Meta Platforms, Inc. the company that runs the platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads, has become a serious danger to human society. Most people recognise the corrosive influence their platforms have on people that overuse them, many people are trying to curb or stop their use. It seems that few people really grasp the full scope of how serious of a problem this company has become.
The scope and breadth of how much data Meta collects on everyone is staggering when you look into it. Most people are only aware of the tip of the iceberg. But having any Meta app on your phone with permission to use the microphone means that all conversations within hearing range of that phone are scanned and parsed and catalogued. It is unlikely Meta are wasting the storage space to store real audio recordings (but they could be), but they store marked up transcripts and use the conversations to train their AIs. This is why you suddenly find yourself being targeted with ads for a product you were just discussing with a friend. They also track you on every website. Not just websites they own, they also publish the code of various widgets and plugins for websites who are too lazy to code the features themselves and also sometimes pay websites to include their code. Whether it is bible.com or pornhub, whether eis.de or ebay. Unless you are blocking javascript code on your browser very thoroughly records of every website you visit and what you do there are constantly being sent to Meta and associated with the internal profile they have on you. You do not have to have any accounts on any of their platforms for them to have a personal profile with all this information. They know who you are even if you never used any of their platforms. Lastly, they purchase data provided on the global data market, which includes credit card and bonus point/loyalty programs. This means for many people they also know exactly what you spend your money on, inluding where you buy things, at what time of day and most crucially, who you were interacting with at the time. This is the most insidious part of all. Because they are your communication tools, they know everyone in your life, what your relationship to them is, how you interact with them, where you go together... etc. All of this information is collated and analysed by huge AI systems and compared to other people to find patterns of behaviour. Meta literally knows things about most people that they don't know about themselves. There are stories about people suddenly seeing ads for strollers and baby food and then finding out later that they are pregnant.
People say "Hey I am not hiding anything, why should I care?" Well, Meta are not peeping toms, looking at your porn habits and laughing and making office memes about it. Their business model is behaviour modification. They aim to literally control people's minds, and they are very successful at it. Companies and individuals pay Meta huge sums of money to get people anywhere in the world, in a very targetted way, to do things they want. In the most obvious and widely acknowledged case this is getting people to buy certain products or consume certain media. But this kind of behaviour modification can be used in so many more ways, some of them very sinister. With the detailed understanding of each person they have they can model how you will react to seeing certain information, and try out variations until they find something that works on you. Meta platforms have been linked to the rise of extremist ideologies, coups against democratic governments, even genocides. They have been instrumental in putting fascist and in some cases psychopathic dictators into power. Donald Trump is not presedent of the united states because most people there like him and his policies, he is president because powerful people paid a lot of money to social media companies to get him there. They are also laughing at your private photos and browser history and making memes in the office, but that is kind of less important.
The writer George Orwell wrote of a brutal pseudo-socialist fascist surveillance state that controls everything that happens through watching everyone every moment. H. P. Lovecraft talks about demon-god entities from other dimensions that come through tears in the fabric of reality and send brain parasites to feast on our brains. Companies like Meta are alarmingly close to both of these descriptions. The type of society we are likely to end up with if this kind of behaviour continues is something we should all be concerned about. I don't have perfect future sight and your guess is as good as mine regarding the details of how this could turn out. But in my darker moments when I imagine worst case scenarios brain eating worm parasites start to seem like an attractive alternative. With AI slop now being added to the usual propaganda and manipulation even our shared understanding of reality being eroded.
Ideally I would like to advocate that we kill this monster, and others like it, before it destroys us. But for now I think I have to settle for telling people not to feed the beast. Use these platforms as little as possible, try to look for alternative ways to achieve what they give you. Try to reduce the amount, detail and accuracy of the data that they are collecting on you. I don't really know anyone who still uses facebook except to communicate with their grandparents, but a great alternative to most Meta products can be found in the fediverse. Talking about what fediverse is and why it is better is outside the scope of this article but think of it as communist social media, made by people for people. Most fediverse platforms are not for profit, run by small communities, contain no advertising and offer all the same services and features. For example pixelfed allows you to share and publish photos and videos, to subscribe to your friends feeds and keep up with what they are posting, follow organisations that post updates for cultural events etc. message your friends and so on. But when people join these servers, they are often not satisfied. The first reason is network inertia - your friends are not on the platform, and neither are many of the organisations you follow. The problem is if you quit because no-one is there, when your friends try to set up account later, they won't find you there and they will quit too. This is how Meta maintains a monopoly, by locking people into their platform. The way you can get around this is by using both for a while and encouraging your followers on Instagram to follow you on pixelfed instead. The other reason is that you will feel like you can't broadcast your message as widely as you can on Instagram. It is too easy for people to ignore you and filter you out. This is by design and it is something you should want. It means as a user you are more able to ignore people and filter them out too. The illusion that you will one day become a big influencer on Instagram is fed by Meta selecting a few individuals and pushing their message in everyone's face, because it suits their own agenda to do so. This is like a lottery, you probably won't win. If you really want to be an influencer you should build real relationships with real people, not just a horde of faceless followers. Federated platforms allow this, and in return they allow you to see the content you want from the people you follow, without an AI algorithm manipulating, censoring and emphasising parts of it.
Yes Meta is just one of many companies using this business model. Alphabet Inc. (aka google) and Amazon.com, Inc. are also serious players and cosmic horrors in their own right. I am focusing on one of them because this is for me the most egregious and the one that effects the lives of the most people I meet in the strongest way, but they will all need to be dealt with at some point. If we learn to fight Meta we can use the same skills and tools to combat the others as well. Ultimately we need strong legislation to make this kind of company illegal. Even then there will be black market behaviour modification services, but they won't have the same level of access to people's minds as these companies have now.
In 20 years when younger generations are asking you "How could anyone have used platforms like this knowing what they were doing?" and you feel the urge to justify yourself by saying "We never knew what they were doing", please think back to this article and the countless other times people have probably tried to warn you and instead say "We just never listened when people tried to warn us".