As I pointed out in the comments on yesterday’s post, a hallmark of authoritarian regimes is their need to make everybody inform on everyone else.
Facebook, the online marketing firm to which the state has long outsourced its censorship work, has now dropped any pretext of being an open forum where people of varying opinions can freely discuss ideas. Instead, they are issuing Stasi-style calls for their users to rat on friends and family members suspected of heresy against the Death Cult.
On the odd chance you still had a Facebook account for some reason, that reason no longer exists. Delete your Facebook account. Don’t wait for your Funko Pop-Cultist college roommate or your three mask-wearing wine aunt to turn you in. Facebook has openly declared itself a surveillance state contractor. Get off their platform now!
For those who used to follow me on Facebook, you can find me on Gab.
And if you want a fun read that puts the white-knuckle thrills back in sci fi anthologies, find it in Combat Frame XSeed: Classified Intel
I never liked microblogs. This is just the icing on the “Farewell!” cake.
On a related note, I find it hilarious how clingy Facebook is. The deletion option is well hidden inside Settings, under headings that in no way suggest that the “delete” option is there. Then, they leave you with a “scheduled for deletion” message informing you that you can still change your mind if you log in within the next 30 days. Dark patterns, I think they call it, when a website is designed in such a way that it will naturally incline you to spend or waste money, or in this case keep your account active.
IIRC, they DON’T delete accounts, even the ones by mass murderers. They just archive them. All the better reason to avoid Facebook.
Amazon Prime does something similar. Here’s at least how it was when I cancelled it:
-First the option to cancel is not in an obvious place. You have to dig for it.
-When you finally find the link you are taken to a page that talks about all the benefits you will lose if you actually go through with it. The option to cancel is buried between three buttons, two of which boot you out of the process and the third gives you an e-mail reminder to consider canceling, but otherwise does nothing.
-If you click on the cancel option you STILL won’t actually cancel. Instead you are taken to a page where Amazon offers alternate payment options. Again, option to cancel is buried between three other buttons which are similar to the last step.
-Clicking again and you get ANOTHER confirmation page, again with other buttons to keep your membership or to only get an e-mail reminder to reconsider. If you confirm here you actually do cancel.
I would also recommend deleting all payment information from Amazon. I don’t think it’s necessary to avoid payment, but it can’t hurt.
All the pages also heavily imply that canceling will cause you to immediately lose benefits. So for example if you signed up for an annual plan three months ago, you may think that canceling will require having paid for nine months of use that you can’t get refunded. In fact you maintain access until the end of your pay period but you aren’t informed of this until you have actually canceled the membership.
Facebook and sites like it don’t produce any inherently valuable products. YOU are the product. Hence their reluctance to let you go.
Some of the more paranoid among us might suspect Facebook’s willingness to censor and surveil explains how a college dropout like Zuckerberg managed to get as far as he has. Yes, FB is evil by design. No, they are not providing a service worth having, even for “free.”
Like I said above, FB, Google, et al. don’t provide value to users. Instead, their business model is built on selling user data to marketers.
Never mind Section 230, simply enforcing basic property laws would bring Big Tech to heel.
I wish you were on Social Galactic, you’ve got more than a few fans over there. Still, I can understand why you might not be. I dropped my FB years ago when I realized it would only get me into trouble, don’t miss it.