Facebook connects people. In a human hive. The ceaseless vibration and buzzing inside this hive both neuroticizes and addicts the individual. It fragments thinking and scatters attention.

The rules and processes in the hive—visible and invisible, explicit and implicit—are determined according to the interests and policies of the company, which hardly correspond to its publicly proclaimed principles. Despite the proven harm of this kind of “connection,” characterized by a constant exchange of low-value—even misleading—information and plain spam, detaching from the network leads many people to symptoms of withdrawal. More than that: the very nature of relationships in the human hive, its atmosphere, the uninterrupted stream of empty information and irritants, shapes the individual in such a way that they become part of the hive—and begin to emit the same kind of content toward others. Thus the hive sustains itself and expands.

Facebook encompasses an enormous mass of people in its network, although the social and personal benefit of this network is questionable and the subject of countless criticisms. Perhaps the main criticism is that the social network has become an environment for all kinds of political and social manipulation. It is a fact that Facebook is a favorable habitat for trolls and fake news, directed by various “headquarters,” which have a toxic effect on people’s lives and mental state. At present, the “hit of the day” on Facebook is the so-called chatbots—programs that converse with people while deceiving them into believing they are speaking to a real flesh-and-blood interlocutor. They are used mainly for advertising purposes (Crowd Marketing[1]), but by no means only for that. There are known cases of bots being used to influence discussions and opinions, sowing hatred and division, as well as diluting and discouraging discussions through spam.

Other accusations against Facebook include violating online privacy and tracking people on the internet; tendentious ordering of news with manipulative intent; automated facial recognition; poor employer ethics; tax avoidance; censorship; recording personal data; improper handling of personal data; allowing fake news; and participation in the U.S. surveillance program PRISM.

Every registered member who logs into Facebook begins to live in a reality directed by that corporation. They offer themselves as a research object whose reactions—even the most insignificant—are recorded and analyzed. The user becomes a target of algorithmic interventions that decide what they should see (and how) and what they should not. Based on their psychological profile, actions, and reactions, psychologically impactful content can be presented—enabling emotional and rational manipulation, suggestion, experiments, and provocations.

It also turns out that the relationship between an individual’s political culture and knowledge is inversely proportional to their use of Facebook. The reason is that Facebook is filled with false and misleading information; in communication, meaningful topics are degraded to a low level, emptied of meaning and vulgarized, until users’ interests are ultimately channeled into trivial and contentless directions.

Facebook’s operating logic is no different from Google’s and consists of the familiar three main steps:

1. Information gathering
2. Profiling
3. Microtargeting and manipulation

Based on this logic, Facebook also decides who sees which news in their news feed. If someone publishes something, not every one of their friends will see that post placed in the same position in their feed. Who sees which item where depends on Facebook’s algorithms. And those, of course, are secret.

Thus, individualized sorting of news means the possibility of shaping perception. For example, placing a post in a particular position among other items in a person’s feed can influence how that individual interprets it—depending on the context Facebook has chosen for them. The possibilities for “playing” with all the platform’s parameters—tuning them, tweaking them—are endless. And this will not change until some generally accepted standards are introduced for how social networks should function, just as standards exist for many other things.

In 2017, an Australian newspaper revealed internal Facebook strategic documents describing in detail the company’s ability to determine when its teenage users feel insecure. According to the report, by monitoring posts, images, interactions, and online activity in real time, Facebook is able to determine when young people feel stressed, defeated, overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, stupid, dumb, useless, and like failures. Although Facebook claims it never used this information for microtargeting teenagers, the company does not deny that it could do so.

Based on what has been disclosed, we can assume the same methodology could be applied to all age and social groups. And then all that remains is to hope that Facebook will be kind enough not to use this power (because that is exactly what it is—power) for its own benefit and to the detriment of its users.

Or perhaps we have another option—one we should fight for?

It has been proven that Facebook tracks not only its members but also those without an account, through tracking “cookies” (files saved on a user’s computer containing diverse information related to their activity). In November 2015, the Belgian data protection authority, citing European Union laws, ordered Facebook to stop tracking people who were not users of the social network, or be prepared to pay a fine of 250,000 British pounds for each day the illegal practice continued. In response, instead of discontinuing the tracking cookies, Facebook banned access to its network for everyone in Belgium who did not have an account. Moreover, Facebook criticized the order in an attempt to defend the tracking of non-registered individuals, claiming that these tracking cookies contributed to a higher level of security.

There are known cases in which Facebook has experimented with the behavior of its users. On July 3, 2014, USA Today reported that the human rights group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the U.S. consumer protection antitrust authority, the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that Facebook violated the law by subjecting members of its network to emotional research and experiments without informing them or obtaining consent. The case concerned an incident in 2012, when the company experimented on 689,000 (six hundred eighty-nine thousand) people, studying the psychological impact of positive and negative posts on individuals in order to determine whether emotional states can be “contagious”—whether individuals are influenced by the emotional state of those whose posts they read online. For this purpose, the test group was divided into two parts: for the first group, negative posts in the news feed were partially filtered, exposing them to more positive posts. Conversely, the second group was exposed to more negative posts. The result showed that individuals are influenced by the character of the posts in their feeds: the content affected the test groups as expected—those exposed to more positive news posted predominantly positive posts, while the other group posted predominantly negative ones.

This happened relatively long ago. A decade in the information industry is an entire era. We can try to imagine the scale of such activity by thinking about how far experiments with human consciousness on the internet may have progressed in that time—and what knowledge they have produced—while, of course, remembering that experiments like the one mentioned, even in 2012, were likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Another project of the company, the subject of public criticism, is the so-called “Willow Village” (also called Zucktown—the town of Zuck, after Mark Zuckerberg): an entire city for Facebook employees, owned by the corporation, where it dictates conditions, culture, and way of life—thus, according to some concerns, violating residents’ civil rights. Encouraging—and sometimes pressuring—employees to remain in this company-controlled and monitored environment outside working hours also raises questions and doubts about the legitimacy of such projects and evokes dystopian concerns. Encapsulating employees in a corporate microworld where they both work and live creates the risk of explicit and implicit influence being exerted on them—manipulating and shaping them, gradually erasing individuality and turning them from people and personalities into mere human resources.

The fact that this is a culturally and socially homogeneous environment where all residents work for a single employer gives any freedom-loving person chills of disgust. The total dependence of every resident on the Mother-Corporation, and the immense possibilities for controlling the environment that the corporation possesses, conjure images of a social laboratory in which people are subjected to various techniques and strategies. Such settlements are not natural organic communities of free individuals, but rather resemble showcases of a corporately controlled society—a prelude to dystopia.

Google is also developing a similar settlement.

[1] Crowd Marketing — a marketing technique that relies on communication as an advertising approach rather than traditional forms of advertising. This can include promoting a product or brand through “recommendations,” spreading rumors, friendly advice, “expert” opinions, mentioning a brand in “casual” conversation, and so on.