One of Zuckerberg's "Dumb Fucks"?
4 weeks ago I ditched Facebook. I had drug my heels for years refusing to join. Facebook always seemed a shady business model to me at best. They were trying to monetize friends, relationships and interpersonal connections. To me it was akin to going out for lunch with your friends and having a salesperson interrupt you in the middle of sharing a personal story with your BFF every 10 minutes. It was only through the urgings of my website designer that I “absolutely, positively had to get on Facebook to help my business” that I reluctantly joined. Many other small business owners were told, cajoled and convinced that it was a *must do* in this brave new marketing ecosystem. Eventually I started paying for some ads on FB, testing the waters. As I tried to improve my skills of utilizing Facebook I reached out to several other small local business owners to share advice on how to make FB work for us. To my surprise, each and every small local business owner contacted had mediocre results at best with FB. I spoke with a couple of friends who work in the marketing world and was told that advertising on FB was not straightforward and could be “tricky”.
Facebook likes to encourage businesses to build a following. They push “boosted” posts, paid for advertising, they constantly send emails and notifications on what you should be doing to increase views and followers. It’s really time consuming if you’re running a small mom and pop type business.
Facebook can also yank your business page without any warning, as they did mine. In other words, you can spend a lot of money for fruitless advertising, waste time building a following, working on ad campaigns and then *poof* from one minute to the next your business page is gone. The only reason is a vague message that you have violated FB’s “rules and policies”. You cannot call anyone, you cannot email a person or support group, when you PM Facebook’s business group you get in an automated reply loop.
Facebook has an official “Facebook Business” page. There they post feel good stories and tips on how to market on FB. You cannot post hard questions, negative feedback nor review Facebook’s really horrible platform and policies. They encourage other businesses to allow reviews, which you have no control over, but you cannot leave a review about Facebook itself. I did manage to capture posts from other business owners struggling with the same problems as me, but their posts were quickly deleted. FB curates content regarding itself aggressively, so all you see are the happy, sunshine and rainbow stories and posts.
I can only surmise that Facebook yanked my page because I was bumping up against a large investor funded competitor that was advertising heavily on FB. This would explain why they refused to give me a specific reason, they didn’t have a good legal reason to provide for suddenly yanking my business page and ads. Ads which had been already approved by them! By being vague and not answering my questions they avoided the liability of showing any bias or discrimination. Facebook is a truly terrible platform to advertise on and even large companies like G.M. struggle with it for a reason, the ROI is way too low. I know some business owners have had good fortune with FB and will tell a different story but the problem is, their stories are the only ones Facebook allows. You don’t see the other side, the other stories of the many businesses that have had problems because FB can delete your comments and pages at their will and whim. I found FB to be one of the absolute worst platforms/mediums I have ever used for advertising in 14 years of owning a business. At every turn Facebook has to lie to keep it’s bottom line chugging along in positive territory:
Advertisers clearly believe they need to be on Facebook, and Facebook wants them to keep believing it. That case has been harder to make over the past several months following embarrassing and very public blunders that cast doubt on Facebook's honesty toward ad buyers. In September, the company admitted that for years it had inflated how much time on average viewers spent watching video ads on the site.www.wired.com/...
It’s also worth noting, an awful lot of the personal pages on FB are fake, just like the Russian troll accounts. I created a couple of pages to test out how easy it was. FB doesn’t verify people’s identities and I was able to create 6 pages in 15 minutes. It’s easier to create a fake account then delete. So how many of the profiles they tout as their user base are fake? No one knows and FB has an incentive to let those numbers get fluffed up in order to fool advertisers as to how many people will see an ad. Don’t believe it when you hear “Facebook is a country”. A country that consists of many Donald Ducks, Scarlett Pimpernels and Fido von Woofwoofs.
