What else is new? The undeniable and unchallenged lord of the F***book empire continues to carelessly brandish an arrogant and childish world view along with the majority of the tech industry, because, well, he can. His recent open letter to society cements a snarky claim that he is holier than thou. As for the rest us ingrates, we are just plain stoopid and still can’t wrap our head around this whole internets thing.
From the heavily fortified catacombs of his Hawaiian estate and operations center, surrounded by a controversial 6′ foot high Medieval-style wall in an underwhelming tribute to Game of Thrones, the $70 billion dollar social network tycoon continues to employ subversive measures and aggressive disinformation campaigns in a lame attempt to detach the company from an array of serious transgressions, ranging from enacting horrendous corporate policy to the illegal handling of personal data.
And Zucky (Can I call him that?), has once again resorted to military grade espionage reeducation methods of subliminal shock treatment in shifting the plot to tame us chunderheads, so we keep our precious accounts active, and continue the valuable flood of consumer and political information that is simply be sold to the highest bidder for lucrative sums, or utilized for dark and insidious purposes. Hosting this wondrous effulgent forum combining transparency and collusion in a shockingly decadent orgy bordering on intellectual pornography, was of course the Washington Post. With all things being equal in the universe, Zuckerberg needs Jeff Bezos, and Bezos could care less about the fate of a digital community lurking in the shadows of the Amazon universe. Maybe Bezos just needed a laugh.
The king pin of F***book took to the print medium in blabbering through an oped, which requires no need for a verdict of audacity, as the purposeful empty words were derived from a source hopelessly naive, as the rules of accountability and decency, or for that matter the basic concept of the rules themselves, do not apply to the individual. In keeping with this reasonable theme, terms such as “bias” and “agenda” were carefully omitted from the text, and the juggernaut of “Cambridge Analytica” was reserved for the always rowdy comments sections, where strangers and bots under the guise of complete anonymity, waste the hours of the day and night sparring back and forth.
What Zuckerberg fails to address through phrases of reassuring cliches and superficial directives revising history, is the reality that his company deliberately moderates content pertaining to conservative ideology and Second Amendment issues, all while publicly claiming that the platform is an unbiased forum for the exchange of free through and ideas. Instead, the premise of the oped supports the false and tired narrative of the 2016 election results influenced by Russian hackers, and exclusive blame is assigned to outside sources. Chillingly, he fires this disturbing Orwellian nightmarish thought to close out his introduction.
“Our responsibility at Facebook is to amplify the good and mitigate the bad.”
Well, one has to start somewhere when implementing revisionist indoctrination control over the behavior patterns of end users. Thankfully, F***book is a public for profit entity, and individuals are free to cancel their accounts… or are they?
The entire tone of the piece seems a bit odd, as the recycled phrases of “fake accounts”, “bad actors”, “working with”, “took down”, and “blocked” are all addressed. Interestingly, in a thought fueled by a possible guilty subconscious, Zuckerberg admits that the company limits the reach of posts that do not ally politically, as they are categorized as a violation of the ambiguous community standards, a reality that right-leaning individuals and groups have been dealing with for roughly 10 months.
“And where posts are flagged as potentially false, we pass them to independent fact-checkers — such as the Associated Press and the Weekly Standard — to review, and we demote posts rated as false, which means they lose 80 percent of future traffic.”
In reading between the lines, the chairman of the vast social network has declared war on ideals contradictory to those shared by the tech community, and now there exists an absolute formula in ensuring that flagged content reaches the least amount of users possible, but that pales in comparison to the intrepid hypocrisy within Zuckerberg’s call to inaction.
He mentions multiple times within his missive, the alleged prevalence of international “bad actors” polluting the organic tapestry of social networks with “fake accounts”. However, F***book and other online communities contract with these so-called sketchy elements in boosting traffic, interactions, and overall revenue. Hmm. It seems that amplifying the bad for personal gains, is the more apt phrase in describing the company’s true responsibility.
Can we hire a voice over professional to emulate Trump in declaring, “Mr. Zuckerberg, you’re deleted!”
