Facebook has been in the firing line since the 2016 election. It’s been saddled with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the rise of QAnon, and the full-spectrum hate campaigns. It’s been criticized for not reacting, and reacting. Double standards as far as the eye can reluctantly see.
The political bias of #DeleteFacebook is pretty obvious. The very troll-like approach is similar to most of the last four years of propaganda. Some sell of the post criticize Facebook and corporations for supporting Black Lives Matter, for example. These are routine tactics for right-wing spam hate.
Other commenters, ironically, criticize Facebook for blocking free speech and “election tampering”. This is really pretty amusing in a black humor sort of way. Most of the propaganda you see online does not come from actual people. Most of it is bot-based, repeated endlessly. You’ll notice that the phraseology never changes, the spelling mistakes never change, and the ridiculous capitalizations never change.
So what is #DeleteFacebook? As usual, we don’t seem to have any particular people responsible for it. Exactly like QAnon, nobody is responsible. According to the news about #DeleteFacebook from around the world, a lot of “celebrities” have got on board. That itself is utterly meaningless, particularly coming from Facebook competitors like WhatsApp.
Of course, like most people, I always need to know what some mindless celebrity thinks about a major issue. Most people, in fact, can make up their own minds.
A lot of posts on #DeleteFacebook don’t actually come from the page. Given the number of comments and responses, by Facebook standards, it’s a particularly unimpressive page. On one post, they are actually boasting about getting 275 hits in an hour. Prairie League? Absolutely.
There are quite a lot of mentions of Parler, an alternative social media site, too. Seems this site is setting itself up as a Conservative-friendly social media page. It’ll probably wind up something like a different version of Breitbart, given the hype it’s getting from right-wingers.
Facebook is probably being targeted for the same reason it was originally targeted – It is the biggest social media platform on the planet. If you can control Facebook, you can control social media.
It is highly debatable whether or not a hate campaign can actually do that. Most people use Facebook because they have friends on Facebook. It’s a convenient way of communicating regularly. Not because some brain-dead paid-skank ideology says they shouldn’t use Facebook.
The other thing most noticeable about #DeleteFacebook is how extraordinarily out of touch it is. A lot of people did leave Facebook long before #DeleteFacebook, mainly because of the trolls and hate speech. The political madness, intolerance, and general racism alone were quite enough to drive many people off Facebook.
I bumped into quite a few trolls on Facebook over that time. I discovered that if you replied to them swearing in Russian, they left you alone. Every single one of these trolls was banging on the same drum. All of them were right-wingers. (Left-wing trolls can be so self-righteous nobody reads them anyway.)
The bottom line here is that #DeleteFacebook is very obviously a political set up. All of a sudden, in the midst of the election turmoil, Facebook is the target? Zuckerberg is the problem?
Seems a little simple, doesn’t it? I wonder who the simplistic crap would be pointed at? To be specific, I wonder for about half a second. This is yet another grandstand play from the Big Book Of Clichés circa McCarthy. Accuse, accuse, accuse, regardless of facts, actual information, or anything else.
#DeleteFacebook may well be the last pointless gargle before the money for paid trolls runs out. This will run its course. It may be ugly, it may be stupid, but what’s new?
For the social media geniuses
Social media doyens, “influencers” (like hell), and the rest of the Holier Than God chicken coop in social media may be interested to consider this:
If Facebook can be buried like this, you can be buried a lot quicker. Play ball with this at your own risk. What’s come out of #DeleteFacebook would be an insult to the rear end of a chicken; it’s nothing. If that can knock over Facebook, what chance have you got?
