The Social Media Apocalypse of July, 2020

Brands are unfriending Facebook due to its poor behavior. Entire countries are unfriending Chinese apps, because of its bad behavior. Guess what? In the real world dictatorships don’t work.

And guess what? In the real world antitrust investigations catch even the best among Silicon Valley profiteers. Let’s admit that digital advertising is a bit broken and that some crusade against “hate speech” isn’t going to save it (I’m looking at you, Reddit).

When Huawei is used against the Muslim minority in China, who are now being force-sterilized by the way and when Microsoft’s facial recognition is used at the border, what have we become?

The Facebook boycott has now gone global and India has decided to ban 59 Chinese apps including TikTok due to Chinese brutality at the border.

Facebook’s response to the global boycott for July has been really tone deaf. TikTok has also been accused of spying on your clip board on your phone. We know it is a data harvesting play funded by the Chinese Government as well as Softbank.

Facebook, Google, Huawei, ByteDance and others are letting us down. There’s no regulation and the ethics of these companies is highly questionable. China has weaponized its best companies to be “instruments of the state”.

Facebook and YouTube algorithms are like part of the dark science of mind control. Meanwhile facial recognition companies like Microsoft and Amazon sell for profit, are racist among other things, and should be banned. How do you trust a world that harvests your data for free? The least they could do is pay us a basic income for it.

We live in a time of protests where social media is the least of our worries. But it appears Facebook and Google will be held accountable one day. The outrage in the United States over the death of Floyd has led to an unprecedented reaction from corporations around the world. Brands are on board to try to pressure Facebook to not incentivize extreme content and to take some responsibility as a media platform.

India recently stated that the 59 Chinese apps are “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of india, security of state and public order.” Certainly the debate of whether TikTok is a national security threat is interesting. Nobody really thinks a boycott could kill Facebook. But Facebook today is an outdated behemoth of a bygone era of social media, not the future.

We live increasingly in a world where Andrew Yang is making more sense than Mark Zuckerberg. Hopefully something will come out of it.

China should be punished for its brutality and increasingly incoherent campaigns of dark influence and black market capitalism around the world. We need to take a stand against tyranny, even if we are slipping into a state where dystopia is the new normal.

Are we asking so much? Social Media just has to keep up with the times. Facebook has been weaponized against us for too long for profit. Over the weekend, Starbucks and Diageo said they would pause advertising on all social media platforms.

The list now includes so many names it’s hard to count including Reebok, Pepsi, Lululemon, Coca Cola, among others. The Stop Hate for Profit campaign is morally right and Sheryl Sandberg is silent.

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know how to play offense after all, since the rise of TikTok has already dethroned him. TikTok made by the company ByteDance has significantly won in the global attention economy and ad-market share during the pandemic which began in China.

The world hasn’t even decided how to punish China for its lack of data transparency, early action and human rights violations with regards to the spread of the virus.

The social media apocalypse is a time in the history of technology when change is being demanded: that technology not be used for political gain nor in nefarious ways. Meanwhile the U.S. Justice Department prosecutors expect to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google in the coming months, focused on the company’s dominance in online advertising and search. A reckoning is coming, and even the most dominant global platforms still need to play by the rules.