In Defense of Facebook: Why The Verge's 'D' Grade for this Year is Unfair

    Looking at the way the news has covered Facebook this year (and even just googling the word Facebook) creates this image of an evil corporate (bordering on monopoly, but I'll get into that later) that has been exposed by the great works of whistle blowers, and good ol' journalism. I'd like to debate that idea.

     I'll start with acknowledging that yes, Facebook has done some pretty messed up stuff this year. But you didn't come to my page for that, because every single tech media has already covered hundreds of timelines of Facebook breaking it's promises. Even myself. The thing is though, and I notice this being done to tech companies a lot more than other companies, you can't judge a group's performance based on it's most elite members.

 

    First of all, and this is a project I followed since it first begin and is one of my favorite projects that I've seen a tech company go after, Facebook has connected almost 100 million more people onto the internet through their internet.org initiative. Internet.org uses low bandwidth services and WiFi hotspots to give people connectivity and (as of April 2018) was testing a solar powered drone which will beam bandwidth down to users in remote areas. Going back to Facebook's privacy issues, this is a bittersweet thing. The areas that they are giving the gift of internet to are usually in countries that have censorship. After what we've seen with Facebook this year, I'm worried that this will just open up another avenue for surveillance, censorship, and uniformity of ideas to people who were so lucky to be free from that before. And on the other hand, people, who couldn't before, can finally get more opportunities whether it be jobs or social connections and enjoy the everyday blessing that the internet is.

    Like, we've got to remember that Facebook has about 25,105 employees as of December 2017, so we can't ignore the hard work and ambition of other people just because the CEO has a bad rep right now. Another initiative they've launched (which might be in an effort to fix their image) has been to provide "independent and credible research about the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally". Being from Sudan, a country with a history of dictatorship and censorship (specifically recently due to more protests) I understand how important freedom of speech on the internet and offline is, and how the internet changes our views to be more on opposite ends of the spectrum. So I enjoyed reading about how Facebook is trying to contribute positively to mitigate these scenarios through a scientific approach with researches.

    There's loads of other examples of Facebook's amazing initiative this year that you could find with a simple Google search. I really just wanted to add this to mix to try and push the fact that we need to look at companies more objectively instead of judging them by whatever rules twitter comes up with. There are real, hardworking employees that get affected behind ever scandal. And that's not to say it's important that we call out companies with executives that have done wrong things, I'm just trying to argue that we need to remember who we're angry with and try to think of who we might inadvertently be hurting. I also want to end off by saying that Facebook is definitely not doing to feel the blow of this year. Unless we have people in government that can question these companies properly (aka people who understand the scope of the issues and have some knowledge about how the tech behind the issues work) and we all try to spread out our usage of social media to things other than FB, Whatsapp and Instagram, Facebook can continue to do whatever it want with our data, because where else are we supposed to get the same services it provides without the strings attached? I argue that encouraging smaller, niche networks (like devRant for developers) is the only way we can try to lessen the grip the Facebook has on the social media market. (see this: "It's time to break up Facebook")


     I hope I've shed some light on a few things you may have not been exposed to before, or at least got you thinking. You can always reach out to me through my blog or on Medium if you're seeing this post there. (If you couldn't tell, you won't find me on Twitter or FB for that matter ;) And remember, I'm just a High School student with too many thoughts so I like venting them out here. I'm not trying to sound like I know everything about all that I write about, I'm just another observer, and I like recording those observations. I've tried my best to cite every claim I make, but if I missed something, feel free to let me know :)