#deletefacebook is a limited hangout with a silver lining

the Cambridge Analytica scandal - far from a disaster for Facebook - plays right into the company's hands. It reveals nothing we didn't learn in previous scandals that received less media coverage. Facebook gets to act shocked, pretend this was an anomaly & not simply business as usual, & act really sorry for abusing users while continuing the abuse. The government gets to pretend to discipline Zuckerberg while continuing to suck up users' data through NSA backdoors. Mass media gets another bedtime story to tell itself while replaying the 2016 election in its quest for a scenario where something other than "Americans voting for the lesser of two evils" gets Trump into the White House. Everybody wins, except Facebook users! Actually, they win too, as long as they #deletefacebook.
Social media doesn't have to be evil. There are alternatives. Minds, Gab, and Steemit are three platforms that have somehow found it within the realm of possibility NOT to sell out their users to the surveillance state while placing increasingly Kafkaesque restrictions on their speech. Let's engineer a mass migration off Zuckerberg's data mining operation.