Thread by @polotek

"...even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was 'deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook.'" buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/ryanma…

"The implicit vision guiding most of our integrity work today is one where all human discourse is overseen by perfect, fair, omniscient robots owned by Mark Zuckerberg."

That's a hell of a sentence.

I was debating this with @operaqueenie. She says facebook is a big problem, but not the only problem. And I found myself making a very passionate case that, yes, Facebook is the *whole* problem. Not the tool per se, but the power it wields and how it wields that power.

If we look at so many of the problems of the day, I don't think they would be as dire as they are without Facebook. And I also believe that if Facebook were dismantled today, those problems would start to become tractable again very rapidly.

Facebook the tool is a machine that addicts people, steals their personal data, surveils them, and brainwashes them with whatever message you want to feed into it. It has captured half the population of the globe. Facebook the company then sells that machine to anyone with money.

Facebook is a weapon of mass destruction that is legally sold to the highest bidder. It has little respect for sovereignty and national interests. It's leaders have no real morals or ethics to speak of. And they have unlimited money to fight any opposition and to buy support.

Combine that with the fact that we are in an era where criminal grifters, white supremacists, and authoritarians are enjoying a huge surge of power and free reign. Hard to say how much of that is due to facebook. But they are certainly the customers of Facebook's killer machine.

Small handfuls of the worst people in the world have the power to control large portions of the populace across the entire planet. That is not hyperbole. Not even a little bit. It is the stark and undeniable reality of the Facebook era. It is a scourge.