Facebook; Can We Trust It?

This article was originally published April 16, 2018, over Proclivities’ Principle Wisdom — In man’s unceasing endeavor to manage his affairs and appetites, throughout time with unyielding skill and determination, there are phenomenons and peculiarities to consider. (wordpress.com)

“It’s less a real crisis about Russians, the Trump election or scamsters like Cambridge Analytica than a long overdue reckoning. Americans, who for decades, have been clinging to reassuring myths about the origins and purpose of the Internet are finally beginning to ask important questions about this awesome Pentagon-designed surveillance tool they’ve enthusiastically welcomed into their homes, bedrooms, purses and pockets.” ~Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi in his recently published special report in this month’s issue of Rolling Stone Magazine “The Facebook Menace” has posed the question, “Should we be asking Facebook to “fix” its problems or should we be fixing Facebook?” An important and enlightening question most Facebook users are too deluded to actually postulate and conceive as a state of overly dependent and too engrossed in our own selves seems to be the Facebook cultural ethos. Taibbi goes on to end his special report with this enlightening statement, “A generation of this kind of messaging is bound to have some pretty weird consequences, of which electing proudly ignorant bubble-thinker Donald Trump is probably just a gentle opener. Given that, we might be too late to fix Facebook — maybe we need to be saved from it instead.”

The Internet was originally designed for military applications in its use with the popularized belief, “The Internet is a force for good, supporting inclusion and democracy.” But I question the biased political thinking of men who used an object as a surveillance tool and when Henry Lewis Stimson’s, the Secretary of War under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman quipped, “Gentlemen don‘t read each other‘s mail.” A surveillance tool is only as “good” as the information it can supply and benefits those interested only in the data. To those whom it is infringing upon, it becomes a colossal menace. It’s like a parasitic infection where only one organism benefits at the expense of another. Hence Taibbi’s hilarious, truthful, but very sad quote, “Designed to be addictive, Facebook feels like a giant blood-engorged tick hanging off your frontal lobe.”

The Internet was designed to be a defense military project which had its advent in the Sixties. Keeping tabs on domestic and foreign resistance movements was one of the net’s original design goals, which is one reason it’s no surprise most of the big Internet-based firms today — Facebook, Google, Amazon — also contract with the military and/or security services.

“In his book, [Yasha] Levine points to the fact that from the very start, the proto-Web banked info collected by the likes of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency…..Surveillance was baked into the original mission of the Internet, Levine says.”

Yet, a surveillance tool, that was designed for data collection, was never conceived that it would become a tool where companies manipulate one’s personal information for commercial and political motives? How is that possible in a cultural ethos of the very climate it operates and works in; “Intelligence?” Seriously folks, are we being misled here by Taibbi, or does Taibbi not want to offend the men in black by proposing their own lack of intelligence? How can we not foresee the inherent evil in something that was designed for evil intent?

One of the problems with this mega-giant is whether to deem it a “news media” source which Facebook insists it is not! Yet the information was deliberately manipulated and disseminated to various users during the 2016 presidential election campaign making it a propaganda tool. If it’s deemed a “news media” source then the government and Mark Zuckerburg are newly found best friends and that means for Zuckerberg, a whole line of new headaches known as government compliance standards. Still, the company conceives itself as a “movement” and not a giant corporation. Weird.

Does anybody remember receiving a picture of Vladimir Putin dressed in black leather, S&M style clothing, holding a whip in one hand, and in the other, a black leather dog leash that was tethered to a collar which was fitted around Donald Trump’s neck while Trump was positioned next to Putin on his knees? It would have come up in your Facebook News Feed while Trump and Clinton were campaigning for the 2016 presidency. The image ran a parallel to the one pictured above. If you didn’t see this picture in your News Feed you probably didn’t have your personal political perspectives listed in your profile. I personally remember this piece of “black propaganda” which was designed to make Trump look bad and cast suspicion as to who would really be running our country if Donald Trump won.

One of the saddest points to this whole affair is how dimly understood the new business works, as well as how government surveillance works, by Facebook. It is a “news media” source and can be deemed that quite frankly. It’s funny that a military surveillance tool should now fall back into the hands of its original owners. Things that make you go, “Hmmmm.”

“It’s a misconception that Facebook sells the personal data of its users. What it sells is its hackerish expertise in snatching and analyzing your personal info from everywhere — on the site and outside it. Facebook keeps tabs on who has an anniversary coming up, who’s in a long-distance relationship, who uses credit cards, who likes baseball and who likes cricket, who observes Ramadan, who’s participated in a time-share, and countless other things.”

One of the major problems with Facebook is that it is not a creditable newsworthy source. It lacks a fact-checker on many of its supposed truths. The sad truth is that Facebook became a titan tailored at delivering news strictly for the laziest, meanest, least intellectually tolerant version of you; your id brain. Facebook works on stimulating the “pleasure centers” of your neural network by an innocuous feature known as the “Like” button. “It’s a social-validation feedback loop,” says Napster’s Sean Parker. “Exactly the kind of thing a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

“It’s designed to match people to information that will reinforce their existing prejudices, whatever those are,” he says. This is what people don’t understand about the “fake news” problem. This isn’t a crack in the system. It is the system. The new age of targeted information distribution is designed to make campaigns of manipulation not just possible but inevitable. It is what the product was designed for.”

Since Facebook decided to incorporate a News Feed feature, this elevated the sophistication to which people could more readily gather information. Now, news comes to you — is even offered to you, suggested in the way a magician offers a card — as part of an artificial entertainment experience that skewed consumers' expectations in a highly specific way.

“I read this on Facebook” soon came to mean something like “I read this in a highly individualized intellectual masturbation session.” The news became a thing that only made it through if it fits into those constant, round-the-clock sorties. Facebook was flying straight to your personal pleasure center. Simultaneously, the news stopped being a broadcast program designed to be digested, for good or ill, by a group, as families had once done over their nightly dinner tables.” Fox and other media news sources were finding it hard to compete with this giant menace.

“The main driver of misinformation diffusion is the polarization of users on specific narratives rather than the lack of fact-checked certifications.” Translation: Lazy thinking and sheltered mental environments lead to more misinformation than fake news does.”

Taibbi goes on to propose that Facebook has become a giant tumor and “when a tumor starts growing teeth and hair, you don’t comb the hair. You yank the thing. And it turns out we have a mechanism for just that.” What Taibbi suggests is breaking up the company just like the government broke up Standard Oil, AT&T, and countless other less-terrifying overgrown corporate tyrants. For what reason: “A functioning free press just can’t coexist with an unaccountable private regulator.”

But it’s not like the government or anyone else could cry out an antitrust action against the company. “Because market size alone, unless gained through improper means, is not a basis for action.”

“Different groups have proposed creating fact-checking star chambers either within the government, Facebook or both — it may be the least-intrusive solution, one that moreover doesn’t create a “legitimacy” standard that could threaten alternatives or dissenting media.”

The real solution to this problem would be to dial back the use of the data-collection technologies that have turned companies like Facebook into modern-day versions of the “propaganda stations” the Federal Radio Commission was so bent on keeping off the airwaves a century ago.

The difference in Facebook doesn’t push Nazism or communism or anarchism, but something far more dangerous: 2 billion individually crafted echo chambers, a kind of precision-targeted mass church of self, of impatience with others, or not giving a shit.

Source: Taibbi, Matt. Rolling Stone Magazine. The Facebook Menace: A hard look at Zuckerberg’s dangerous empire, Issue 1311/1312 April 13-May 3, 2018