The only good thing about Facebook is that no one is required to have an account. I deleted mine a year ago. Now, whenever someone talks about it, I feel like I’ve gone back in time: People still use Facebook?
Liberals are angry that Facebook didn’t do anything about Russians using the platform to spread ridiculous political memes during the 2016 election, obviously stealing the White House from Hillary Clinton. Conservatives are angry that Facebook’s algorithm sometimes buries content from right-leaning news websites and because some conservative personalities have had their pages suspended or deleted for any number of dumb reasons.
Others are angry at Facebook for mining their data, having found out that when Mark Zuckerberg asked them if they wanted to “share your location,” it wasn’t so he could mail them a bag of diamonds.
The solution proposed by nearly all of these people is for the government to do something. In an op-ed last week for the New York Times, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes said the government should “break up” the company by requiring it to spin off its Instagram and WhatsApp messaging properties, regulate how social media platforms protect user privacy, and set up a federal agency to police “acceptable speech” published on those platforms.
There’s another option: Users unsatisfied with what Facebook produces (which is nothing) can simply delete their accounts.
Throughout Hughes’ op-ed, he harps on all the “power” Zuckerberg has. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” and “[I]t’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.”
You would think Zuckerberg is a sexy god.
The only “power” Zuckerberg has is given to him freely by the people using his website. And the site is nothing more than a time suck that might occasionally double as a good social calendar. Facebook isn’t a caregiver and it’s not a community center.
Zuckerberg never said he was going to take care of his users, and anyone who thought that dumping all of their time and personal information into it deserves what they’re getting.
Hughes, in his op-ed, fretted over Facebook’s lack of competitors. “Imagine a competitive market,” he wrote, “in which [consumers] could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit.”
But these are apparently things that not enough people care about, because otherwise someone would have invented them already. More importantly, these are not things people need.
Having an account on Facebook, or anything like it, is required for literally nothing.
I wish McDonald’s served Maine lobster for $5.99. It doesn’t, so I don’t go there for Maine lobster. Likewise, Facebook didn’t show me the things I wanted to see, didn’t bring me any closer to my “friends,” and generally didn’t offer me anything useful. So I stopped going to Facebook.
True, a lot of people use Facebook to trade information, communicate with their friends and family, and learn about current events. And all of those people are aware that there are infinite other ways to do each of those things outside of that one platform.
Nobody needs the government to help them use Facebook. And if they do, they probably shouldn’t be online in the first place.