Which leads to the premise and theory behind my headline, advertising income just isn’t paying all the bills over at Facebook, else they wouldn’t have to lie and inflate the impact of legitimate paid for ads. That’s why they are seeking other income streams, take such low roads. It actually takes work and good communication skills to build a business to business relationship. I know Google is far from a perfect corporate citizen but they have support teams that you can call or chat with 24/7 to get help with your advertising account. Zuckerberg was never interested in putting in the work, developing B2B teams for all strata of business owners, small to large. He just wants to leverage off the work of those he called “dumb fucks” who trust him, as documented in a 2010 article in Business Insider.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
www.businessinsider.com/…
I’ve followed a lot of the FB diaries here at KOS recently. Some of the repeated comments/themes are paraphrased below *in italics with my argument presented below them~
*”Facebook helps poor or underserved populations around the world access the internet. Those who delete their account are only doing so from a place of privilege. “
— FB is not an altruistic entity. Someone has to pay to keep the lights on, servers running and Zuckerberg’s posh life style. He has shown time and again that he’ll take money from any source as long as it’s easy money provided by the ‘dumb fucks’ who do all the work entering their information and he can sell it to third parties, he is not socially conscious about the world at large. He won’t keep servers up and running for free. Furthermore FB is as good, if not better at, building division and hate among segments of populations fighting for resources. If you feel very strongly that FB is a force of good for poor populations around the world, donate money to FB, seriously and sincerely, that is an option. I’ve been helping foot the bills over at FB by paying for my ads, but I’m not giving them one more hard earned cent of my money.
*”Facebook is the only place to keep in touch with family and distant friends now a days.”
— It’s nice to see pictures of the grandkids, little videos of them at the school recital, to share the joy of an old highschool friend earning their degree. I understand that concern. Facebook seems like it’s a ‘can’t do without it’ kind of thing, but how much of that is hype? Just like the hype that I couldn’t keep a business going without it? What Facebook gives it can take away. It’s a for profit venture that’s built on a house of cards. My suggestion is start looking for other ways to share and stay in touch. Facebook has only two ways to go at this point, start charging users or continue to find income streams which undermine civil society in order to make their billions. Nothing in life is free, the question is how much are you willing to pay, directly and indirectly, to share and store memories? There was life before FB and I’ve found there is life after it as well.
*”Facebook helps animal rescues. “
— True to a point, but it also enables a lot of bad actors in the animal world to continue. Also if I had a dime for every time someone posted on a FB rescue page “Someone PLEASE SAVE THIS BABY!!!!” but didn’t actually donate or do anything beyond type in all caps, well I’d be able to build the best dog park ever with those dimes. In other words, I don’t think FB is as big a help to animal welfare as we think it is. Just as with everything else on FB it’s not really quantifiable. At our local shelter most of the adoptions are because of websites like Petfinder and local rescues pulling dogs and cats. I know some folks will strongly dispute this and have some good counter arguments but I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years and FB hasn’t helped *that* much. Factor in the down sides of the scammers, flippers, puppy mills and back yard breeders that also proliferate on FB. FB is not really that great at policing that sort of activity I’ve found.
*”Keep Facebook, just make sure it’s properly regulated. “
— I agree with this, to a point. Personally, I won’t feel badly if Facebook crashes and burns. Some people will be out of work, temporarily but they’ll find other jobs. If anything let it be a lesson to other “social media” companies. Facebook/Zuckerberg has barely concealed his mission and disdain for people and society. One of his first memorable actions with Facebook at Harvard was to use it to hack into the emails of some reporters with Harvard’s Student paper the “Crimson”. www.businessinsider.com/.... He is yet again refusing to meet with legislators, wanting to hide behind his lawyers. He didn’t intend to make this company a good corporate citizen with a social conscious, it’s never been about providing a positive service to it’s users or advertisers. It’s been about how “Zuck” could use his users with the least amount of investment and work on his part, that is the founding principle that continue today. As a small business owner I find that attitude in direct conflict with what most of us dream of and work so hard for day in and day out. My vision never included thinking of my clients as “dumb fucks” that were too trusting and therefore to be taken advantage of. Yes, let’s regulate social media outlets and let’s not be shy about being more forceful about hate speech and bullying on them too.
I hope that I at least have helped convince some that Facebook is not as big and important as Zuckerberg wants us to believe. Please don’t believe the hype about how great and wonderful and needed the “country” of Facebook is. A lot of it is fakery, half truths, smoke and mirrors, the emperor is not so well dressed after all. We won’t be worse off without a Facebook.
It’s also one of those situations where I would like to tell a lot of people who have argued with me about Facebook in past years, “I told you so!”.
As for me, I’ll no longer be one of Zuckerberg’s “dumb fucks” and for what it’s worth, I *never* trusted him or his Facebook. He needs to get a real job for once in his life, earning an honest living.
