The exodus will happen. The history of digital media proves it. First there was Friendster, then there was My Space, then there was Facebook. What’s next?
Imagine for a moment spending years of your life cultivating a Facebook presence, be it a group, a page or a regular old profile. You’ve spent day after day exhaustively posting statuses and reaching out to new friends, accumulating thousands if not millions of readers. Whether your presence is geared toward promoting a non-Facebook site, or if you’re just building a page for the sake of activism or journalism or your dinner pics, you’ve dedicated valuable years accomplishing exactly what the platform was designed to do: creating a network of “friends” who choose to be part of your Facebook thing.
Now imagine Facebook suddenly and without warning deleting all of that work -- photos, statuses, memes, videos, death or illness announcements, breaking news items or plain old cat pics. In an instant, upwards of a decade of your life is obliterated. No explanation, no resolution, no nothing. As many of us have learned the hard way, Facebook’s customer support system makes the cable company look speedy and attentive, so good luck complaining to a real-life human being at Facebook.
Worse yet, imagine that your Facebook page is directly tethered to your livelihood. This is the most tragic story of all, knowing that hundreds of political Facebook pages, left and right alike, were destroyed back on October 11, 2018. “The Purge” wiped out more than 800 pages by colleagues and activists like Kimberley A. Johnson and James Reader, as well as group pages like Everlasting GOP Stoppers and pro-Trump conservative pages like Nation in Distress. Again, no warnings, no three strikes, no time-outs, just POOF! Gone. Deleted.
The explanation by Facebook was that many of these pages were allegedly spamming their own readers -- readers, by the way, who directly chose to follow the authors and their pages. Facebook’s insufferable tech-spaz euphemism was “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” specifically meaning that the page admins were posting the same articles links across two or more other pages. To repeat, these admins were using Facebook within the bounds of what Facebook allowed, until, that is, Facebook retroactively changed the rules after the Purge.
Some of the deleted pages might very well have been violating known rules, but many victims who were caught in the Purge didn’t do anything wrong. And now their work is gone forever, as are their personal incomes.
In the case of The Daily Banter, we managed to avoid the now infamous Purge even though, yeah, as an admin I was posting my articles on the Banter Facebook page as well as Justin Rosario’s page, as well as on both my Bob Cesca Show page and my personal profile. But I wasn’t purged. Neither was Justin or Ben Cohen or The Daily Banter. Yay for us. Unfortunately, the Purge wasn’t the only front in Facebook’s war against its own users.
Back in 2013, Facebook began to monkey with the algorithm that determines which statuses appear in the News Feeds of its users. Before the algorithm change, links to The Daily Banter or Salon or any other news site were given the same visibility as cat pics and food porn, and traffic to the Banter was great. After the algorithm change, however, links to non-Facebook sites began to be throttled. Facebook placed arbitrary limits on how often statuses with links were seen in New Feeds. Over time, the digital cock-blocking grew more and more restrictive, with smaller and smaller respites between contractions until, last Summer, Facebook’s algorithm grew so suffocating it became nearly impossible to build traffic from users who -- again -- chose to receive updates and links from the throttled sites.
In terms of the algorithm, Facebook wanted pages like the Banter’s to pay for exposure in News Feeds. If we didn’t pay, our statuses were buried and our traffic suffered -- meaning that indie low-budget or no-budget pages were screwed with their pants on.
In terms of the Purge, we’re talking about a corporation and its thieving CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, taking punitive measures against innocent users all because Zuckerberg got caught accepting money from the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, and other Russia-linked propaganda farms. Pressured by Congress with the threat of regulatory measures, Zuckerberg authorized the Purge and the rest is tragic history. To put it simply: Zuckerberg fucked up, so hundreds of pages operating within the rules were killed. And guess what? There are still thousands of Russian trolls and literally billions of fake accounts on the platform anyway.
Back to our “cold open.”
Like an incurable virus, Facebook has become inextricably embedded in our public lives. If we want to compete in the digital world, whether it’s our businesses or our personal thoughts on politics, it’s mandatory to be on Facebook. Unplug, and we might as well not bother. We might as well cease to exist, while other pages and sites will gladly slip into our empty chair. It’s just not as easy as leaving Facebook unilaterally unless everyone does it.
And the exodus will happen. The history of digital media proves it. First there was Friendster, then there was My Space, then there was Facebook. What’s next?
It’s not happening yet, but Facebook is flummoxing the world with such harrowing frequency, be it the Purge or a conga-line of news reports about its gratuitous privacy breaches, Facebook is gradually killing itself. My dream is for another enterprising gaggle of under-fed, sleep deprived Silicon Valley nerds to invent the next big social media platform that’ll become what Facebook used to be -- a social network where status updates, links or not, are untethered by mysterious artificial intelligence bots or sinister algorithms designed to extort money from users.
Hell, Zuckerberg stole “The Facebook” from the Winklevoss brothers, so perhaps it’s time for someone else to steal Zuckerberg’s platform by creating one that’s basically Facebook Classic, circa 2012-ish, but with enough structural differences to keep it from being sued and shut down. The time is now. Facebook has to die. And when it does, I’m throwing a party and everyone’s invited.
DailyBanter
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