Three years after Facebook was founded, in 2007, I joined purely for the purpose of maintaining contact with friends I had made while hitchhiking across Lebanon following the Israeli invasion in the summer of 2006, which had destroyed most of the country but left its renowned hospitality intact, reports Al Jazeera.
My Facebook friends list was progressively growing by adding former middle school and high school classmates, such as my seventh-grade boyfriend and a few Zionists whom I eventually unfriended after learning how to use the feature.
Next came authors, scholars, and activists with similar political philosophies.
For a while, this gave Facebook the appearance of having the capacity to function as a real virtual community and an inspirational platform.
Naturally, Facebook never set out to promote human togetherness, and capitalism soon reared its ugly head.
Once a sizable portion of the population was successfully seduced into a digital addiction, the Facebook elite proceeded to destroy the idea that privacy is a fundamental human right, reports Al Jazeera.
And the outlook is really dire as Facebook marks its 20th anniversary on February 4.
Examine Facebook’s “surveillance capitalism” business model, which entails “aggregating vast amounts of data on people, using it to infer incredibly detailed profiles on their lives and behaviour, and monetarily monetizing it by selling these predictions to others such as advertisers,” as condemned by Amnesty International in 2019.
When I was recently using my phone to browse Facebook, I saw that there were about seventy adverts in a row, reports Al Jazeera.
Many of them featured the actress Angelina Jolie and her family, a topic that Facebook’s monitoring system seems to think I should be particularly interested in.
With angry rage, I closed Facebook, but a few minutes later, I returned for more meaningless distractions and cheesy, emoji-filled messages.
In addition, I’ve been receiving advertisements for plastic surgery and skimpy clothing that accentuate the bust on a daily basis.
One particularly striking item was a lacy black suit with horns, a leash, and an exhortation to “explore your dark side,” reports Al Jazeera.
Tell us your thoughts in the Facebook post and share this with your friends.