For a lot of people I know, FaceBook IS the Internet. It's the largest audience ever aggregated, so nobody can really afford to avoid it completely. I've used FaceBook advertising for years to reach a specific audience for one of my customers. It works well because FaceBook has the world's easiest to access database of demographic data, and you can pay as you go for just what you need.
Now FaceBook is at the center of some real social and political problems, and I'm not clear anybody notices, or cares. Mueller's indictments last week specifically called out FaceBook, again and again. I am moving quickly toward the view that FaceBook is the gutter of the Internet, but I don't know how to do anything about it.
Read the indictment for yourself:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/rosenstein-mueller-indictment-russia/553601/
FaceBook is mentioned 37 times across the 37 page indictment. Twitter 14 times. Instagram too. This places FaceBook at the center of a cyber attack on America's national security. The whole country is in peril, and FaceBook is being pimped by the Russian government, using cheap advertising.
The whole idea that FaceBook is America's number 1 news and information channel is obviously a problem. Until 2016 Instagram was a great place to shop for guns. Now we know there's an operation that curates garbage on US social media for no other purpose than to screw up the country. Who is profiting from this? FaceBook.
Zuckerberg and his Harvard buddies have made fortunes, and the US government is their bitch. Talk about an oligarchy. How about some accountability? If you can figure out a way to monetize everything everybody does on the Internet every day, how about figuring out a better way to vet your advertising customers. The root of the indictment is that the advertisers were not who they said they were.
Deep in the bowels of FaceBook there's a database, equivalent to Steemit's blockchain. Can't they figure out a way to match patterns to keep out fraudulent customers? Of course they could, but the profit incentive is too great to do that. I wonder what would happen if the audience for Steemit exploded, and people with an agenda against the US government were to flood the blockchain as alleged in the Mueller indictment. Would the perpetrators be "down-voted"? Would that fix it?