In this TED talk, Jaron Lanier reflects on a "globally tragic, astoundingly

ridiculous mistake" companies like Google and Facebook made at the

foundation of digital culture, and how we can undo it.
Facebook, which is currently the biggest target after many scandals, decides
how you will see posts without options to let users decide how you want it.
All changes to the functionality of the wall were intended to make more
money. Do you remember games everywhere, for example? Facebook was
promoting them a lot to take them on board and when the mission was
accomplished, Facebook stopped that to charge companies to make money.
The same thing can be seen with business pages. I would call it
manipulation, even if this is not so bad for us, users.
But Facebook lives thanks to an advertisement. Many times ads are not very
well recognized from the normal post. I can create a post and pay to share it
with a group of people I want to. If I do that to promote my salsa
calendar with people dancing salsa in my country, it’s nice and useful. There
are many ads like that. But then there are also other businesses
like Cambridge Analytica. Facebook doesn’t care about privacy much so
Cambridge Analytica could download many data in the past about us to help
them run political campaigns. Which is manipulation without question.
You could say you have ad block (as I do) and communicate mostly in
private messages, so it doesn’t apply to you. Well, communication is not just
chatting. Maybe you don’t see it, but all public posts are also communication
which shapes us. Or it shapes our friends, which then shape us. Anyway,
Facebook knows there are many people using Messenger and not whole The
Facebook platform, that’s why you already could see ads in Messenger as
well.
Some people left Facebook and/or Messenger to go to another place.
WhatsApp is one of the popular choices as my friends use this one if they
are not using Messenger. But WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. The same is
true for the Instagram. And moving to other products of the same company
doesn’t make much sense.
We could all leave Facebook and move to another company, it wouldn’t be
for the first time. But, other companies need to make money to keep servers
running as well. With the free the internet there is no other way than run ads.
I was working on a recommendation system for Seznam.cz and even if we
had researches to try our best to have a quality recommendation, always a
solution with better traffic won.
Who could blame those companies? People don’t pay, business do that.
Social networks (and search engines and all other apps we use on the
Internet) then don’t work for us, but for them. That’s why I really like that
quote, “We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to
communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third
person who wishes to manipulate them.”
So, are we, are YOU, ready to pay for social networks to get better
experience?
Until you (and companies) will be ready, be careful out there. It’s world of
ads.