Open Letter to Fuckbook

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Thief in Chief

Fuckbook HQ

1 Hacker Way 1601 Willow Road,

Menlo Park, California

94025

Dear Corporate Cunt Zero:

            I am obliged to write to you on account of being unable to share my grievances to Fuckbook online on account of yet another week-long suspension with which I was hit yesterday. Apparently, Fuckbook loves to commit sadism on a daily basis and when I try to do something, anything on my account other than merely gawk, I get this box saying I’ve been suspended for x number of days but if I think this decision is in error, you “helpfully” provide a link with the words, “Let us Know.”

            The problem is, when I attempt to let you know what my thoughts are on your neverending fascism, I get another box telling me “Your request couldn’t be processed. Please try again.” Because, you know, I’ve been blocked from doing anything on your Nazi site other than impotently look at my monitor, including appealing your brainless algorithm’s decision and letting you know why I think it’s in error despite your giving me the illusion that I still have this minimal amount of power, after all. So you sadistic corporate cunts think nothing of leading us around in circles.

           

           This came about because some right wing troll named Joseph David Chadwick keeps reporting me for virtually every anti Trump meme I put up, memes that others put up with seeming impunity (although many of my friends have gotten suspended for the most specious of reasons). Chadwick has been stalking me for well over five years and at this point, you’re merely enabling him.

            He’s also been known to set up fake accounts under alternate names, send friend requests to my friends and me and once, in a writer’s group to which he’d belonged, even harassed a young woman so much that she had a nervous breakdown and was obliged to unpublish all her books then republish them with new titles and cover art just to get away from Chadwick and his one star reviews (which he’d done to me countless times).

            Chadwick is your typical right wing troll who in the reptilian recesses of his brain that is no larger than the meat of a walnut is just barely smart enough to know how easily your mindless algorithms can be gamed. The idea that you blatantly stole from Harvard University, this grand experiment in social media, has turned into something more closely resembling anti-social media. Now, any right wing troll with an agenda (and they, like you, always have an agenda) has the power to anonymously and with complete impunity report someone for “offensive content” that runs counter to your so-called “community guidelines” and that if they do it enough times to the same person, that account is automatically red-flagged so that virtually any post that person makes is given a disproportionate amount of attention from said mindless algorithm.    

            As with every single behemoth on the internet, your experiment in Artificial Intelligence has been a dismal, shambling, Kafkaesque, Orwellian nightmare. People who depend upon Fuckbook to make book sales or sell services now find themselves suspended on a regular basis due to getting reported by right wing assholes such as yourself for reasons that are so specious it completely eludes reason. It is now virtually impossible for such people who are being stalked and cyber harassed to put anything on your site. One of my friends was recently suspended for putting up a quote by Saint Augustine because it was flagged as hate speech.

            Yes, St. fucking Augustine.

            You may think AI is a wonderful cost-cutting and job-killing measure that capably takes the place of real human beings who have real cognitive abilities but you are so very, very wrong. Historically, in the brief history of the implementation of artificial intelligence, we’ve learned in spades that AI learns and evolves just enough to be dangerous yet not nearly enough to be of any appreciable benefit. It is, to say the very least, an extremely poor replacement for actual human cognition.

            Remember that experiment that Twitter tried a few years ago? They set up a chatbot account that was intended to learn from the people with whom it conversed. Within hours, the chatbot was responding to people with extreme right wing, Neo Nazi talking points and when Twitter’s engineering department learned what was happening, they were obliged to immediately terminate the account.

            How do we know the algorithm you use isn’t learning how to do the same thing, that the more it’s used by right wing accounts to report people innocent of hate speech or any other infraction, it isn’t adopting a more right wing outlook on those who are victimized by it? AI does not work, plain and simple. In the times I was suspended for “offensive content”, I’d appealed it and, more often than not, when reviewed by an actual human being, the algorithm’s draconian decision was reversed. (This latest time, I never got a notification that would’ve given me the ability to request an appeal, thereby violating my right for a redress of my grievances.)

            Just recently, my alternate Facebook account was shut down for a month for something I put on my wall weeks before. I appealed the decision, the post was reinstated within a day, yet my account remained suspended for the full month. Again, the post in question was reinstated. I was not. You stole a month out of my life that I cannot possibly get back.

