Two Tech Geeks

Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason

Quartz wrote about [everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason(https://qz.com/1342757/everything-bad-about-facebook-is-bad-for-the-same-reason/).

It is true that Facebook rarely holds “ideological positions at odds with the community.” Since Facebook is banal, it typically lacks ideological positions about anything at all. The social-media platform has long tried to position itself as a bastion of neutrality, a platform for other people’s ideas, a passive conduit. When Swisher challenged Zuckerberg on allowing Sandy Hook deniers to spread their message, he said, “Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.”

But an organization with so much influence does not need to be ideologically opposed to society to cause harm. It only needs to stop thinking about humans, to feel comfortable dismissing religious violence, ethnic discrimination, hate speech, loneliness, age discrimination, and live-streamed death as “operational scaling issues.” To think of suicide as a “use case” for Facebook Live.

Recently I came across an Anti Islam page on Facebook. So, like every sensible person would, I reported the page to Facebook. Facebook customer service thanked me for taking the time to lodge the report but then goes on to say that the page doesn’t go against any of our specific Community Standards. It’s not the first time my reports about racists, discriminating and hateful posts have been ignored. Even reports about sham doctors dishing out false information and bad advice fell to deaf ears.

This sums up how toxic Facebook is.

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