My mother uses Google every day. She'll do a search for the bylaws for her municipality. Or she'll search for ingredient substitutions in a recipe she's reading. She's got a toe dipped into the Twitter ocean. She'll click on the odd thing on Twitter to read a thread posted by her local councillor, or something by a comedian she likes. She's even shown me cat memes from Reddit!
But where were the bylaws being discussed, such that she wanted to look them up? Where did she find that recipe in the first place? Where did she hear about something written by her city councillor? Where did she see a link to a video clip on Reddit or Twitter?
On Facebook, of course. She's generally aware that big tech is turning our society into a surveillance-consumption dystopia. And it's obvious how central Facebook is to this. More obvious than Google. Facebook is the first page she loads every time she gets on the computer. It sends her notifications on her tablet. She has an account on Facebook -- almost everyone here does. She doesn't have a Twitter or Reddit account. Just passive drive-by reading.
Facebook is the central pillar from her perspective. It's obviously heavily personalized content. You basically have to be logged in to use it. It's very obvious to see how they could manipulate you by selecting which messages and news stories you see on your personalized feed. Facebook might as well be the Internet for some people. So Facebook draws the ire. By comparison, Google and their ads, and their trackers, are under the surface, in the background, operating largely unseen by many. (Many people also seem to be unaware Google owns Youtube, oddly.)
“ While the blame for President Trump’s incitement to insurrection lies squarely with him, the biggest social media companies — most prominently my former employer, Facebook — are absolutely complicit. They have not only allowed Trump to lie and sow division for years, their business models have exploited our biases and weaknesses and abetted the growth of conspiracy-touting hate groups and outrage machines.”[1]
“What is clear, however, is that Facebook was a “key vector of distribution for untrustworthy websites.” [2]
“ In the Philippines, Facebook staff trained Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign, which then used the platform to circulate disinformation, including a fake endorsement from the pope and a fake sex tape of a political opponent. Since winning, Duterte has paid armies of online trolls to harass, dox and spread disinformation about journalists and political opponents on Facebook. Although Facebook has since organized safety and digital literacy workshops while hiring more Tagalog speakers, journalists still contend that Facebook hasn’t “done anything to deal with the fundamental problem, which is they’re allowing lies to be treated the same way as truth and spreading it … Either they’re negligent or they’re complicit in state-sponsored hate”.” [3]
[1]https://hbr.org/2021/01/how-to-hold-social-media-accountable...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2020/03/21/facebook...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...