Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service available from 2006 for potential account holders. It had gained one billion active users by February 2012.

Quotes about Facebook

 * I think with all technology, people have an idea of how it will be used, but then it has a life of its own and people use it in all kinds of ways. In the same way with Facebook. I doubt when people first created Facebook they imagined it was going to help people in Egypt overthrow a dictator. So it does have a life of its own that we can’t predict.
 * Heather Brooke, "Chatham House Talk", 28 September 2011.


 * On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg describes his personal mission this way: “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” There is no mention of ripping apart the social fabric. Tobacco companies once tried marketing like this: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!” The difference is, the media called them on it. A glowing cover story in Time magazine from 2014 opens with a photo of Zuckerberg surrounded by a crowd of poor children in India. “Our mission is to connect every person in the world,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying. The article does briefly note the obvious financial interest Facebook has in hooking every living person on social media. But the piece quickly moves on to suggest that “creating wealth and saving lives” are likely Zuckerberg’s real motives. When elites do focus their attention on Facebook, it’s invariably to demand the company exert even more control over its users. Following the 2016 election, there were widespread calls for Facebook to further restrict the news Americans are allowed to see on the site. According to the Washington Post, Barack Obama took Zuckerberg aside during a meeting of world leaders in Peru and begged him to impose greater censorship. Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California made the same demand. “You created these platforms and now they are being misused,” she said. “And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will.” If only Obama and Feinstein were as concerned about Facebook’s relentless invasions of the public’s privacy. Or about the millions of addicted users steadily degrading from its use. Or about the rending of the social fabric.
 * Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018)
 * FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. Why care that they track this data? Think the future, not just today. ... It isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom.
 * Chet Faliszek Twitter (2 April 2018).


 * Facebook has now firmly established itself as a hub on the internet, making it a destination for surfers to do multiple tasks such as communications, gaming, shopping, photo-sharing and information gathering.
 * Chris Green - an analyst at the Davies Murphy Group consultancy, quoted on BBC News, "Facebook tops Google searches for UK in 2013", 17 December 2013.


 * I would ask [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg], 'Can you explain to me the reasoning why such broad access to user data is granted, especially friends' data?
 * Aleksandr Kogan in "Facebook: Your personal info for sale" by Aimeee Picchi, CBS News, March 21, 2018


 * This power over our egos has granted Facebook what we can think of as bullying rights. It routinely attempts to bully people into compliance with its rules on the boundaries of free speech, using tactics such as arbitrarily blocking users or reducing the visibility level of particular posts and videos.
 * Malhotra, R. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds. New Delhi : Rupa, 2021.


 * The hard reality is that the more you interact with Facebook, the more control it will assert over you. The company’s tactic is to encourage people to comply by intimidating them enough to internalize Facebook’s way of thinking. Users are reluctant to walk away from the platform because they have invested time and energy in it and are unwilling to abandon their relationships.
 * Malhotra, R. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds. New Delhi : Rupa, 2021.


 * A big part of Facebook's pitch is that it has so much information about its users that it can more effectively target ads to those who will be responsive to the content. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet.
 * Christopher Matthews, (January 15, 2014). "More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled Facebook Since 2011". Business.time.com. Retrieved April 22, 2014.


 * Facebook is the backbone of small business in America
 * Kevin O'Leary "Facebook runs small business in America, says shark Kevin O’Leary (October 5, 2021)
 * Now let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began 5 years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill. What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth.
 * Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize lecture, 10 December 2021


 * Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts.
 * Maria Ressa How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022)


 * I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues.
 * Maria Ressa How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022)


 * The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to.
 * Zephyr Teachout, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was an utter sham (11 April 2018), .


 * Facebook likes to present itself as a tech company, but often appears more like an advertising corporation that happens to use digital technology in order to conduct its core business. [...] Facebook represents a new kind of corporate power, the dimensions of which are only now becoming apparent.
 * "The Observer view on how Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy" (editorial), , 17 March 2018


 * Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.
 * Richard Stallman, Facebook is a surveillance engine, not friend: Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
 * I have one friend whose Facebook updates are exclusively complaining about Facebook.
 * Paul F. Tompkins, Pod F. Tompkast, "EXTRASODE: Chik Tract", 31 July 2012.


 * I doff my fedora to this Facebook! It's the smartest way to keep people dumb since we started fluoridating the water.
 * Henry Topple (John Hodgman) Codefellas.


 * I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years. [...] I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things.
 * Jimmy Wales, "Jimmy Wales on tech's future", Orlando Sentinel, 3 November 2007.


 * Facebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity. The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say.  Facebook posts by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian rightwinger whose 2017 re-election is widely viewed as fraudulent, received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook Pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – that had been set up to look like Facebook user accounts.
 * Facebook knew of Honduran president’s manipulation campaign – and let it continue for 11 months, Julia Carrie Wong and Jeff Ernst, The Guardian, (13 April 2021)


 * לא לדאוג, אנחנו על זה #פייסבוק_מתה
 * Do not worry, we are on it. # Facebook_died
 * זק״א "Facebook's 'Meta' rebrand translates to 'dead' in Hebrew" (October 31, 2021)

Quotes from Facebook

 * We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That's why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts.
 * Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of global policy management, as reported by CNBC, January 17, 2018


 * We stand against all forms of hate including hate targeting the Muslim community. We do not allow people to attack anyone based on their race, ethnicity, national origin or religion, and we remove this hate speech as soon as we become aware of it...Facebook “appreciate[s] feedback from governments, experts and communities as we work to keep our platform safe.
 * Statement emailed to Al Jazeera on October 26, ,2020


 * [Facebook had removed the president's posts] because we judged that their effect - and likely their intent - would be to provoke further violence
 * according to Facebook blocks Trump 'at least until transition complete' January 7, 2020


 * The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,
 * It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter."
 * Facebook regional managing director William Easton told the Associated Press according to "Facebook restricts users, publishers from sharing news content in Australia" ( February 17, 2021)


 * We've been combatting human trafficking] on our platform for many years and our goal remains to prevent anyone who seeks to exploit others from having a home on our platform
 * Our goal is to help deter people from searching for this type of content
 * spokesperson Andy Stone "Facebook has known it has a human trafficking problem for years. It still hasn't fully fixed it" (October 25,2021)


 * [the existing brand could not] possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future
 * Mark Zuckerberg "Facebook changes its name to Meta in major rebrand" (October 29, 2021)