As more news comes out about the extent of Facebook's corruption each day, it may be hard to keep track of all that has been revealed. For this article, I have compiled some of the stories that I have found to be the most interesting, many of them confirming suspicions that people in the alternative media have held for a very long time.
"Facebook is probably listening to you"
After years of denying that Facebook has been listening to your every word to feed you ads, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says that have probably been listening all along. During an appearance before the UK parliament, Wylie said, “There’s audio that could be useful just in terms of, are you in an office environment, are you outside, are you watching TV, what are you doing right now?”
Facebook Sent A Doctor To Hospitals Trying To Collect Medical Records
Facebook has halted a plan to gather information from several major U.S. hospitals about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription information.
"This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone's data," a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.
However, they only stopped the plan because of the other controversy surrounding their data sharing activities.
Facebook Thinks You Pay With Your Privacy
Facebook operating chief Sheryl Sandberg said in a recent statement that if users want to have more privacy, they should pay for it.
“We are not sweeping up data, people are inputting data. People are sharing data with Facebook... We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level, that would be a paid product,” Sandberg said.
Facebook seems to think that in order to have any type of income or advertisement at all, they need to have vast amounts of private information from its users.
Facebook Execs Were Deleting Sent Messages From Other People's Inboxes
Three sources revealed to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Mark Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspicuously remain.
When asked about the situation, Facebook representatives said, “After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”
After the story went public Facebook issued a statement saying that they will make this a feature that is available to all users.
“We have discussed this feature several times. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge in a statement.
Facebook Wants To Kill Alternative Media
In a recent interview with VOX, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plan to prioritize mainstream media sources
“This year, we’ve rolled out a number of changes to News Feed that try to boost in the ranking broadly trusted news sources. We’ve surveyed people across the whole community and asked them whether they trust different news sources. Take the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Even if not everyone reads them, the people who don’t read them typically still think they’re good, trustworthy journalism. Whereas if you get down to blogs that may be on more of the fringe, they’ll have their strong supporters, but people who don’t necessarily read them often don’t trust them as much,” Zuckerberg said.
However, this is not what people actually want, most people get their news from a variety of sources on social media because they no longer trust the mainstream narrative and they want an alternative viewpoint.
Once upon a time social media was "the new media" where everyone had a voice, where there were no longer political and corporate gatekeepers. Well guess what? The new media, is morphing back into the old media, where the narrative is controlled by powerful interests who seek a uniformity of opinion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion and Manifesto of the Free Humans
I just won a 3-year-long battle with cancer, and will be working to help others through my experience, if you wish to contribute to my medical bills, consider subscribing to my podcast on Patreon.