Look, at this stage everyone knows Facebook is an evil monstrosity that is maliciously exploiting us and our data at every turn, but at the same time it is undeniably the best service for keeping track of what a bunch of half-strangers you hate are doing with their lives.
Like it or not: we’re shackled to Facebook. Sure, you can be one of those people who’s conspicuously not present on it – but you’re just marking yourself out as a super weirdo who doesn’t care if you don’t get invited to anything anymore.
Facebook is at a historically unprecedented point where it’s a medium of communication and news dissemination used by pretty much everyone on the planet but it’s completely privately owned. Pretty much they can fuck with us however we like and we can’t do shit about it, because we love looking at memes and videos of dogs so much.
If Facebook is one of the major ways people get their news, what happens if they start censoring stuff? Well, they already totally are. Former Facebook employees revealed that their team of “news curators” pick and choose what trending topics will show up on the site, in addition to adding stuff to the trending section that isn’t actually trending.
The biggest accusations have been that they’re censoring news from right-wing publications like Breitbart from appearing, which might be a short term victory for you if you’re left leaning, but a long term loss for all of us as Mark Zuckernerd starts controlling all our thoughts via radio waves (okay probably not that bad, but still pretty bad).
Interestingly, they’ve also been screening the trending topics for news about Facebook, which (very ironically) means shit like this that criticises them won’t actually show up. Suuure seems like those cheeky billionaire nerds have got something to hide.
Facebook has denied the claims but, I mean, you would, wouldn’t you.
Source: Gizmodo.
Photo: Getty Images / Justin Sullivan.
