Oceans of Blood on His Hands

Mark Zuckerberg created a website with the founding intent of objectifying women and it grew and grew until it became an unstopping engine for fueling genocide and undermining democracy.

For that, he’s a billionaire. One of the youngest.

And why is he a billionaire?

For creating a big hate machine.

Resurgent nationalism runs on the engine of Facebook, all over the world. We have years and years of evidence proving this is the case. In the guise of providing us with the connectivity software necessary to power community, it has instead powered dictators and hate crimes all over the world.

It's impossible to take in good faith any tech company's claim that Black Lives Matter when they let white nationalists use their platforms as megaphones, inviting the whole fucking world to their online klan meeting happening twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, except now they’re called “Facebook interest groups” and instead of pamphlets, they share memes.

All this technology didn’t exist ten years ago. It’s new enough that we haven’t had time to examine its ethics or its effects on our lives. I was still a child when I made my first Facebook account. I wasn’t even old enough to drink. But in the years since its creation, we’ve seen it gas up genocides. We’ve seen its community-building features used to bring fascist comments and ideas into our everyday banality. It was hard to see what was happening while it was happening but I’m sure we’ve all seen enough of it now to know what was going on.

Stopping these things isn’t technologically difficult. I’m not a software engineer but I know enough them with whom I have talked about Facebook’s role in disinformation campaigns and mobilizing latent hate towards activist suppression. They agree with me that it’s more than possible to outthink the fascists with code, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that letting them use social media is incredibly profitable. Troll farms, fake news sites, hate groups and targeted harassment campaigns generate so much engagement. They generate so many clicks! So many metrics. Huge metrics. Wow.

If your business model depends on providing advertisers with metrics showing how much organic engagement your site generates, then you can’t do better than by encouraging the growth of as many troll farms as possible. All over the world. Those things are literally defined as hundreds of people employed in the project of shitposting content all day. From the perspective of Facebook, troll farms thus exist to shit metrics. They might as well be printing money. Financially speaking, they have zero incentive to shut them down.

And that’s just one mindkilling aspect of this that speaks to the bigger problem: these sites are billion-dollar businesses. They are not public infrastructure. They don’t have to play by any rules. They have industry lobbyists who help them buy off Congressmen so that they get to write their own rules. That’s why when they set their own rules called terms of service, they often let the worst offenders violate them over and over again. Why? Because breaking the rules is profitable. Obviously.

For a long time, tech was imagined as apolitical, as somehow beyond the fray. It was haloed as the beacon of progress, the harbinger of better things to come.

We desperately wanted to believe that something so simple was making us better—better friends, better citizens, better neighbors. A world of connection brought down to our phones.

But it hasn’t done any of those things. At best, it’s provided lazy people with a means of social surveillance over people they barely know. At worst, it’s a weapon for autocratic regimes to rally the forces of hate against love.

Please tell me that you’ve finally had enough.

Please delete your account.