If I said to you that the Internet was being run by criminals and the only way to stop them is for you to stop using the Internet, you would never do it. The reason you’d never do it is because you can’t do without the Internet. It’s like electricity, gas and oil, you and everyone else couldn’t survive without it.
The same applies with Facebook. Facebook is so much part of society, an eco-system we just can’t do without. Most of us know that it causes untold harm in the world, people post the worst of humankind on the platform and Facebook are struggling to regulate themselves.
When Facebook became mainstream, we were all so overjoyed, apart from email there was nothing, well okay maybe Friends Reunited and MySpace, that allowed us to communicate and befriend almost anyone. In the beginning we would only connect with family and friends, this then grew beyond people we knew and we accepted requests from complete strangers. I wonder why we did this? Maybe we wanted to receive more likes (love) from strangers to makes us feel good about ourselves?
Facebook is like electricity, like gas and oil, maybe even food. We can not live without it, governments know this too and they can not live without it either, so any regulation or the dishing out of fines will always be small, because they need to make use of the platform to enable human surveillance, I know because I’ve heard this from Cyber Security professionals who advice the U.K. government.
Not everyone is staying on the platform though. They have lost users and more people tell me that they don’t do Facebook. They often say they prefer Instagram, haha they don’t realise it’s also Facebook! Some say they don’t do either, they prefer WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends. Oops that’s also Facebook! You see you can’t get away from them. Thousands of small business owners who have your email address and/or mobile phone number are able to add it to Facebook audiences and target you with ads and the latest changes to Facebook, which means you can’t even get your details removed from the advertisers that uploaded them, even if you’re not there. Facebook says nobody can see those details, but Facebook has them!
Happy Facebooking, just know who they are.