As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially two billion people!”
Mark Zuckerberg, July 2017
That’s amazing. Astonishing. Congratulations, Facebook, on these incredible numbers! Except…
This past week during Congressional Hearings, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, revealed (rather proudly) to Congress that from March of 2017 to October of 2018 Facebook has deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts. Read that again…
1.3 BILLION FAKE ACCOUNTS,
OUT OF 2 BILLION TOTAL!
Now before you jump to the conclusion that all your friends on Facebook are fake (at least in the literal sense), know that Sandberg also stated that most of these accounts are “bots”. However
What does all this mean? Well, it probably means that unless a real friend or family member that you’ve actually met in person says something on Facebook, then there’s a very good chance that the “person” saying it is not really a person at all, but a corporation, government or other entity hell-bent on Tom-Foolery. Facebook claims that most of these fake accounts are inactive Page accounts, not profiles (people). I’m not sure that makes me feel any better about it.
While everyone is scrambling around complaining about advertising appearing on Facebook, you may want to consider that Facebook itself IS the advertising. There are TV commercials, radio commercials and now there is Facebook—nothing more than a giant advertisement disguised as something you might actually want in your life… like TV shows and music. Facebook itself is a giant propaganda machine that uses pictures of your relatives to get your attention.
*Photo by Jolanda Flubacher