            And now you’re stealing yet another week out of my life on my main account, which I use to moderate a book and writing group and sell my books. All Fuckbook does is steal, steal, steal, even when there’s no financial or economic benefit to it.

            And still constantly, despite all the bullshit suspensions, you keep shoving those little blue “boost” buttons in our faces as if, after enduring countless indignities, we’re still receptive to the idea of shoving our hard-earned money down your bulging, bottomless pockets for ads that rarely, if ever, prove to be efficacious. Those getting hit most often with the suspensions report that they’re least likely to pay for “boosted” posts or at the very least, have their posts artificially suppressed so no one sees them on their feeds. In essence, you are stealing eyeballs.

            Let’s be perfectly frank, Markie Mark: No one “earns” $26 billion by the time they’re 26- You steal it. You stole the entire idea of Fuckbook from Harvard University’s own social network, ran your misogynistic bastard version of it out of your dorm room and perverted the original idea of Harvard’s social network to rate how hot girls looked. 13 years later, you got a fascist elected President of the United States. By April of this year when you got called on the plush carpet of the United States Congress, you looked like Lt. Commander Data caught in the headlights.

            And your risible community standards to keep Fuckbook a “safe and friendly environment” for its users apparently involves accepting money (100,000 rubles) from smalltime Russian bad actors propagating propaganda on Fuckbook, not using basic password protection, ergo letting 413,000,000 phone numbers of your users to get blown into the wind, you allowed Cambridge Analytica to use our contact information for their purposes and sell more of our information to corporations than you’d let on. You use algorithms to make snap decisions on the viability of certain posts to save on human resource overhead expenses yet think nothing of hiring up to 1,000,000 people to creepily listen in on our Facebook Messenger conversations, another violation of your own TOS.

            If this is what you consider a “safe and friendly” environment, I’d hate to consider what your definition of dangerous and hostile is.

            Yet you irresponsible corporate cunts, you executive douchebags still bitterly resist tooth and nail any government regulation whatsoever from either the US or Canadian governments or any government.       

You artificially suppress peoples’ visibility, especially when they post content linking to their own blogs or Amazon product pages (How Fuckbook knows that is creepy enough but we know you've been in bed with Amazon for years), you arbitrarily suspend or terminate the accounts of those who are blameless of any wrongdoing and are left with no means of redress, you allow Nazi hate groups to grow and thrive and profit from hosting auctions selling child brides in Africa and take a month to do anything about it, if you do. You violate your own TOS by violating the rights of innocent people in the acts of not safeguarding our security and allow highly personal contact information to get freely disseminated on the internet.

And you do this with a typically corporate arrogant expectation of impunity and, like the typical executive cunts you are, you keep expecting to get unlimited free passes from our Congress and other governments to continue making the same mistakes and thefts from the planet’s population.

Explain to me again why every nation on the planet earth shouldn’t regulate the fucking shit out of Fuckbook?

Essentially, if Fuckbook was the United States government you would’ve violated virtually every single amendment in the bill of rights, starting with free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to petition (1^st amendment), the illegal search and seizure of papers and effects (4^th amendment) and so forth. If Fuckbook ever, God forbid, supplanted the United States government (Which is dysfunctional enough these days, thanks in large part to you personally), you’d be in court so often for violating the United States Constitution you’d hardly be able to function on a day to day basis.

Ergo, I fervently hope that your bloated corporation eventually goes the way of Friendster, Google+ and Myspace and that I live long enough to see it. Fuckbook is an Orwellian palimpsest of something that actually worked to the benefit of innocent people: The student body of Harvard University. If not from Harvard, you’ve graduated from fucking over the Winklevoss twins who helped you steal Harvard’s social network and now you’re fucking over many of your 2.5 billion users and making a pile of money in the process.

And now you're getting involved with online dating? God fucking help us all.

How the fuck do you sleep at night, Zuckerberg?

Don’t even bother responding to this. I’ve heard enough of your corporate cunt boilerplate bullshit to last me 100 lifetimes.

Sincerely.

Robert Crawford