The problem with Facebook

I thought this would be a good post to write because of the anti-trust case to break Facebook up. This was something that I had written about in a history course on philosophy and ideology in university, and was actually one of the favourite pieces I had written during my three years at university. This is a post about how Facebook has created a post-truth and meta-reality world and will consider how fake news evolved from the English Civil War and the philosophy behind what constitutes news.

To understand truth in philosophy, was to understand how reality worked. The idea I would like to take for truth is how we interpret information through our senses, whether written, heard or tasted. Much of this had its roots in how parliament defeated the monarchy. Much of what was printed about the royalty during this time was propaganda, it was printed to show the basic communication between parliament and the monarchy without providing any true or deep insight into why the king was acting this way. Print was a new medium through which to communicate during this time as social media is to society now. The reason why it was considered as truth is because they absorbed was written in those prints without any real understanding for the other side. 

In the 1960s, people were reading newspapers or listening to the radio and by the 1980s. people were watching the news on television. The most important thing were the way that these mediums were distributed, they were distributed by the television networks or radio networks, meaning they were in control of what they distributed and their listeners or viewers had the freedom to decide what to listen to. In 2010, Facebook became the distributor of news based on what people liked on their feeds or watched on other websites. Facebook was able to track what websites people went on because many websites had chosen to use Facebook as an easy login method, whereby allowing Facebook to put cookies on your web browser and track you. The same thing would happen with phones and your location. This provided Facebook with lots of information about you and could provide you with news websites based on the information that it has collected and the highest bidder for your attention.

When we arrive in 2016, Cambridge Analytica became an important scandal and made us understand how Facebook can manipulate us. Facebook would allow Cambridge Analytica to provide people with quizes and they would collect this data and would even be allowed to take information from the profile of people on your friends list. This meant that Facebook would target pro-trump and pro-brexit advertisements to people who it did not know who to vote for nor understood the importance of the election. What the attempt to break up facebook suggests is that the American government understands that Facebook has too much power.