Mark Zuckerberg may still be wearing a hoodie and sneakers to product launches but Facebook is in need of a major wardrobe overhaul. Since it’s founding in 2004 Facebook has been evolving from adding features like groups, messaging, apps, the like button and the ability to live stream.
Over time Facebook has become not just a social networking site but a place for businesses to advertise and for politicians to push platforms. With the advance in technology, there have been issues with bots taking over accounts and many of the accounts are not associated with a human directly. Businessman Mark Cuban took to Twitter to call for social networks to confirm that all accounts have a human behind them.
It's time for @twitter to confirm a real name and real person behind every account, and for @facebook to to get far more stringent on the same. I don't care what the user name is. But there needs to be a single human behind every individual account .
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 28, 2018
It’s not just the divide between humanity and bots that is causing social media to “destroy democracy”, it is also the echo chamber effects that are working to harm a human’s ability to divide between news media and propaganda.
A person’s ability to pick what they like and what appears on their newsfeed is great in theory – in practicality not so much. If one can simply put all liberal news outlets on their newsfeed and never be exposed to the other side of the conversation then they will end up only hearing one side of the story. This echo chamber effect is multiplied when Facebook removes stories from certain publishers and places them on a hard to find news feed, resulting in the publishers losing 80% of views.
Facebook is acting against the public good, and it's time for people to build alternatives – great piece by @EthanZ https://t.co/XC4OCQnRm6
— Hella Hueck (@hellahueck) January 28, 2018
In the end, social media is designed for people to stay connected to the world, not for businesses to advertise or for politicians to push an agenda. Facebook ultimately has to decide in the future who their true customer is – the people or the propaganda.