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Zucked

Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
Mar 31, 2019rdtansey rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
I was disappointed. The first half of the book is interesting but the entire second half of the book reads more like a resume for the author being the only one that understands and knows how to fix these privacy issues. If you followed the data breaches and congressional hearings last year there is little new here. OK, we get it - Mark Zuckerberg is a self absorbed very wealthy 33 year old kid that neither understands nor cares about the potential damage to democracy the platform he created has caused and will continue to cause, Sheryl Sandberg is just as culpable, and Google, Amazon and Twitter are also aiding bad actors but no one realizes it because they've all been overshadowed by Facebook's transgressions... The "filter bubbles" have existed long before Facebook became ubiquitous. A significant segment of the country only tunes to FOX news everyday (or MSNBC) and is fed a continuous stream of biased reporting that only reinforces whatever position management has asserted in order to maximize profits. Before cable TV there were publications that did the same. Isn't this what advertising is all about (think Mad Men)? The issue is not that these one sided information/misinformation vehicles exist, but rather that people are too ignorant to take time to understand opposing viewpoints. The author does make many valid points having to do with the pitfalls of technology, particularly the rise of mobile communications and its negative anti-social influence on young children. Facebook has made it significantly easier for bad actors and rogue nations to influence democratic institutions, but again if people would just come out of their cocoons and realize much of the information on-line is total fabrication the effect would be minimized. The answer is education. Maybe we need to start teaching children how to identify social media misinformation in grammar school.