Facebook Is an Authoritarian State – The Atlantic
To Zuckerberg, Facebook s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them people instead of users, but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.
GDP makes for a telling comparison, not just because it gestures at Facebook s extraordinary power, but because it helps us see Facebook for what it really is. Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power.
She gets it.