Facebook does not exist for your pleasure: Remember that. By Geniusofdespair

 I decided to boost our brand "Eye on Miami" on Facebook  for some unknown reason. I do crazy stuff sometimes. I guess I am trying to get people to join the Eye on Miami Group on Facebook. Don't know what that is about? Neither do I, but look on the Right Side of this page there is a giant Facebook link to the Group. Hit it. Join it.

Well, back to the story, I am paying $2 a day for 3 days to boost the post on the left to see what happens. As you can see the $2 got me an extra 359 people in one day. The problem is, many, many of those people are trolls. I am now getting all this crazy troll stuff on Eye on Miami. And, I am getting Trump crazed gun people. Luckily it hasn't tainted the Group page only the Eye on Miami Facebook page. I didn't  do any boosting on the group page and I have to approve all the people that join.

 It is like when Castro emptied his prisons and mental hospitals during the Mariel Boat lift. Facebook has afforded me all their crazy people in getting me more hits. They must have a looney bin set aside for boosting posts.

So what am I getting at?

Facebook is not here for your pleasure. It is here to make money. It is all about the money, not your Kid's Birthday Party.

And, there are trolls all over Facebook. Get your privacy settings set up. I can see too many people's data. Get your whole date of birth off of facebook. Too much HONEST shit on your page. Make up some stuff.  And, damn it, don't sign in to anything with Facebook. They take your whole FRIENDS list when you do. It might be easy for you but you are selling me out and all your friends.

Good luck with Facebook. You need it. I am glad I sold my stock.

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MORE, on the Facebook debacle ... a five-alarm fire in American democracy ... by gimleteye

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are huddled away, trying to figure out their next steps now that the role of Facebook data in promoting the election of Donald Trump and the Alt-R is coming clear. Their shameful disgrace is spreading across Western democracies because elected representatives allowed Moscow Center an open door to exploit the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of human nature; proliferating the scum of nativist fears and anxieties (in parallel, too, with Rupert Murdoch's Fox News empire).

Here are a couple of recent postings worth reading in their entirely. The first, an OPED by Lizzie O'Shea in the UK Guardian (which has bravely lead the disclosures about Cambridge Analytica's exploitation of Facebook data) makes a case for re-working the internet to protect personal data and privacy, as a generalist point of view:

Facebook’s reckless vanity has made the headlines again, with the revelation that data it held on about 50 million users was exploited commercially without their consent, and that when Facebook found out about this, it did pathetically little. We only know this thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower. This is yet another scandal in a troubled period for the company, with a growing sense that it is all profit, no responsibility. But the current malaise goes wider than Facebook. On the internet more widely, the advertising-supported model has demanded its payout, and as a result our experience of the web is getting worse. Like rats scrambling to get back on a sinking ship, senior former-Facebookers are lining up to express regrets. It all feels too little, too late.

The second is by a mathematician whose feed I recently began to follow: Paul-Olivier Dehaye. This post on Medium, in Sept. 2017, is even more astringent today, following the whistleblowers emerging from the Bannon/Trump/Mercer/Cambridge Analytica connections.

Dear Facebook, For the past two years, I have been trying to contribute to the public debate around Facebook’s influence in elections. For instance, I have been credited for research on two influential articles: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down (Das Magazin, Zurich, then translated worldwide) and Robert Mercer: The big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media (The Guardian/The Observer). As part of this wider effort, I have tried for a long time to use my data protection rights to get access to more information about the ad targeting that takes place on your platform. These requests have so far been met with one limited, but encouraging, success.

I’m just a curious FB adopter who blogs from time to time on Facebook, a five-alarm fire in American democracy. I was horrified by FB content that passed on my screen in 2016 (before deleting all the Trump and RUS supporting groups that swamped my FB feed.)

Dehaye has an outline of what Facebook is not telling us about its algorithms. We’ve allowed FB to abuse western democracies and election processes ... long past time for governments to intervene although that runs counter to the Republican narrative; a significant reason for Congress to be returned to Democratic control in Nov. 2018.

The GOP has been as silent on Cambridge Analytica and Trump as it has been on Facebook. It doesn't want to confront the truth that its jihad against government regulation -- of everything from public health to to gun safety -- is criminal negligence. The swamp isn't being drained. America is not being made great again.

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Stormy Daniels is fit to end the sonnet ... by gimleteye

UK Guardian Carole Caddwalldr just broke open the story of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower. Click here, to read the story. This morning, Facebook banned the whistleblower.

Rupert Murdoch set the stage, long ago, with a profit model to extract billions by ginning up base emotions. Under Reagan, the Fairness Doctrine disappeared. Mark Zuckerburg weaponized Murdoch's model and helped put a mobbed-up grifter in the WH. Putin saw the opportunity most clearly, driving straight through social media to infiltrate the US elections. While federales were building TSA check points at airports to prevent another 9/11, Moscow Center copied a few data files, put a few 20 yr old computer nerds to work, and shattered liberal democracy. Stormy Daniels is fit to end the sonnet.

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