Facebook, Surveillance Capitalism, and We

This article (The Guardian 2018) analyses how Facebook – through, among others, M. Zuckerberg's naivety, political and otherwise, together with Facebook's business model – contributed to getting Trump into the White House.

In all its incisive honesty, while likely only scratching the surface, this is rather frustrating reading. For me personally and you that receive this as my Facebook friends, because we are all indirectly – if not directly – implicated. We have accepted (to the extent we understand, are aware, or care about it) that Facebook amasses enormous (and that is an understatement) amounts of data about our personal lives, and uses these data towards goals that we have no knowledge about and certainly cannot control. The term used in the article, "surveillance capitalism", is spot on.

As Facebook users, our tunnel vision is that this social media platform is a great tool for disseminating information and connecting with the outside world, to the point that we by now wonder "what did we do before Facebook (and social media generally)?" Thus, while we believe we use Facebook as a free tool, we forget the other side of the coin, which is that we are all – several billions of us strong – unwitting pawns in Facebook's global business model.

Happy reading. I can only hope that you will realize the roles that you, as Facebook users, play ...

Lars T Soeftestad

Notes
(1) This article was adapted from a post on Facebook 8 April 2018, and posted here on the same day. The article was updated 8 September 2018.
(2) Image credit: The Guardian (2018).
(3) Permalink. URL: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/facebook-surveillance-capitalism-and-we
(4) This article was published 8 April 2018.

Source
The Guardian. 2018. "How Facebook got into a mess - and why it can't get out of it." URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/07/facebookgot-into-mess-cant-get-out-of-it-mark-zuckerberg-surveillance-capitalism