Erin Kissane: Untangling Threads
Less emotionally, I think it’s unwise to assume that an organization that has…
- demonstrably and continuously made antisocial and sometimes deadly choices on behalf of billions of human beings and
- allowed its products to be weaponized by covert state-level operations behind multiple genocides and hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of smaller persecutions, all while
- ducking meaningful oversight,
- lying about what they do and know, and
- treating their core extraction machines as fait-accompli inevitabilities that mustn’t be governed except in patently ineffective ways…
…will be a good citizen after adopting a new, interoperable technical structure.
Increasingly I'm of the mind that "social media" has been a net negative. Whatever else it has been, it has also always been a tool for propaganda, for harassment, for distortion. And if you think that's a bit rich of me to say, I invite you to read Erin's article, where the case is made that even if it can be good in the hands of the right steward, Meta/Facebook is not an unwitting or hapless one but an actively terrible one.