to get people to identify their spouses and babies in photos.
Facebook asks its useds to provide their entire list of other people’s email addresses.
This by itself is surveillance of those other people, but Facebook uses it to go further and try to guess the relationships of people who are not Facebook useds* (along with collecting their phone numbers, and email and postal addresses).
That information must be worth some money to companies. It is surely worth money to the secret police of any country that isn’t democratic enough.
However, the principal wrong here is not that Facebook can guess which non-useds know you or me. It is that Facebook collects information from its useds about whether they know you or me.
I think we can formulate the principle that any social network that asks its members for information about other people is abusive.
Facebook apps have access to that used’s* information — and the useds’ “friends’” information, too. Thus, if you make the mistake of using Facebook, even if you don’t let a company access your data, any of your “friends” can give the company access to your data.
For more see here.
Ads
Fossil fuel companies paid Facebook around 10 million dollars in 2020 for ads to discourage adequate climate defense action.
An NYU research project asks useds of Facebook to volunteer to run a special browser extension so they can report data about the ads Facebook shows them. Facebook has demanded NYU stop this research on the grounds that it constitutss forbidden “bulk data collection”.
The researchers discovered that numerous political advertisers were violating Facebook’s disclosure rules, yet the company has been letting it happen. People speculate that that’s why Facebook wants to shut down this research.
Facebook pressures political organizations to show ads only to people that Facebook believes support them. It charges extra to show the ads to anyone else.
This has the effect of encouraging twofaced campaigning.
Useds say that Facebook mostly shows them infomercials rather than anything about their friends, and what they post doesn’t reach their friends. Knowing this could make it easier for you to decide to close your account for all the other reasons described in this file.
Facebook exploits its useds* by conscripting them for ads.
Facebook settled a lawsuit by promising useds will be able to ‘limit’ this use of their names and photos in ads shown to other useds. However, since this is “opt-out”, by default useds will still be exploited. What’s more, it may not even be a complete opt-out.
Facebook will no longer allow useds to decline to let their names be used in advertisements. More than ever, Facebook is really Suckerberg.
In addition, Facebook secretly collects useds’ phone numbers. The article says it is not clear why. Perhaps it’s a favor for the NSA.
Facebook Messenger will show ads to users as they talk with each other.
Did the vegetarian used of Facebook* really “like” McDonalds, or did Facebook make it up? In fact, Facebook invents phony “likes”, and worse, falsely suggests people liked specific text that they had never even seen.
Facebook publishes ads citing specific useds as if they endorsed the ads. Martin Lewis is suing Facebook for misrepresenting him this way.
Facebook sends political messages as coming from people who have clicked Like buttons.
Facebook recently settled a lawsuit, promising to stop a very similar practice involving ads, but these political messages are not considered “ads” and Facebook continues to send them.
Facebook developed algorithms to detect teenagers that are in a vulnerable or susceptible state, to target them with ads.
Aside from all the ethical reasons not to let Facebook use you, there is a practical reason small businesses might care about: advertising there is ineffective for them.
Facebook “support groups” must be a windfall for Facebook’s profiling and advertising. They are also used to lure people into expensive “therapy”.
Facebook gives video-publishing media sites exaggerated view counts to attract them to move from Youtube. Some of them borrow money to invest to profit from this increased popularity, and they go bankrupt.
Another drawback is that if you refuse to be a zucker, the site becomes inaccessible to you when it is on Facebook.
Psychological Harm
How quitting Facebook and Ex-Twitter enabled one user to change for the better his approach to life.
Research comparing various US universities shows a correlation between when Facebook started operating in each and when there was an increase in depression. In other words, Facebook is harmful and addictive.
Facebook knowingly worked with game developers to encourage children to spend their parents’ money.
Facebook cuts some useds off from in-person interaction with their friends and family.
Tricks that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat use to make people feel anxious and spend time there.
Facebook Helped Advertisers Target Teens Who Feel “Worthless”.
Heavy use of Facebook tends to make some people feel worthless.
Facebook lurkers are likely to feel happier if they stop being used by Facebook for at least a week.
If you want to “engage with others” more, how about doing it outside of Facebook? That would provide the same benefits and would avoid giving Facebook any more information about you or the others you engage with.
