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

      Delete
    2. 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. 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. 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

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...