Another Nail in the Coffin for Facebook

We, at the Jewish Voice have been calling out Facebook, the social media giant for years, for its massive size and power over its users by controlling not only the quantity, quality and type of dissemination of information to its users but also the selection of their users, themselves. We, to be perfectly up front, have been persecuted by FB and penalized for making statements that their biased screening employees deem not fit for publication. They pick and choose just what their members view, read and digest. Not necessarily good news for their subscribers. And scarily number wise, Facebook, just 17 years old, is a $1trillion+ company, over 20,000 employees, with over 2.8 billion users which is 60% of all internet-connected people on earth. These people, many of whom who you see daily, walking or sitting with heads bowed, scrolling down at their cell phones, wasting their precious time on this site rather than doing things that are constructive, like creating things, reading, learning or broadening their horizons.

Just this week, a whistleblower shared a treasure trove of Facebook documents alleging the social giant knew its products were fueling hate and harming childrens’ health. This brave, outspoken heroine, 37 year old data scientist, Frances Haugen, who had previously worked for Google and Pinterest, was interviewed on 60 Minutes, telling us that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen before. We smiled in agreement with her televised comments. “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety. it is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety,” Haugen claimed. She called for the company to be regulated. Congress has had its founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg, on the stand many times grilling him and hopefully they will do just that….call the media giant to task. We’re waiting……

We are concerned with FB’s impact on young teenagers whose soaring suicide rates have been tied to the bullying antics recorded on their accounts. But because of space limitations, we’ll focus on this media giant’s impact on politics and the Covid pandemic. After the January 6th riots in D.C., FB banned President Trump from his account for 2 years, blaming him, without evidence, for instigating this event. This was an inside decision, not one backed by a trial or even an open, impartial investigation of Trump’s behavior. It was an obvious political decision with dire implications for our democracy.

When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters recently that decisions about whether to ban social media users should be left to the companies that run the platforms, she responded: “Our view continues to be, though, that every platform, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, any other platform that is disseminating information to millions of Americans has a responsibility to crack down on disinformation, to crack down on false information, whether it’s about the election or even about the vaccine.” In other words, the elected President of the United States can be banned from FB but paid hack, Dr. Fauci, who has flip-flopped on masks, the vaccines, who had invested taxpayer funds in the Wuhan military bio-weapon’s laboratory and put millions of our citizens at risk, is free to propagandize on Facebook. It’s time to close this site down for the safety of our nation.