A study found that people get measurably happier (on the average) if they stop being used by Facebook.
Being used by Facebook tends to be bad for your mental health.
Facebook tends to lead its useds into a sort of trance in which they believe, more or less, whatever comes up in the feed.
Facebook makes it easy to say different things to different groups of people, which has the effect of breaking up the common culture of any society.
Reading the feed on Facebook makes many useds feel envy and sadness.
They can reduce these feelings by posting more about themselves. Thus, the system (Facebook and the used) pressures the used into giving Facebook more personal data.
In some regions, 10% of Facebook useds don’t realize that talking to Facebook is using the internet. And Facebook is directing millions of people into having no internet access except to Facebook.
This is the sort of thing that a democratic society should prohibit, for the same reason we prohibit other kinds of monopolies.
Why Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing.
Parents should regard Facebook as a sort of gang that you don’t want your kids to get mixed up in.
The competition for “likes” on Facebook lures teenagers to procure “likes” by any means necessary, and no means is too sleazy. The way a player scores in this game is by selling the list of people who “liked” him to a company, thus paying back favors with abuse; but these useds* have adopted an amoral attitude in which they no longer try to judge exploitation ethically.
This competition inculcates an amoral attitude in which nothing is genuine and the only value is success. I don’t think that the desire to build a career (no matter what kind) excuses this behavior.
A person’s number of ‘friends’ on Facebook measures narcissism.
Facebook is designed to get useds* addicted to vanity.
One used writes that Facebook led her to be in love with “the projection of [her] own desired life”.
Social networks, for lonely people, may only show them how lonely they are.
A study found that being heavily used by Facebook tended to make people sad, independent of how the useds felt at the start of the study.
The study eliminated the hypothesis that people let Facebook use them more because they were sadder to begin with.
This is not yet proof, but given so many other reasons to avoid Facebook, why not take this precaution?
Another study shows that being used a lot by Facebook encourages depression; since people generally post an exaggerated positive picture of their lives, their lives appear to be better than your own.
Allowing yourself to be used frequently by Facebook promotes eating disorders.
Facebook (along with Twitter and Snapchat) uses tricks to make people feel anxious and spend time there.
Facebook treats the video moderators like shit. And that’s in addition to the depression they feel from watching the videos.
The article gives no evidence that Utley’s death was caused by his job, but the way the managers treated it is despicable even if they did not cause it.
Naturally, these workers are subcontracted, so that Facebook can deny responsibility for how they are treated. But Facebook is in fact responsible: it demands contractors offer a low price, which they achieve by treating the workers like shit. We need laws to hold companies like Facebook responsible for the treatment of indirect workers, and give them employee rights such as sick leave.
It should be a felony for employees of a company to ask a worker to sign a nondisclosure agreement covering any aspect of the working conditions, benefits, or pay.
The most important of the techniques used by Facebook (and other antisocial media) to addict and manipulate victims.
Taxes
Facebook is a tax dodger.
Of course, it’s not the only one, but that is no excuse.
Racism
Facebook guesses the race of each used, and companies use this to show people different ads.
Facebook has introduced a racial discrimination feature that lets advertisers direct ads at people selected by race.
In response a group of Facebook useds have filed a lawsuit, which has led Facebook to stop allowing discrimination, although only in the specific areas where that is illegal in the US.
In other words, Facebook supports racism as far as the law allows.
Facebook is effectively racially profiling its useds, in an indirect and deniable way.
How “personalization” done by Facebook, presented as a feature, turns into a dangerous because it is done corruptly.
Facebook still allows housing advertisements to be targeted in discriminatory ways.
Facebook continues to facilitate racial discrimination in housing ads, according to a 2018 lawsuit.
Facebook faces a US government complaint for racial discrimination in housing advertisements.
Control of media
Facebook now intentionally puts positive stories about Facebook into its useds’ Facebook news feeds.
Climate denial ads on Facebook seen by millions, report finds.
Facebook threatens to subsume newspapers and magazines, gaining unprecedented power.
When a company has dangerous power, it is irrelevant whether it got that “fairly” in a “in a competitive open market”. We should not let that irrelevance distract us from what matters: protecting ourselves from their power.
