My mother uses Google every day. She'll do a search for the bylaws for her municipality. Or she'll search for ingredient substitutions in a recipe she's reading. She's got a toe dipped into the Twitter ocean. She'll click on the odd thing on Twitter to read a thread posted by her local councillor, or something by a comedian she likes. She's even shown me cat memes from Reddit!
But where were the bylaws being discussed, such that she wanted to look them up? Where did she find that recipe in the first place? Where did she hear about something written by her city councillor? Where did she see a link to a video clip on Reddit or Twitter?
On Facebook, of course. She's generally aware that big tech is turning our society into a surveillance-consumption dystopia. And it's obvious how central Facebook is to this. More obvious than Google. Facebook is the first page she loads every time she gets on the computer. It sends her notifications on her tablet. She has an account on Facebook -- almost everyone here does. She doesn't have a Twitter or Reddit account. Just passive drive-by reading.
Facebook is the central pillar from her perspective. It's obviously heavily personalized content. You basically have to be logged in to use it. It's very obvious to see how they could manipulate you by selecting which messages and news stories you see on your personalized feed. Facebook might as well be the Internet for some people. So Facebook draws the ire. By comparison, Google and their ads, and their trackers, are under the surface, in the background, operating largely unseen by many. (Many people also seem to be unaware Google owns Youtube, oddly.)
But on reach, I think that might be it: Facebook has more of it among a larger population (and possibly one that has more effect on the rest those around them). So you're saying they're being targeted because they're more influential? That really says something about the rest of them too, don't you think?
Google gets hate for being a monopoly, for collecting every bit of data about you ever, for manipulating search results for creating echo chambers of YouTube. For censuring "free speach"... It goes one an on.
All the social media platforms get hate. With respect to big tech the ones that don't leak data (because they don't sell it) get less.
Specifically Apple, Google and Microsoft might collect a lot of data but by not selling it they are free from the recurring embarrassment that companies that do sell it pretty much without fail ultimately face.
It's there, but it doesn't seem as persistent as it is with Facebook, right now and over the past few years. People within the tech community are often noted to defend and praise many of the worst things Google does. Furthermore, there seems to be a card deck of typical points you can expect to see when inquiring on the matter. It just feels like a strange forced narrative, like Monsanto criticizing Crispr or something (not that that's happened, but you see what I'm saying).
It really feels like a club of big people bullying one of their own, and I can't put my finger on why it's happening. Could be nothing, but it's just too consistent to be 100% likely coincidental.
And by no means am I presenting threshed out points or claiming to cite stats, more just asking for discussion for those who can perhaps see a bit of what I'm trying to get across.
“ While the blame for President Trump’s incitement to insurrection lies squarely with him, the biggest social media companies — most prominently my former employer, Facebook — are absolutely complicit. They have not only allowed Trump to lie and sow division for years, their business models have exploited our biases and weaknesses and abetted the growth of conspiracy-touting hate groups and outrage machines.”[1]
“What is clear, however, is that Facebook was a “key vector of distribution for untrustworthy websites.” [2]
“ In the Philippines, Facebook staff trained Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign, which then used the platform to circulate disinformation, including a fake endorsement from the pope and a fake sex tape of a political opponent. Since winning, Duterte has paid armies of online trolls to harass, dox and spread disinformation about journalists and political opponents on Facebook. Although Facebook has since organized safety and digital literacy workshops while hiring more Tagalog speakers, journalists still contend that Facebook hasn’t “done anything to deal with the fundamental problem, which is they’re allowing lies to be treated the same way as truth and spreading it … Either they’re negligent or they’re complicit in state-sponsored hate”.” [3]
[1]https://hbr.org/2021/01/how-to-hold-social-media-accountable...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2020/03/21/facebook...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...