I enjoy Facebook. I really do. I find myself there every day I’m near a computer, usually many times a day. I very much enjoy watching the children of young families (and I’m of an age when most families are young) growing up. I also enjoy mixing it up with smart people who keep me and everyone else honest, until ad hominem attacks start flying, that is, at which time I leave the scene. I like putting my Range posts up so people who don’t visit the Weekly site regularly can link to what I’m writing if they’re interested. I can do without the “This is what I’m eating” and “This is what I look like an hour after the last time I showed you what I looked like” posts. I scroll past those quickly. No harm, no foul.
But Facebook is also a stinking cesspool of misinformation and propaganda. No matter your political or social viewpoint, you’ll find posts designed to make you hate others who are on the other side of an issue, and even hate people who don’t care about it quite as passionately as you do. Evil forces did everything they could to use Facebook to undermine our last elections, with the Russian government leading the way. Today we learned Britain’s Brexit vote was most likely tainted by the same hands in the same way, which lots of us suspected already. And Zuckerberg & Co. aren’t doing a whole lot to fix things.
There’s not much I can do to change Facebook. I can protest by taking my page down and exiting the virtual gathering place entirely, but that wouldn’t accomplish much of anything except rob me of a little bit of pleasure. So I’ve decided to make a token protest. I have declared every Friday will be Facebook-Free Friday. Nobody cares that I won’t be hanging around Friday, least of all Mark Zuckerberg. But I have a feeling, if Zuckerberg saw his numbers drop dramatically Friday as part of a one-day-a-week boycott, he’d make an effort to fix the problems driving people away. He’s no fool. He understands his empire is built on people showing up. If they decide to leave en masse, he’s got nothing.
There’s no way to get all the bad actors off Facebook. They’ll find ways of coming back no matter what you do to block them. But I know this. If an employee came to Zuckerberg and told him he’d make an extra few billion a year if he cut out 80 percent of the truly damaging material on Facebook, he’d put a hundred of his best people on it right away who would use their super-human coding skills to detect nefarious postings, and he’d put a thousand people on monitoring duty to clean up what algorithms can’t accomplish on their own. He’d advertise easy-to-use, emoji-driven ways for users to report problems to his thousand monitors who could evaluate the suspect pages and see whether or not they’re real problems. He’d tell the people he’s assigned to the job, “Keep making it better. Report to me daily. Get it done. I want those billions!” Facebook would become a better, safer place, guaranteed. Where there’s a will, the brilliant, creative people Zuckerberg surrounds himself with would find a hundred ways.
If he could improve Facebook for a couple billion bucks, he can do it because it’s the proper moral, patriotic thing to do. He’s making a token effort now. He needs something to focus his mind. Nothing is weaker than the feeble strength of this one person leaving Facebook one day a week. But for me, it feels better than doing nothing. And if others do it . . .
(Next: Twitter Turnoff Tuesday?)
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2017.
Facebook-Free everyday!
The BIGGEST waste of time on this planet is facebook. I have WAY better activities to waste time with. I don’t have an account and I never will.
I waste too much time too, even without a computer at home. The one enjoyable thing about facebook is contact with decades old friends from my childhood, & posts from cousins I rarely see.
Dave, in your first paragraph your description of what you like about Facebook fits how I see and use Facebook. Then you go into a rant about Zuckerberg and attack his character because Facebook is in business to make a buck. That’s capitalism and entrepreneurism, from which we, at least most of us humans, have greatly benefited. Facebook is less than perfect, but what would be perfect for you, would not necessarily be perfect for me. To totally personalize Facebook would require a very complex algorithm, probably not worth the cost to develop. I don’t have problem with Facebook as it is, particularly since it’s free and optional, i.e., not required viewing. And if one anticipates propaganda and misinformation, and deals with it accordingly, what’s problem.
Regarding “Biggest waste of time on this planet is Facebook”, no, vacuuming the carpet is the biggest waste of time; it just gets dirty again.
Amen, AZ/DC. Amen.
You originally said, Buffett “hasn’t paid a penny on his $81 billion dollar fortune.” Now you say he paid $1.85 million in 2015 and extrapolated his entire tax payments over 40 years, though how you can do that is a mystery to me, and you called the $74 million you say he paid “a rounding error.” To recap, first he paid nothing, then he paid $74 million, which is the same as nothing. I have to say, your ability to admit you were wrong and say you weren’t wrong astounds me.
David,,
You are joing right? Really, really joking? You find out that Warren Buffett hasn’t paid one penny on the dollar, not even 1/10 of a penny on the dollar of his fortune while every year advocating for more taxes and small businesses that compete with his businesses and you defend him?
Pathetic.
Not one penny on the dollar. That’s what he has paid. Can you do math? Can you multiply by 40 working years. Can you divide by 81,000,000,000, as in $81 billion dollars?
He is in the zero tax bracket advocating for more taxes on people paying:
28% federal + 12.4% Social Security + 2.9% Medicare + 5% state + 5% sales + 10% regulatory load
Pretty pathetic David.