The Facebook news feed, seen as an instance of the AI apocalypse.
It is important to keep in mind that Facebook is bad for many other reasons. This is one more reason to oppose it, but we had plenty already.
It is unfortunate that the article uses the term “content” to refer to published text. Just because CNN does that is no reason why we should follow its example.
Facebook’s automated “trending news stories”, not edited by human minds, include bogus stories, clickbait and disinformation.
Facebook Is Eating the Internet.
Facebook’s corporate-only news feed both directs useds away from independent journalism and tracks their reading.
Twitter told people about protests and the uniformed thugs’ violence in Ferguson (those who were interested), while Facebook mostly steered people away.
A convicted blackmailer who helped Putin crush independent media in Russia now owns a large stake in Facebook.
Facebook tries to discourage useds* from visiting other web sites.
(This article uses the word “content” to refer to published works. I think that is a bad practice since that term disparages the works. See gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.)
To free writers and publishers from the power of Facebook, don’t let Facebook direct what you read or watch.
You will do this automatically if you refuse to be a used of Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook account, so Facebook doesn’t know what I read, and has no direct influence on my choices.
Facebook Helped Consolidate Power for Cambodia’s Dictator and His Attack-Dog Media, Then Killed the Independent Press’s Platform.
To some extent the Cambodian government figured out how to use the policies that Facebook had anyway. However, some of the methods described in the article show that Facebook went out of its way to cooperate.
With Zuck’s Blessing, Facebook Quietly Stymied Traffic to Left-Leaning News Outlets.
The sites that suffered were not very leftist. One example cited was Mother Jones.
Attacks on Democracy
Many governments and political factions, in many countries, are making massive use of Facebook for disinformation.
The employee in charge of dealing this was fired, and posted internally a report on the magnitude of the problem. It seems that in most of these cases the staff mean well but they have no idea how to cope.
Facebook offers unaccountable access to people’s attention, enabling disinformation campaigns to affect elections. Facebook’s detailed profiling of its useds enables both political campaigns and outside groups to influence the voting behavior of specific types of people.
For manipulating Americans, Facebook is the platform of choice.
Don’t be so easy to manipulate — stop being a used of Facebook!
A special unit in Facebook actively aids political campaigns in the US and other countries. These politicians are likely subsequently to protect Facebook from regulation afterwards.
Facebook advertises based on its capacity to swing the results of elections.
By not letting it use us, we reduce that capacity.
It appears Russians used Facebook to recruit people for the troll’s rallies during the election campaign.
Allowing them to do this fits Facebook’s stated mission, “Bringing the world closer together”.
Arguing that Facebook deliberately promotes right wing extremism because it would benefit from a Republican victory.
Facebook sent troll farm output to 140 million Americans users each month. 100 million of them had not expressed any interest in those things — Facebook sent it to them spontaneously.
(Those figures are from 2019.)
Facebook did not seen to consider it urgent to put an end to this.
Miscellaneous
Meta-Facebook is suing to wipe out the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook says it works very hard to catch terrorist pages, but it’s amazing how much it does not find.
Facebook is a social network monopoly that buys, copies or kills competitors, antitrust committee finds.
Facebook was compelled to offer some additional options to limit use of certain kinds of personal data. So it designed the user interface to discourage people from using them.
Facebook plans to work with a right-wing think-tank funded by rich fossil fuel interests, supposedly to “protect” democracy.
The funding suggests that what they plan to protect is plutocracy.
A used of Facebook developed a browser add-on to make it easier to unfollow everyone and make one’s newsfeed empty. Users loved it, until Facebook threatened an absurd lawsuit that he could not afford to defend.
If the client software for Facebook were free, users could probably make the newsfeed disappear by modifying that software.
Nobelist journalist Maria Ressa says Facebook is “biased against facts.” I never thought of it that way, but that fits what we know about it. It does indeed “prioritize the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts.”
Facebook draws useds by promising interoperability, then eliminates the interoperability once it gets them hooked. Here’s how it did that with XMPP for messaging.
The writer of that page has recognized that the power Facebook has over its useds is dangerous, but hasn’t thought it through to the conclusion that we shouldn’t let Facebook use us.
