Facebook 451
How long until Facebook goes under? Generation Z are deactivating their accounts or avoiding the site altogether. Millennials—now dubiously designated by Jonathan Haidt as those born between 1982 and 1994—are increasingly abandoning their accounts or lamenting their dependence on it, often for professional reasons: promotion, group chats for work, organizing. The only reason I still have a Facebook account is to share my writing, music, video work, and event invitations. I hate it. I’ve quoted Dan Deacon before on Facebook, but he really nailed it a few years ago: unlike the idiosyncratic and volatile MySpace, going on Facebook is “like meeting everyone you’ve ever known in a mall food court.” It’s graphically bland and intentionally generic, homogenizing the experience of using social media to the point of anesthesia. For the first time, I’ve seen people ask—on Facebook—“Why is anyone still on here?” Good question.On Thursday we visited the Hollywood Reporter's "The PBS 'Frontline' Documentary That May Scare You Off Of Social Media (FB; TWTR; GOOG)".
Facebook’s reputation has crumbled since 2016, when the scale of their data warehouse and its alarming security vulnerabilities became clear. This week, PBS’ Frontline premiered a documentary called “The Facebook Dilemma” aired in two parts on Monday and Tuesday night. It’s a startling piece of journalism tackling very recent history: it opens with clips from an amateur documentary filmed at Facebook’s first offices in June 2005, where Mark Zuckerberg wears basketball shorts and drinks beer from a red solo cup on camera. At a certain point, people in the company realized they were building a “digital nation state,” and one employee recalls thinking at the time that “Mark isn’t going to stop until everyone is on Facebook.”
In November 2011, COO Sheryl Sandberg told reporters that “Our business model is by far the most privacy friendly to consumers… the only things that Facebook knows about you are the things you’ve done and told us.” Meanwhile, they were meeting with data brokerage firms to sell user data in order to justify their IPO and make wary investors come onboard. Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s director of public policy from 2009 to 2011, says these deals went down “four or five months” before the company’s IPO in May 2012. In 2010, Kara Swisher pressed Zuckerberg on Facebook’s privacy policy at a D9 panel event. As she recalls, and as the video shows, Zuckerberg began stammering and flop-sweating, so much so that Swisher “really thought he was going to faint.”...MORE
