Facebook Algorithm Boosts Pro-Facebook News
Orwell was an optimist.
Facebook is a rotten company, rotten from the top down, its founder, board and top execs are sociopaths and monsters, committers of non-hyperbolic, no-fooling crimes against humanity. They lie, they cheat, they steal. They are some of history’s greatest villains.
Because Facebook is a terrible company run by terrible people, it periodically erupts in ghastly scandal. Sometimes whistleblowers or reporters reveal historic crimes, including (but not limited to) deliberately helping to foment genocide.
Sometimes, the scandals are contemporary: either Facebook blithely announces it’s going to do something terrible, or we learn of some terrible thing underway from leaks or investigations.
Thanks to a history of anticompetitive mergers — Whatsapp, Instagram, Onavo and more — based on fraudulent promises to antitrust regulators, Facebook has grown to nearly three billion users — except FB doesn’t have users, really — it has hostages.
As Facebook’s own internal memos show, the company doesn’t just buy up competitors so users have nowhere to flee to, it also engineers in…