Facebook measured the depth of its grip over its useds by trying to drive them away with malfunctioning apps. No matter how bad things got, the useds would not be driven away.
It is very important for you personally to refuse to use Facebook, especially if some of your friends do (or might), because that’s how you influence them, for good or for ill.
Facebook keeps track of how long people look at an item.
Unfriend Facebook now — you are its product, not its customer.
Facebook says that a used can’t have Facebook’s data about him, because it’s a trade secret.
A German regulator says that Facebook’s face recognition is illegal.
It appears Facebook spontaneously sends phone messages to people in India who have had no connection with Facebook. This person is trying to find out why.
Facebook has put an outrageous trademark claim on the word “book” into its terms of service.
To be dependent on Facebook, or any other specific company you could not replace with another, is to make yourself vulnerable to unbounded legal aggression. Don’t be a fool — unfriend Facebook today rather than accept these terms.
A credit agency in Germany plans to evaluate people’s creditworthiness by who their ‘friends‘ are on Facebook.
The lesson is that we should make sure that no activities collect information about lots of people’s social networks.
Facebook is attempting to gouge companies and web sites that use it to keep in touch with their customers.
The attitude of this criticism is too narrowly commercial for me to sympathize fully with it, and I expect that Facebook will reduce this charge so as to avoid driving these customers away. I am also repelled by the shallowness that leads to thinking that Facebook in April 2012 was good merely because it aided their commercial goals.
Nonetheless, this demonstrates the arrogant way Facebook treats anyone that deals with it, which is a reason not to be one of them.
Parents of children used by Facebook are suing for a refund of money Facebook let the children spend using the parents’ credit cards.
Facebook: the most congenitally dishonest company in America.
Lauren Weinstein: Fixing Facebook May Be Impossible.
If so, we must make it go away.
When useds of Facebook stop logging in, Facebook sends them emails to manipulate them to come back.
This does no direct harm to the used, but demonstrates how manipulative Facebook is in general.
Your real friends will keep in touch in some other way. Your other “friends”, you can do without.
Facebook protects far-right activists even after rule breaches.
Facebook pays its subcontracted workers very little, and treats them in a way that is cruel if not fraudulent. When they demanded better treatment, the subcontractor told them to shut up or quit.
Subcontracting enables Facebook to disclaim legal responsibility for all of this, but morally Facebook is entirely responsible.
If company A buys goods or services from company B, and none of the workers of B are particularly associated with company A’s purchase, there is usually no reason to hold A responsible for how B treats workers. But when B is hired to provide people to work for A, morally speaking they are working for A. We should change the law to match the morality.
Facebook staff discussed in a tone of cupidity how they were leading minors to spend their parents’ money playing games. Facebook kept the parents confused about the situation, too.
Facebook sponsored the rightwing Federalist Society to host a dinner honoring Justice Kavanaugh, who tried to commit rape years ago and lied about it while testifying to Congress.
This article argues that the bully’s executive order targeting social-media, supposedly a threat to Twitter, is really a message to Zuckerberg: “Keep on letting me use your platform to spread hatred and lies.” Zuckerberg seems to be willing.
Facebook’s management knew in 2018 that it profited by stirring up division between users, and decided to continue.
Facebook insisting on merging all WhatsApp data into its main data base. This is a great impetus to stop using WhatsApp forever.
Facebook told a subcontractor to pull the union representative (of subcontracted janitors) off work on Facebook’s building. That was because he organized a protest against Facebook’s demand to work so fast that it made people work overtime unpaid. This is likely to be tantamount to firing him, though perhaps with a legal loophole.
This is one more reason why subcontracting should be limited by law to small numbers of workers doing small total amounts of work.
Not every business is nasty to workers like this, but no business deserves rights the way humans do. Subcontracting generally gives workers less power over their work (pay, schedules, working conditions), even as it reduces the accountability over the business in regard to the work they do for customers. It benefits the business but harms everyone else. So let’s forbid it, except for small cases where a full-time employee would simply not make sense.
* We call them ‘useds’ rather than ‘users’ because Facebook is using them, not vice versa.
Filed under: 
AM deeply disappointed but not shocked. There’s no actual plan to look after people’s health, let alone properly inform them. This is societal or systemic breakdown.
