I really do not understand the power of Facebook. I do have a Facebook account and its only purpose is to reach out and find long lost friends of many years ago and this has been most successful.
I get all my news from political sites both left and right on the internet. I know both sides. I even watch TV and it pisses me off but I do watch it. Fox News pisses me off the least and the others piss me off in the extreme.
Please explain to me why Facebook is so powerful. I really do not understand.
Say something on Facebook and all of your friends see it. If anyone else comments on it then all of their friends may see it. So each comment may multiple the viewership of the conversation by hundreds or thousands of people.
I don't use Facebook.
The power of Facebook is that it caters to the overwhelming number of low information voters, gossips, busybodies, and airheads in the world.
Imagine a high school clique on steroids and growth hormones. My guess is that most Facebook users are airhead women who exchange cat pictures with their friends. Nothing wrong with that of course. Whatever floats your boat.
But when these people are manipulated by Soros, it is a formidable reservoir of "approved and acceptable" public opinion. In social settings no one wants to be perceived as a bigot, so baloney like "Black Lives Matter", "Hands Up Don't Shoot", "Trump Is Racist" is readily adopted through shaming and peer pressure. Groupthink is what Facebook is good at.
There are many millions of people who use it far more than you do. They get headlines, news, opinion, everything - from it. Moreover, as a platform where all your opinions are open and public for eternity to everyone you know, whether closely or casually, it automatically becomes highly skewed towards blandness and conformity. Facebook can then manipulate that conformity.
...”Please explain to me why Facebook is so powerful. I really do not understand.”...
I realized a couple of years ago what FB was doing and how it was luring the naive into it’s net. I disabled my account upon being hacked for the third time after putting in all the available safeguards. Of course, when active, I entered into FB political discussions with friends from my traditional and conservative point of view. When I alerted my friends that I was disabling my account, one told me he had done his own research with his more than 400 friends and discovered that his conservative posts never reached them, and guessed that it was the same with mine. I suspect he was right. Mr. Zuckerberg is the 4th richest person on the earth and is very young to be so successful, solely, because of the appeal of FB. Needless to say, he has to understand the power he holds to manipulate the kind of information out there which has the best chance to reach the eyes of his FB users. The ads are powerful, as well. Someone has said that, “in every progressive is a dictator trying to get out.” If it is the goal of FB, Google and Yahoo or whomever else is richer than most nations, to form and shape this world into their image, they can do it largely through censorship. Most of us fear terrorism, nuclear war, an Electromagnetic Pulse, illness or disease, or violence against us in some other way. However, for me, I fear FB, Google, and, to some extent, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. He owns Amazon which I love. What I do not love is his purchase of the Washington Post in his effort to do the same thing FB and Google are doing, through unfair propagandistic news reporting. Out here in the land of real people, most of whom feel that they are sure which gender they are, will be found much naivete and lack of understanding about the #1 danger to us, which, in my view, is the monopoly of big tech to take over and ruin our freedom, our lives and the hope of the future and humanity for a long, long time to come. One more thing about FB. The years I tried to keep up with it showed me one of the charms about it for some heavy users. It was simply a way to rewrite one’s own history. I saw this over and over again just from the postings and photos of the people I personally knew. It was a way to be one’s own publicist. I do not like big government, but just as in the monopoly of Standard Oil in the old, old days, the dangerous tech monopolies need to be broken up. Another thing which makes us pause when we hear of Zuckerberg’s political views is this..Why has he built himself such a high wall and fortress around his home, to live behind? Is he for or against a wall to protect our nation which is our home or does cheap labor and Democrat votes “trump” that idea? Just wondering.
Low-information people use Facebook the way some of us use Free Republic (for news and discussion); there are a lot of them, and they are low-information. If Facebook had 10,000 users it would be a non-issue; it is a primary news source (under the guise of social networking) for many people.
Like you I use Facebook to stay in touch with family and firefighters who became friends before everyone retired and moved.
That’s it. I don’t do politics on FB and ‘unfollow’ anyone who does. Left or right. Doesn’t make a difference to me. It’s not why I’m there. If I wanted to do politics on FB I would follow/join political FB pages. I haven’t and won’t.
I don’t do FB news either and don’t understand why anyone would.
This is a very interesting article. It’s been all about monetization, but now Zuck wants to turn that down. His advertisers are not happy. Should be interesting.
I hardly used FB until Some serious health situations happened. I became a bubble girl and found social interaction thru FB.
I do not used FB for anything political as it is for social purposes to be. However, many do post and comment on political/current events. The comments on those posts can become heated and opinions formed and relationships broken.
I also belong to private groups that are related to my health condition. That has helped me connect with others going thru a similar ordeal.
I was invited into a closed and private group. That one is political. About 25 members are a combination of every walk of life politically and most are outspoken. We challenge each other. But, it takes some thick skin at times.
What is said in there, stays there.
I also signed up for cooking pages and my feed gets videos and recipes.
As you can see, there are many aspects to FB.
Facebook is dying. I only check it because many niche products I enjoy reach their customers directly through. The number of posts by individual “friends” has dropped off dramatically in the last year, and we are 50-somethings. My kids don’t even look at Facebook.
same question here. I use it to keep in contact with my vet pals I served with, other than that I do not get anything from it.
FB sells all your personal information and sells it without your knowledge,
50% of the population is below median intelligence. There's a lot of numbskulls.