F.T.C. Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion
Five billion dollars is more than a slap on the wrist, even for Facebook. That’s a ton of money, and I’m glad the FTC has approved a serious fine and not just a measly couple million bucks, as I was afraid would be the case. However, this is not significant enough to change Facebook’s business model. At the least, Facebook needs to be punished so severely that they MUST change their business model in order to remain profitable (I want them to be fined out of existence, personally). Cases like this must continue to be brought against them, because they make the same privacy violations day after day. Legislation must be enacted that safeguards the American people from such egregious privacy violations in the future.
I think the best way to fix the whole Facebook mess is to break up the company, throw Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in prison, and throw away the key. They have been intentionally dishonest and immeasurably greedy. Maybe have a ceremonial Hunger Games with the rest of the company’s executives.
As far as the company’s stockpile of cash, I think it should be doled out evenly to everyone who ever had an account. Facebook has been deceitfully profiting off of our information, so I don’t think its going too far to suggest that we put a stop to this nonsense and try to compensate the citizens of the world for the data Facebook stole from them and weaponized.
As far as the actual platform, pull the plug and shut it down. Facebook makes people increasingly hostile and drives them further to the edges of the political spectrum. It upsets people, and it wastes their time. It’s a toxic wasteland of clickbait ads that serve no purpose other than to confuse, captivate, and enrage people, and it’s making “journalists” lazier by the day; we’re in dangerous territory where people on different sides of the aisle can rarely agree on facts and truth, and we need to address these issues sooner rather than later, or we’re going to lose all common understanding of truth as technology progresses and deep fake videos get more and more realistic. I know there are a lot of people whose small businesses rely on Facebook; not to be too harsh, but they should have done more work to understand the platform and the dangers of it before putting all of their digital eggs in that basket. If their businesses are providing legitimate value to consumers, they will find a way to continue doing business with them; hoorah, capitalism.