New Facebook Trump Tool Lets Thin-Skinned Friends Unfriend People Who Disagree with Them
You have probably heard about this new Facebook Trump Tool - A tool to let you find out who in your Facebook friends group likes Donald Trump. Congratulations for all the thin-skinned folks who think that now they can finally unfriend their besties because a Facebook tool has informed them that their friends "LIKE" someone that they hate.
But this is wrong and disturbing on so many levels.
Facebook is conducting social experiments on its users and collects data,
like LOTS of data on users.
Even rumors that the Rainbow Flags from this summer, where you can change your profile to a Rainbow Flag in support of gay rights, was actually a social experiment to see whether or not people would be willing to follow a social cause in this manner made major news. This has been duped as a rumor, but Facebook does actually conduct social experiments and post-datamining social movements may eventually look at the data gleaned from any social media decisions, like massive amounts of people defriending someone because a tool tells them too.
(More about Facebook and Social Media Experiments:
It's not all rainbows and unicorns, now is it Facebook?
But there are much larger implications to this anti-Trump tool
that are unrelated to the politics of it all.
What if Facebook allows you to defriend all gun owners?
What if Facebook allows you to defriend all Muslim sympathizers?
What if Facebook allows you to defriend any gay rights activists?
What if Facebook decided to label every friend by their faith, political beliefs, ethnic identity?
What if Facebook aggregated all of your friends for you, so you can sit there and judge each one by algorithms and not relationships?
What if local governments or corporations could do the same?
What if you could not only determine which of your friends did not agree with you, but you knew their exact location at this very minute?
What if criminals could access the same information?
What if you lived in a country where religious or political beliefs could end in imprisonment or death?
WOULD YOU WANT FACEBOOK TO CREATE A TOOL THAT TOLD THE WORLD YOUR EVERY BELIEF, LIKE, DISLIKE, ETC. BASED ON UNLAWFUL DATAMINING?
Would you want someone that means to do you harm access to information that could jeopardize your safety, your job, your family?
While some of this information is gleaned somewhat voluntarily, the reality is that we have absolutely no idea how Facebook uses the information that they gather on us, nor do we know what third parties do with the data once they have it. And while Facebook is supposedly going to keep our information safe from the unscrupulous, the reality is that in in the future, Facebook's one use may be datamining by corporations and governments.
Americans think the Trump Tool is cute, funny, or even helpful. But it can be a powerful weapon in the wrong hands, even if those hands are our own.
