Skip to main content

Facebook’s Sucker-berg

 

Ideal partners

Facebook has blocked me for not following “community standards” because I wondered in a comment whether one of its users was mentally retarded. That person whose IQ looked suspect has a name which is an odd mix of North Indian Brahmin and South Indian Roman Catholic. When he/she (the name is male and the profile pic is female) got me blocked for wondering facetiously about his/her IQ, I checked his/her profile and saw that he/she was an Indian living abroad having studied at Copenhagen International School and Imperial College of London. He/she is apparently very nationalistic. Strangely, he/she reminded me of Anjum/Aftab, the hijra character in Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness though they have nothing in common.

What I don’t understand, however, is why Facebook bothers to block anyone just because he wonders about the IQ of one of its users. Facebook’s own IQ is highly suspect. It is just a swindling medium. I don’t really care whether it exists or not. I wander into its domain just for the heck of it. Like an atheist entering a temple dedicated to the eleventh incarnation of Vishnu.

Facebook is one of the most unethical websites. It shares your information with third parties without your permission. The privacy settings revert to unsafe mode after you redesign it each time. Facebook ads contain malware that creep into your personal life maliciously. Experts say that Facebook gets your real friends making you vulnerable unknowingly. There are too many scammers and fraudsters there whom Facebook never cares to block.

Frances Haugen of Cambridge Analytic is one of the many whistleblowers who drew the attention of the world to the multifarious frauds perpetrated by Facebook. She said in no uncertain terms that Facebook lied to the public, investors, advertisers, journalists and governments. Facebook is mere shit in other words. You enter there at your own risk. I enter there knowing that I am stepping into a riled cesspool. I don’t care whether an Indian nationalist wheelwright living in Copenhagen or London gets me blocked in that cesspool.

Facebook is replete with hate speech, misinformation, and celebrations of violence. With 350 million Indians using Facebook, India is the company’s largest market.

Mark Zuckerberg’s integrity has been questioned again and again in the international media. Just Google his name with the word ‘integrity’ added to it and you will be amazed to see the results. This mammoth fraud is blocking people for calling another fraud’s IQ into question without even bothering to find out the details of what exactly happened. I am not even given a chance to explain! Come on, Sucker-berg!

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 1, 2022 at 3:50 PM

    Hari om
    I have nothing to do with the booke of phisogs... but recently was semiblocked from Instagram (fb owned) for having a "suspect URL"... say what??!!! Stick to blogging I say &*> YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 1, 2022 at 4:08 PM

      Just after I posted this, the message came thst it was a mistake. I was unblocked. Quite funny.

      Delete
    2. ArtiFebruary 2, 2022 at 9:51 AM

      Just read your comment above, looks like Facebook is reading your blog posts! I do visit Fb whenever I want to share a new blog post -- have been thinking about the visibility cloak I sometimes like to don because I do enjoy the connectivity. Hmmm... to be or not to be on SM is the question.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 2, 2022 at 10:28 AM

      SM can be a nuisance. But it has its delights too. I learn a lot of things from SM before they appear in the mass media.

      Delete
  2. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 13, 2022 at 9:24 PM

    It has certain merits too and that's why people still stick to it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more