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RE: Its Time To #DeleteFacebook, Say Social Users, Journalists, and Publishers!
Wait there is something big going on with Facebook now and private info? So are profiles in danger as of now? I had no idea so much was going on I knew from your previous blog that they are a terrible place to find any growth at all on things like writing or doing videos etc. growing a following. But now this crap? Geez how far does this go downhill? Also what is Kred? I have never heard of that place before.
Well, I wouldn't say Facebook profiles are necessarily in danger, but the ways in which Facebook user data were obtained and used by data analytics firms like Cambridge Analytica were definitely deceitful and dishonest. They lied to Facebook users, telling them they were collecting data to be used with a personality test; when in fact the data was being used to create psychological profiles of Facebook users in order to create election campaign ads that would help steer better results for Trump.
Trump's election committee hired the firm to help with promoting their campaign, and Steve Bannon was actually one of the people who helped launch the firm to begin with. While Trump may not have had any knowledge as to what was going on, Bannon definitely did, and he knew what Cambridge was doing because he was one of those running it.
With all the talk of Russia attempting to manipulate the last election, it was actually Trump's own campaign and the people he trusted (Bannon) that attempted to manipulate users on social media in hopes of steering their support during the election process.
The deceitful harvesting of user data without disclosing what that data was being used for is why so many are so incredibly angry with Facebook right now. To be honest, I'm not surprised by any of this, as politics has always been a game of deceit and dishonesty anyway.
While what Cambridge and Bannon did were fundamentally wrong, this doesn't make up for the fact we live in a world of stupid people who're easily manipulated and will believe any misinformation that's thrown in their face. We need a better system of education so that people can be smart enough to tell the difference between fact from fiction.
I personally dislike Facebook for a whole different set of reasons. What I find to be the most distasteful is the fact the platform robs journalists and publishers of their audiences and forces them to pay in order to get visibility. Facebook also never shares a dime of its massive wealth back with its greatest of contributors, their greed is just unreal! Their willingness to openly promote misinformation on such a mass scale is another reason I think Facebook is bad news.
As for Kred, its a data firm that's centered upon measuring social influence of internet users, and they boast a whole line of products, services, and platforms that help both people and organizations determine and measure their influence online.
Kred has a social platform/virtual stock market game, that's freely open to the public. The platform is a social network in its own right, and the virtual stock market surrounding it allows users to invest in each other using the platform's virtual currency called Eaves. I'm considering do a write up better explaining how the platform works in the near future.