Zucked Recap

Zucked Recap

By Brian J. Lancaster (March 2022)

Website: www.laughingcoyote.net

After the numerous fuckups on the part of Facebook (now calling itself Meta), including playing a massive role in the Russian interference in the 2016 election, the 2021 attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol, the genocide in Myanmar, government brainwashing in countries like the Philippines under their former psychotic leader Duterte, and probably the U.K. Brexit decision (bad move for the U.K., great advantage for us Americans), it's pretty clear there needs to be more government regulation over Silicon Valley, first and foremost over Facebook. I would also add Brazil's Bolsonaro to the list of fascists that Facebook helped to get elected, but I still need some more evidence. I did win $20 betting on Bolsonaro with a student back in 2019, the only political bet I ever won.

This is what a social media education leads to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzg85iP-LKE

I picked up Zucked by Roger McNamee for $2 at a Salvation Army, and it's one of the most important nonfiction books I've read since... well, I usually don't read nonfiction. It's 287 pages, but I feel the need to condense his calls to action in a short and easy-to-insert suppository right here. And I swear I'm not bitter because I have been banned from Facebook around 20 times now (I lost count).

I don't really care about teenagers' self-esteem. They can and should hate themselves and their bodies as much as possible (fat people make me want to vomit). I also don't care about the "addiction" he talks about to the internet and video games. I think the internet can make you money and video games make kids smarter. If I had a kid, I would rather he play games than just passively sit and watch TV.

I only care about the election and journalistic integrity of free countries, countries that are proud to not be under the iron clenched fist of a dictatorship, where the president can just poison you if you write an article about how he's putting on weight. For this assurance to continue, we need to stop Facebook from leaking private user data to organizations like Cambridge Analytica.

GET OFF THE FAT JOKES! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNRvz5O9l2s

I was there on Facebook before the 2016 election, and I saw Russians trying to pretend to be Americans born in Wisconsin, making all the usual Russian grammar mistakes. "What you talking about, bro? I born in Wisconsin." (One way to tell if they are Russian agents is if they call you "bro"). When I called them out, the accounts were immediately deleted. It happened multiple times.

Most of Roger McNamee's book goes over evidence of this, but we are beyond that. We know what happened. What follows are the solutions, how we can fix social media platforms with legislation and hopefully bust Facebook up into pieces and allow for superior technology to compete in the marketplace.

Solutions to the Facebook problem in Zucked by Roger McNamee:

#1) Internet platforms should be subject to fiduciary laws, including confidentiality, like doctors and lawyers. Whether or not confidentiality is included in fiduciary responsibilities is not open to debate, despite what Google searches will tell you. Doctors and lawyers are subject to this, and Facebook and Google should be as well. When the data leaks to Cambridge Analytica happened, it should have been equally as litigable as your doctor going around telling everyone you have herpes.

#2) The EU has GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation), instilling penalties to anyone who tries to sell your data without your consent. This is why FB had to move its data centers from Ireland to the U.S., where privacy is not mentioned once in any laws besides the 4th amendment (protections against unreasonable searches and seizures). Not that the U.S. has a great track record of following its own Bill of Rights, but data privacy still needs to be added to the U.S. Constitution.

GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/

#3) Antitrust legislation should be enacted, mostly for Facebook because of how much it fucked up, but also probably for Google. They have been immune to anti-monopoly laws for too long because they are technically free services. All of their money comes from ads. I used to pay FB for ads before I realized what a cancer that website is. I still pay Google $1/day for ads, and I still like Google. But congress needs to accept the fact that these companies are not free services. There is nothing wrong with advertising services, but they need to be regarded as such. Millions of people pay for ads on a regular basis.

#4) There needs to be legislation regulating artificial intelligence. I've heard people talk about how when they mention a product, their smart phone will immediately advertise that product to them. They think this is because their smart phone is listening to them, but the reality is much creepier. According to McNamee, it's more likely that an AI algorithm has so much information on you that it can predict what products you will mention and when, before you even know what you're doing.

I never finished Dune because I wasn't into any of the characters, but I read far enough to read the law, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." I believe Mass Effect had some similar bullshit law. But now it is time to be serious about AI legislation. It's time to start thinking about how this metadata AI can crumble democracy and spark genocide by manipulating human emotions with algorithms.

#5) Finally, McNamee says that all data should be owned by the user. This would be a difficult feat to accomplish, so I'm not sure it's feasible. But if it helps stop Facebook from obliterating fair democratic elections around the world and just decreasing the IQ of the populace in general, I'm all for it.

Edit (April):

Facebook groups are a ridiculously easy thing to start. I started a joke group called Lesbian Muslim Feministas back in 2012 or something. Then a ton of lesbian Muslim women got on there looking for romance, and I could just control the entire the thing. I then gave the group to someone else as an admin, who I knew was an actual lesbian Muslim after a long chat. The group is dead now, but it was so easy to just use groups to fuck with everybody. It's what Russia did to cause ethnic violence in the United States. They made fake groups on both sides of issues, staged protests, and created violence.

Sources:

Zucked. Roger McNamee. 2019.

"A practical guide to the European Union’s GDPR for American businesses"

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/16/17360944/gdpr-us-business-eu-european-union-data-protection-privacy