Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users.
I've never really understood social media in this form, nor understood its takeover as primary communication channel and I'm not going to go full RMS or expect anyone else to have the same values as myself, but if people do share those values, and do want better than facetwitsnapagramblr (without any judgement on if they should) then they should have participated in building and using something better instead of deluding themselves.
> Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users.
With the possible exception of "surveillance" everything you just said is also true of newspapers.
If you're going to start splitting hairs then you don't "have to" use any one particular method of staying in touch with people. Supreme convenience is not force.
In theory, it is not. In practice, it is. Not only that, in case when there is a fight between almost anything (such as privacy, security,...) and convenience, the latter will always win (on large scale).
Facebook is also the town square where people are selling the newspapers, Facebook is the streets that newspaper delivery trucks drive down, and Facebook is the sidewalks on which employees at the newspaper walk to work.
There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences.
Facebook has positioned itself as the public square. The freedoms of the press, speech and protest are predicated on equal access to these public forums and they clearly do not exist in our current media landscape.
I've never really understood social media in this form, nor understood its takeover as primary communication channel and I'm not going to go full RMS or expect anyone else to have the same values as myself, but if people do share those values, and do want better than facetwitsnapagramblr (without any judgement on if they should) then they should have participated in building and using something better instead of deluding themselves.