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'What's Facebook?', Elon Musk Asks, As He Deletes SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages
It is unlikely that Facebook will see a significant drop in its mammoth userbase following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But on Friday, the #DeleteFacebook campaign, which is seeing an increasingly growing number of people call it quits on the world's largest social network, found its biggest backer: Elon Musk. Responding to WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton's "#DeleteFacebook" tweet, Musk asked "What's Facebook?" That was the beginning of a tweetstorm, which saw journalists asking Musk why his companies -- SpaceX and Tesla -- maintained their Facebook pages. Shouldn't Musk, they asked, delete them? Musk agreed. As of this writing, the official Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla, both of which had more than two million followers, are nowhere to be found. The Facebook page of SolarCity is gone too, if you were wondering.
The move comes months after Musk said Zuckerberg's understanding of AI was limited.
The move comes months after Musk said Zuckerberg's understanding of AI was limited.
Now delete Twitter too.
Generic Relative/Friend: What Facebook did is horrible! Someone should go to jail. Muh privacy!
You: Hey, I heard about this other social media site with different business model. You want to try it out together to see if we like it better than FB?
Generic Relative/Friend: No! I have no time for that! *Posts more crappy memes on Facebook*
In terms of reputation, if Comcast is the bottom of the barrel, Facebook's rep is now buried 6 ft under the barrel and Generic Relative/Friend cannot even spend 10 minutes to try a competing site.
This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.
At it's beginning, I checked their User Agreement and whatever content I would post there pictures etc., it would become Facebooks property and that was not to my liking, never looked back to there. Proofed me just right in doing so by not participating on this circus.
After years of resisting joining Facebook, I caved after publishing my first novel. I figured that it was a potential place to spread the word of my book and I couldn't ignore it. As a method of spreading the word, it's pretty bad, though. If you post something, everyone who follows you won't see it. Not unless you pay Facebook to spread it to more people than the people they deem will see your message. If a group of people follow me, I'd think they should ALL see my message, but apparently Facebook disagrees.
I'd be interested in any alternatives to Facebook that people can recommend. (And, no, "get off all social media" is not a valid alternative.) Are there up and coming social media sites that are viable alternatives to Facebook? Obviously, they might not have the number of users that Facebook has, but if you set the page to be public, it doesn't matter if the person is a subscribed member or not.
At this point, I'm thinking of going back to my blog and maybe using IFTTT to auto-post links on Facebook about my blog posts.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Facebook has been used for market research and political research for years, and people generally viewed this as a positive: finally, campaigns could figure out what people actually wanted and liked. And the TOS make it pretty clear that data can be used for such purposes. All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?
It makes no sense to quit Facebook and still use Instagram.
It's the same damn company collecting the same damn data.
I don't respond to AC's.
Musk doesn't like Zuck, and Zuck returns the favor. Not surprised Musk taking opportunity to dog-pile on the kid when he's down (his version of 'down' anyways).
I've noticed the cattiness between these two for a couple years. They've been chippy in public regarding diverging views on AI. And probably didn't help that SpaceX blew up Facebook's pet-project satellite - which I thought was totally worth the firework but Faceboy not so thrilled about it if I remember correctly.
Take your lives back, people.
That's what Facebook is good for. You use it to create accounts for sites in the web in which you want to make comments. All the resulting trash will go to your Facebook account. I haven't checked out mine in years, but I am sure that it must be brimming with garbage. Let the Facebook minions deal with that. You see? Facebook is good for something.
No just run uMatrix with default settings, which
** Blocks 1st party frames, and
** Blocks 3rd party:
** ** Cookies
** ** Media
** ** Scripts
** ** XHR
** ** Other
I also remove most all of the uMatrix subscription lists, which are mostly redundant with the above settings. Although it will necessitate tweaking to get some sites to work -- mostly enabling CDN's.
What disturbs me about such deletion is the casual destruction of all the information and entertainment in the posts and comments. I know Facebook is renowned for the ephemeral and lightweight nature of its content, and almost all wouldn't have been worth preserving. But worthwhile stuff and history has also been lost.
I felt the same way when IMDB deleted its fora.
They certainly used to. How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics
And Barack Obama and the Facebook Election
True. And people are waking up to the degree that the Silicon Valley technocracy and their platforms (Google, Twitter, Facebook) are trying to manipulate them, are trying to influence elections, etc. Glad it's finally starting to sink in.
Of course it is. Facebook is a manipulative, privacy-invading company. However, back when Chris Hughes ran Obama's online campaign, people hailed the use and analysis of social networks as the dawn of a new democracy, yet now that the other side is doing it, all of a sudden the same people are up in arms.
That was Hillary's approach: Clinton: “But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position.
Of course, the last election wasn't much about positions anyway, it was about Hillary's personality and the fact that a large percentage of the voting population found her utterly disgusting and reprehensible. I left the Democratic party over her nomination and didn't vote at all in 2016.