Letter to the editor: Facebook propagates digital dystopia

1984 witnesses Mark Zuckerberg’s birth. By 2020, he influences over 2.7 billion Facebook users. His net worth exceeds $54 billion. A third of the planet uses Facebook, a company with only 30,000 employees.Facebook fulfills user wants, not necessarily needs. Its popularity astounds Corporate America. Deploying artificial-intelligence (AI) for platform surveillance commoditizes user participation. AI distills each user’s behavior into a set of about 29,000 predictive criteria. Selling user profiles fuels Facebook. Extracting information from Facebook pages enables construction of shadow profiles for those not even on the platform.Facebook-derived user data empowers advertisers. These advertisers develop targeted ads for groups as small as 20. Not only Corporate America but foreign intelligence agencies benefit from this approach. Nowadays, the flood of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and fake news radicalize users.Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg call Facebook a public utility. However, regulation and profit margins set by government oversight define public utility conduct. Roger McNamee, author of “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,” highlights Facebook’s past performance as anything but that of a public utility. He observes, “They have taken advantage of our trust, using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of human psychology,  » Read More