Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Build WeChat for the West

Saying Facebook's plans are to become the "WeChat of the west" makes me even more wary. The first thing that I think of when I think of WeChat is "ubiquitous surveillance", especially governmental surveillance.

And this is a good thing? Not only that, but we're supposed to trust Mark "Privacy This Time" Zuckerberg with something that indispensable?

> “The future is private,” he declared grandiosely.

Nearly 10 years ago, Zuckerberg proclaimed, to paraphrase, that the age of privacy is over. Forgive me if I don't take what he says today seriously at all.

> It could argue that a single dominant social network is easier to police than lots of smaller ones and has greater financial and technical capacity to keep users safe from harmful content.

I'm reassured by this. /s

It's the same old story, but with a new coat of "privacy" paint.

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3074222/facebook-d...

However, could we face a near future scenario where WeChat expands outside of it’s total dominance of China and penetrates One Belt, One Road trade partners?

Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent(WeChat), and Huawei(BATH) are all well integrated into Chinese government/PLA strategy.

Could Zipf’s Law combined with Metcalfe’s Law apply here?

In the global digital geopolitical sense((geodigital?), are we better off with shaping and influencing the US devil we know, than the authoritarian WeChat devil we don’t, and can’t?

To me, this effort by Facebook is just another step in the macro war between geodigital operating systems.

Thoughts?

WeChat is strictly monitored, pervasively censored and rigorously controlled to align with official dogma, stifle rumors, suppress dissent and promote harmony.

The new Facebook would be end-to-end encrypted so Facebook can't read messages even under court order. It will be physically impossible to monitor, censor or control how the platform is used and abused.

Facebook lost control of the monster they created, and this is their solution - abdicate any responsibility whatsoever.

I don't want the WeChat model, or the current Facebook model, or the new Facebook where their toxic waste is externalized to governments and the public to clean up.

These are all anti-patterns.

I admit those features are pretty awesome as it allows businesses to target the exact groups of customer they wanted. It's the holy grail of advertising. Imagine you can just bypass all those who are not interested in your product and only laser target the ones who have intentions to buy.

Having said that, I understand for businesses to have such effective insights, it's reasonable that consumer privacy must be compromised to some degree. We can't have the cake and eat it too. If one agrees to use Facebook they must give up privacy, it's just that simple and I accepted that when I used it.

For Mark Zuckerberg to come out and say they won't peek at your information, that would be dishonest. How are they going to sell ads if they don't have your information?

For Facebook to continue to grow, they must strive to innovate and provide new services that are deemed so valuable by the public that people are willing to give up some of their privacy in exchange for these new services. That's really the only way.

Everyone knows Google does some surveillance on their users too but their services provide very high values to society, people simply can't ignore and not use it.

For me most interesting candidate is Amazon in that space. Would be interesting to see if Amazon will make a move at Facebook eventually - just a matter of time.

So I've zero clue what Zuckerberg thinks is going to happen as far that goes.