Yea, and there was a lot of controversy that went all the way up to the government and there was the attempt to break apart the tight centralization that had become Telcos. Obviously this is repeating itself.
Social systems are built by people and broken apart by people. People are telling you to stop using Facebook because they don't have anyone's best interests aligned with anything besides their own. So stop using Facebook unless they figure out how to prove differently. Trust takes time and when it's broken, it takes effort to regrow. Don't give them that power over you. That's the point of what a lot of people are saying. All of that stuff influences the ways we see all online communication. A breakdown in trust from one superpower affects perception of everything it is connected to. And some people like socializing online freely, without having to constantly police themselves for every statement uttered, because for some people, that's all we ever had for real and fluid and trusting social interaction and that's all we learned to feel comfortable with. Facebook changed that dynamic to an extreme.
So Facebook sucks, that's why we have that perspective. They are going to have to do more than AI research because it's still very obviously aligned with their own interests and not necessarily the interests of the people that use Facebook. They need to rethink stuff, or at least think about the perspective of folks that use Facebook without projecting their own insecurities onto the rest of the world. Do different things, think about what Facebook does that breaks relationships down instead of builds them, think about how to solve those problems. Because it does. It establishes social dynamics that are not useful for meaningful dialogue. They took advantage of that, which is an abuse of trust. All of this stuff matters in this political climate. It affects all of us.
Yes, you use a service, you become the product. That's what we've been led to accept. How about just not seeing people solely as means to an end (profit)? It's a balance. Capitalism matters to this country clearly, it matters to lots of people on Ycombinator, entrepreneurs, startups, small business, developers, etc. But it's still a balance. You don't want it to override everything you are and everything you do because then it controls you, instead of you have control over you. That would seem like a contradiction because the point of having financial security is to have your own control. But the world is much more complicated than the business of making money. This doesn't mean toss everything you've ever done in the garbage. Just means be mindful of the balance.
Facebook, for whatever reason it was built, was sold to a consumer public as a means for improving socialization. It is not doing that because it chose to not do that. It took an action that was orthogonal to the mutual trust established in the business dynamic. Takes time to repair that. AI is still too tightly coupled to predicting how people think.
Bottom line is, you have to ask yourself "Why do they want to do that?".