Bye Bye Facebook

Goodbye Facebook

By Stephen P. Pizzo

So I am freshly off a multi-day banishment from Facebook.

What did I do to offend Facebook’s newly found sensibilities? I’d tell you in detail, but that would end up getting this post taken down as well and, since it’s my final FB post, I’d like to avoid that. Suffice to say I reposted a meme of a Trump MAGA hat, with a replacement, (and unflattering,) slogan on it. The first word was “White.” The second you can guess.

I’m not proud of it. I readily admit it was, at best, a sophomoric act. But fighting with the flood of rightwing trolls, neo-fascists and Trumpsters on FB does bring the worst out in me. Besides, it’s a waste of time. As George Bernard Shaw once noted; “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

Anyway, that was my sin. Not a fake video or racially inflammatory rhetoric. Just a direct insult aimed at Trump’s “deplorables”

Ironically though, that enforced timeout gave me a chance to think about all this and ask myself some questions…questions I hope more folks will start asking. Like, just what is the value proposition Facebook offers its users really?Facebook may have started as a place to connect with friends and relatives, but it’s now devolved into a place where like-minded folk gather in cyber-circle-jerks to satisfy each other’s already held opinions. It’s a kind of cathartic vehicle that provides a place to vent the ever-growing angst and frustrations which now soak today’s society and politics. And, as I did, a place to strike back at those who support the people and politics that upset us so much…for all the good that does.

And about Facebook’s “Friends” list. Here’s another thing Facebook has perverted. They have devalued the very concept of what genuine “friends” are. Most of those on our “Friends” lists do not rise to the level of such a lofty post. True friends are rare and precious. If you have a couple of real friends in your life, you’re a lucky person. Other than family members, Facebook “friends” tend to be little more than an assortment of folks who share our views, fears and anxieties — fellow travelers, or maybe it’s just that misery likes company.

I must add that I found it more than ironic to be banished for posting a semi-humorous meme, by the same company that helped put an unstable and unqualified man in the Oval Office, and profited by doing so. A company that, even as reports of fake Russian content emerged during the 2016 campaign, eagerly took ad money…in rubles no less…from Russian saboteur-hackers. And, when caught red-handed, glibly responded: “We’re shocked, simply shocked!”

And, a company which, right up to the day it banished me for my post, not only allowed an obviously altered video that made House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appear drunk, to remain on its platform, and when called out for that replied that they felt it was important to allow people to make up their own minds, about the video. (Fact Check: Nancy Pelosi is a confirmed non-drinker.)

Maybe such cynical “do as we day, not as we do” behavior by FB is why the term “Fakebook” is now trending on social media.

So what’s behind Facebook’s increasingly toxic behavior? Facebook left that fake Pelosi video up because removing deleting it would have set a standard of content curation Facebook has no intention implementing…ever. So it remained up, to continued doing the damage it was produced to do. It wasn’t fake content that Facebook feared, but the setting of a curation precedent that Zuckerberg fears would kill its golden revenue goose.

Here’s Zuckerberg’s moral and ethical dilemma in a nutshell: In order to continue the ad revenue juggernaut Facebook has become, Zuckerberg needs to keep traffic figures up and growing. In the commercial Internet social media space, “eyeballs, “time-on-site” and “stickiness” are the holy trinity of profitability. And, there are simply not enough fans of cat and dog videos, graduation pictures, baby pictures and “what I did on my vacation” posts to drive and grow visits to the site. But peddling political/social angst produces eyeballs and eyeballs produce ad revenue. Simple as that.

A growing list of critics demand Zuckerberg more carefully curate Facebook content. Should Zuckerberg do that, weeding out the social and political shit-disturbers, Zuck knows that visits to his site will at least level off, and most likely fall, followed closely by future ad revenue.

So there you see the crux of the matter — the cancer metastasizing within Facebook. Zuckerberg has only one nightmare and it’s that if Facebook is forced to into cleaning up its virulent, anti-social content it could go the way of its tamer predecessor, MySpace — which is now pretty much nobody’s space.

Young Zuck had a good idea in his dorm room at the right time in history, and it made him a multi-billionaire. In the process, he unintentionally created his own Frankenstein monster, which now runs him, rather than the other way around. Like the human meat-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors, every day his creation demands, “Feed me, Zuck, I’m hungry!” And so now he has to do and tolerate things he would likely never have imagined when he began this journey.

But it’s not Zuckerberg’s soul (assuming he has one left) that I care a damn about. Instead, I worry what his creation is dongto us, to our country and other countries. What it’s doing to our social fabric, to our politics, to our souls? Are we really better off today than we were before there was a Facebook? I see not a shred of evidence that we are, quite the opposite. Facebook has become a demonstrably negative force, a place for rhetorical combat, a place where truth and lies intermingle as equal currency. A cyber-Tower of Babel where everyone talks but no one listens. A place you visit only to leave feeling worse than when you entered.

As a recovering Facebooker, I must admit, the damn thing can be addictive. That’s no accident. It’s structured to be. Even though I left each Facebook session feeling more depressed and engulfed in free-floating anxiety, I kept going back. It was cyber-nicotine or worse, a cyber-opioid. I knew it was doing me no good, even emotional harm, yet I kept going back.

Ironically it took an intervention from the monster itself to detox me. A time away from it and I feel better than I have in a couple of years. As a retired journalist, I of course keep up with the news, the real news. I have my digital subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post, two publications I have written for in the past and had my pieces meticulously vetted by their fact-checkers and editors. So I know firsthand that there I can get carefully fact-checked articles as well as a variety of thought-provoking opinion pieces byinformed writers.

I suspect I am not alone, that others will also depart in greater numbers as the 2020 race heats up, provoking the Russians and crazies on all sides to pour yet more of their venom onto Facebook’s Newsfeeds.

It’s all getting rather tiresome, and dangerous. And government regulators seem unable or unwilling to take all that on in any meaningful way. So the only way to punish Facebook is to leave it alone, to die by the side of the information highway like roadkill.

As Facebook sinks into well-deserved irrelevance hopefully the void left will be filled by a resurgent, re-energized traditional news media. The kind of news outlets with editors and fact checkers who know the difference between fact and fiction.

So, goodbye Facebook. I wish I could say it was nice knowing you, but it wasn’t. You just became a habit — a bad habit.