Getting bounced from Facebook a year ago was the push that I needed to get off the platform and spend less time doomscrolling. But the basis for the ejection is so absurd given the company's behavior. Let me get back to that.
I saw The Social Reckoning today, the Aaron Sorkin written and directed sequel to The Social Network. It appears to have bombed at the box office, but I'll see anything Sorkin wrote. I happened to love it, in part because it's a dramatization about a journalistic endeavor. It's a genre that I love, and other recent films like She Said and A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (with bad and good outcomes, respectively) have been so great to me. Heck, Sorkin's series The News Room isn't even based on a real news org, but since they cover real events, it's fucking outstanding.
Reckoning is about the Wall Street Journal's reporting on just how terrible Facebook/Meta is, because of its decisions to do a lot of shitty things even when they knew the harm they were causing. Like any Sorkin piece based on real events, it's obviously heavily dramatized, but the underlying core facts are based on the lead's character, a whistleblower and former Facebook employee. The company quite literally knew it was radicalizing people with its rage content, and promoted it anyway. The film follows an arc that climaxes on the January 9 insurrection, making it clear that the company had a non-trivial role in creating the atmosphere that led to the violence.
Despite the lawsuits brought by all of the states, Meta eventually settled with them to the tune of $17 billion, which of course means exactly dick to the company. It hasn't forced a change in behavior, and the federal government hasn't done anything (about anything, but that's the Republican m.o. these days). Ironically, two Republican-led states, Florida and Texas, refused to settle. Texas got their own billion, Florida is going to trial. The long and short of it though, is that nothing really changed. It's still a shitty company that does shitty things making our world shitty. The epilogue is that, fortunately, there are countless individual lawsuits, and the EU is far from done with them.
Going back to the ban, after the appeal, I reached out to a friend of a friend that worked at FB. It turns out that a human had reviewed the case, and they believed that referencing the fact that Google couldn't tell the difference between Cedar Point and CSAM was problematic and justified the ban. This is the company that knew it was radicalizing people, creating an environment for teen bullying and fat shaming girls.
We're clearly not done fixing online social interaction.
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