Not that there was much trust to be lost, but it becomes clearer every day that nothing social media platforms and their broligarch owners do is worthy of trust.
They make agreeing to ongoing vacuuming up of personal information, including but not limited to behavioral data, a condition of use, and billions of people seem fine with that, to satisfy their social media addiction and FOMO. I would rather pay and be free from surveillance and manipulation by the platform owners, but that is not an option.
And it doesn’t by any means end with what people actively allow the owners to do to them in order to use the platform.
The platform owners accumulate wealth by allowing and encouraging users to engage in unlawful, unauthorized publishing of vast amounts of copyrighted image and video content owned by others. The incorrectly understood acceptability of such unlawful publishing is premised on the convenient misunderstanding that publicly accessible and public domain are the same. They are not.
The platform owners also reward the creation of “content” that is at best worthless garbage designed to evoke engagement that earns ad income for the users and also puts money in the bank accounts of the slimeballs that run the platforms. Recently, that content includes huge amounts of AI-generated dreck, including countless deepfake invitations of viewers to crime scenes as the victim. And the platforms shadow-ban content that does not “align” with their business model of theft and engagement harvesting at any moral cost.
Social media companies operate with a business model in which both surveillance and manipulation of users and unlawful publishing by users of IP they don’t own are essential enabling activities.
The owner of Meta is a serial liar with no semblance of a conscience, and his unvoiced hope that he will never be regulated will probably be fulfilled. Orders to pay huge sums of money resulting from civil litigation are just a cost of doing business. And so it goes.
