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How Facebook (ab)uses your mobile number!

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I am receiving quite a few notifications on the Facebook mobile app (although I don’t look that often), asking me to do something with my mobile number, well I didn't think I had it on there, in fact I don’t have it on my profile, but in researching further I discovered it’s there in the background, stupid me. More about that in a bit, but first a few things to share for context.

I am not a big fan of Facebook and I am very suspicious of Mark Zuckerberg. He is exactly the same as any dictator who has ever lived and lied his way into becoming a billionaire, just think about it.

Facebook had 2.912 billion monthly active users as of January 2022, placing it 1st in ranking of the world’s most ‘active’ social media platforms. Nearly 3 billion people on the globe have happily shared their email and very likely their mobile number with Facebook. This data that we have so willingly shared is a forever unlimiting goldmine for Facebook, it’s shareholders and it’s advertisers. Facebook’s monthly active users equate to 36.8% of all the people on Earth today. I call that a pretty big dictatorship!

They (Facebook) have been accused of so many data crimes, but have never been prosecuted and nobody has gone to jail, okay they’ve had a few minor fines, which basically was pocket change for them. You can read the whole timeline of their crimes here: A timeline of trouble: Facebook's privacy record and regulatory fines, by Guild ~ 4 August, 2021

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Sludge Theory is alive, well and thriving everywhere!

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The two defining characteristics of a sludge (Thaler, 2018) are “friction and bad intentions” (Goldhill, 2019). While Richard Thaler strongly advocates nudging for good by making desirable behaviour easier, a sludge does the opposite: It makes a process more difficult in order to arrive at an outcome that is not in the best interest of the sludged. Examples of sludges include product rebates that require difficult procedures, subscription cancellations that can only be done with a phone call and complicated or long government student aid application forms.

Even when a sludge is associated with a beneficial behaviour (as in student aid, voter registrations or driver’s licenses, for example), costs can be excessive. These costs may be a difficulty in acquiring information, unnecessary amounts of time spent, or psychological detriments, such as frustration (Sunstein, 2020).

Facebook

So Facebook have changed their algorithm again and the world is up in arms. Regular users are raising their arms in celebration and those with business pages are raising their arms in anger.

All of us who have business pages were promised a free business page to promote our business to followers for free.

And then things slowly changed for the worst.

Slowly our business posts stopped appearing on our followers newsfeeds. But all the trainers out there suggested that as followers rarely will go back to the business page, we must keep active and post at least once per day.

What a crock of s..t, that turned out to be.

My motto with Social Media is ‘expect the unexpected’, the fake news debate has given Facebook the best excuse ever.

Right, they said, let’s reduce the amount of business page posts to newsfeeds in case it contains fake news and that way we can tell owners of business pages that the only way they can have visibility is to pay for our bargain basement adverts.

Let’s change the forecast for Facebook ad revenue by 2020, which was $60 billion, just mobile ads by the way, to $90 billion.

The only winner for this change of algorithm is Facebook.

DUH, who else did you think was going to benefit, you?

Happy Facebooking!

Michael de Groot