Facebook a hotbed of betrayal from get-go
Social media site made users into product
Is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook still planning to run for president in 2020?
No, I didn’t think so. But what a difference a year or so makes. Remember his “listening tour” in Iowa? Zuckerberg even hired a pollster because, you know, he was just what the country was looking for: A 67-inch-tall computer nerd from Harvard by way of the New York suburbs.
He was being “urged” to run
— just ask him.
Until a few days ago, Zuck- erberg was one of the Beautiful People. He opposed “the Wall,” because, you know, he’s got enough dore-mi to build his own walls to keep the alien hordes at bay. It’s the same attitude the pope, House Speaker Paul Ryan and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio share about walls. Good walls make good neighbors — for them, but not for you.
Now, however, the chattering classes have turned on Zuckerberg, the world’s fifthrichest person, according to the latest Forbes list, with a net worth of $71 billion. This week Zuckerberg is taking an even worse pounding than Nos. 6 and 7, the evil Koch brothers, worth a paltry $60 billion apiece.
Personally, I never got the whole Facebook thing. I have a page for my radio show, but that’s strictly business. When I first heard about Facebook, somebody told me I could use it to catch up with my high school classmates.
My first thought was, why the hell would I want to? I never moved away. My radio show is carried on the stations I listened to as a kid. If any of my classmates need to speak to me, they can call in to my show. I don’t need Mark Zuckerberg.
I use Google, I rely on Amazon, I goof around on Twitter, and I listen to music and watch old movies on YouTube. But Facebook? Forget about it!
There’s a saying in Silicon Valley: If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
So before all of you Facebook users post your next anti-Trump screed and unfriend your neighbor for wearing a MAGA hat, maybe you should read the “Terms of Service” you agreed to when you signed up for the “free” service.
When you buy or sell a house, the real estate lawyers make you initial every page of the P&S, as if you’ve actually read the fine print about lead paint, balloon payments, easements, etc. So don’t tell me that all the members of the “reality-based” community didn’t know that they were being harvested, like so many farm-raised catfish.
Isn’t it amazing that in 2012 when Obama’s re-election campaign was “scraping” data, he was hailed as a genius? But when Cambridge Analytica did it in 2016, it suddenly became an “Orwellian” scandal. Because, of course, they were doing it for Donald J. Trump.
Speaking of Trump, I don’t think he’s serious about trust-busting these Politically Correct totalitarians in Silicon Valley. I wish he were. These billionaires have a lot more power, and they use it more darkly, than the John D. Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegies and Buck Dukes did.
To return to that Forbes list, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is worth (or was, before the recent presidential tweetstorm) $112 billion, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google are worth just under $50 billion each.
But the moonbats remain obsessed with Rupert Murdoch, whose net worth is a paltry $15 billion (No. 94), which is still five times more than the Great Satan himself, President Trump, No. 766 with $3.1 billion.
Whatever happened to money talks, BS walks? If money is the root of all evil, then these internet enforcers of PC orthodoxy must truly be the real malefactors of great wealth, right?
I’m trying to be angry about Facebook’s alleged betrayal, but really, who couldn’t see this coming?