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On the decline of Facebook



Facebook has become a hot topic of discussion lately. NPR and CNBC, not to mention plenty of other sources, reported that the company's stock is down $80 billion in value, following news that the company allowed the data of more than  50 million users to be sent to third parties without their permission.

Like a lot of people, I made my Facebook account to stay in touch with friends after I graduated high school and everyone, for the most part, went their separate ways. I've never been a huge fan of Facebook, that's not why I've used it for so long. I use it because, simply, that's how a huge number of my friends and I communicate. It's also a good way to keep in touch with people I don't necessarily talk to more than every once in awhile.

Back in 2009, Facebook was the up-and-coming app, the shiny new competitor to Myspace - the Pepsi to Myspace's Coke.

This huge data leak is a big deal, and it should be treated accordingly. Still, especially for those of us who have had it for awhile - are we really surprised?

Facebook has had privacy issues for a long time. That doesn't make it okay - that's not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying it shouldn't have taken this long for such an outrage to happen. Facebook has become a hugely unregulated platform for advertising and app development. Anyone can post to Facebook and, while that sounds nice in theory, history is full of examples of why giving human beings free reign to as they wish usually ends up with a lot of people getting their balls kicked, figuratively and literally.

For example: those fun apps you play all the time, those "TAKE THIS QUIZ TO FIND OUT WHICH NINJA TURTLE YOU ARE!" types of quizzes? Those are actually designed to gather data to infer upon your preferences, personality, and lifestyle without your knowledge so that third-parties can market ads to you. That's been a matter of public record for years. And that's just one example of the fuckery Facebook has been pulling right in front of us this whole time.

It's also been widely-discussed that Facebook is engineered to be addictive. Again, for years. I personally have, on several occasions, closed a window containing my Facebook feed, only to open it again seconds later without thinking about it.

Facebook's recent ad campaign has made it painfully obvious they know their user base is slipping away, and they're desperate to mitigate the impending exodus.

So the question is: to delete or not to delete?

Again, this is something all of us should have asked a long time ago. I'm no exception.

For the moment, Facebook is an echo chamber at best and a minefield of ads, iffy apps, and shitposts at worst...depending on who you're talk to. Everyone's Facebook experience is a little different, thanks to its tendency to alter itself based on your preferences.

In time, I think there will definitely come a point where I will delete Facebook. It's useful to me for now, and I've been cutting back substantially on my use of it, but scandals like this are good, in a silver lining kind of way. They remind us that Facebook is nobody's friend.

Take a look at this clip from "Wayne's World" (1992) and replace "Benjamin" with "Facebook." You'll see what I mean.


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