Sean Parker is back in the news.
It’s way worse than what this clown Parker has to say. Facebook knew what they were doing. They knew it was the user they were selling.
I was there, I saw it happen. I couldn’t believe people would do this. I was beside myself, telling anyone who’d listen what was going to happen. People looked at me like I was crazy. No one listened. Now here we are.
Facebook cooked up a scam and called it a service. Convinced the world what they were doing was good. The scam wasn’t new, it was dotcom redux — give it away free, hook ’em, sell everything the user does while using the service to anyone who’ll pay.
To get there, to get the users to sell, it started with fee. Who can resist free? From there they needed the user to spend as much time as possible on their site – because more time on site = more data mined = more sales. So their entire design approach was to hook users (free, free drugs), so they could steal (okay, it wasn’t stealing because users agreed in the Terms and Conditions) everything the user did and said while on the site then sell it. The user was the product being sold.
I still can’t believe this has happened. I keep thinking people are going to wake up.
Facebook, is a sleazy company. Anyone who’s part of them is complicit. The fact they’ve been able to achieve what they have is such a bad sign for our society.
I knew how bad it’d be for addicts. Because leading up to MySpace, I was already hooked on the Internet. I was looking at porn in 1989, waiting an hour for boobs to load over a 1200 baud modem. From there I was on chat. I was chatting with people all over the world, “friends”, at all times of day. Then the Pipeline hit, I was all over that. Then it was forums. I was in deep, I had it bad. Voices from the Internet in my head all day long.
When Facebook hit I knew what happened to me was going to happen to millions, scratch that, billions of others. And it did.
Social media is a social disease. But it didn’t cost us our democracy or our freedom. No. The users did that. Because all Facebook and the other social media companies did was lay drugs on the porch with a sign “Free drugs. Use as much as you want, anytime you want. We have an endless supply, they’ll always be free. We’ll even bring them to you”.
The beat goes on until people do one simple thing — turn it off. Turn off social media. Then keep it off.
But getting off of drugs is really hard. I know it, the social media companies know it.
The way to get off of drugs is to stop using drugs. As powerful as the social media companies are, people have more power.
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