Read on Twitter
1/ On the bright side, at least Zuck can rest easy tonight, knowing his system worked exactly as designed.
2/ Four years (and more) of enabling and amplifying Trump's lies and unhinged conspiracy theories. The dinners, the Oval Office meetings, the relationship building. And it worked.
3/ Years of supporting racist hate groups - and encouraging their growth with a finely tuned algorithm, referring members of one group to others. All worked flawlessly.
4/ And then the preparations for the Big Game. Test runs with strongmen in smaller, vulnerable countries. The Philippines was a fun one, putting Duterte in power and helping him replace the independent press with Facebook. Worked great.
5/ Bolsonaro in Brazil, another test run, this one a bit bigger than the Philippines, but again: system worked flawlessly. Crowds on election day were chanting. "Face..book. Face..book." Can't buy that sort of love. (Except with Facebook you can, that's the whole point, ha)
6/ The genocide in Myanmar. True, the United Nations named Facebook as complicit, and what a shame, Zuck must think: but again, look at the power under the hood! This thing really is disruptive, *at scale*. Amazing.
7/ All the while, no resistance to Facebook's rise. True, @ewarren briefly raised the specter of an antitrust-happy president-an "existential threat" to Zuck, the opposite of the happy customer now in the White House. But the new administration will have plenty of Big Tech alums.
8/ And, perhaps best of all, no resistance from Facebook employees themselves. Sure, an occasional angry resignation, and some low-level complaint on the company message boards: all easily muted or banned. System is growing without resistance or dissent: a beautiful thing.
9/ Oh, as for advertisers: hundreds of them stamp their feet about the racist algorithm and pull their advertising for one single month. So adorable, Zuck thinks! As he says in a staff meeting: they'll be back. And they are. Profits keep rising. System is working as designed.
10/ Finally, today, the Big Game. 1-6. Everything comes together: terrorists from the hate groups, recruited by the algorithm, chant the lies fed to them by the happy customer in the White House. And the system works just as it did in the Philippines and Brazil. Perfectly.
11/ A finishing touch: Facebook PR gets ahead the crisis by "showing leadership." The #1 customer's account is put on pause for a few hours, heightening the drama and the pent-up demand for the customer's return the next day. PR optics looks great, and engagement is guaranteed.
12/ As democracy burned in the Philippines and Brazil, so it burns in the US. And while Facebook keeps growing, and growing, and growing, no one with a platform dares to publicly question the system. The consequences, after all, work perfectly at scale.
/eot
/eot
