Unsocial Media

It started out innocently enough.

Mark Zuckerberg, a 20-year-old college student at Harvard, co-founded Facebook with three friends in 2004. Facebook would soon become the biggest thing in a new phenomenon called “social media” -- designed at first to be an online place to post good things happening in users’ lives that could be quickly shared with others.

You know, birthday greetings, silly pet snaps, endless selfies -- and photos of what you had for lunch.

Really cool, important stuff -- right?

And people flocked to it because -- unlike email -- it offered a much wider audience to see your inane pictures and a place where you could go and “like” -- or not like -- stuff you saw.

And that’s when Facebook began to go bad and the era of social media “trolls” was unleashed. Where anonymous, hateful people could be nasty to others and spread lies with no repercussions.

By 2008, Facebook had become heavily politicized when it was realized how many potential voters could be influenced by what they saw on Facebook.

But instead of Facebook being a place where only “true” messages might be shared, it became a cesspool of hate and misinformation. Instead of it being a place where people could go and view uplifting messages and sweet photos, it offered an unending stream of vitriol and lies.

Over the past 17 years, a guy who’s not yet even 40 -- Zuckerberg -- now controls a set of social media channels that are used and viewed by more than 3 billion people worldwide.

Recently, Facebook went dark for about six hours and news reports said Facebook lost about $6 billion during the outage.

That’s $1 billion per hour!

That’s some serious cash rolling into the pockets of a guy with little actual life experience and in an industry that is largely self-regulated.

But that may be changing.

A whistleblower who worked for Facebook and saw its inner workings recently testified to Congress that Facebook is not really trying to regulate its content away from lies, hate speech and misinformation.

On the contrary, the former employee said, Facebook is hesitant to remove nasty content because that kind of content increases viewer reaction and interaction, thus pleasing Facebook advertisers on those pages.

The whistleblower said Facebook knows it is causing anti-social behavior and political divisiveness. But without federal oversight, Facebook will continue to do so no matter how much Zuckerberg protests its innocence, she said.

In just a few short years, Facebook has become a worldwide financial giant (Zuckerberg is now one of the richest people in the world) with its CEO arguably the most powerful person on the planet.

And during the election of 2016 -- American intelligence agencies concluded -- Russian hackers disseminated thousands of false Facebook messages designed to confuse and divide the American electorate.

And ultimately help elect a bombastic, know-nothing, narcissistic reality-TV-show buffoon.

So what do we do?

Well, you can always just say goodbye to Facebook (which is obviously using your personal data to sell to advertisers and make even more money) and go back to email when you want to send something cute or inspiring to your friends.

Or you can petition your Congressional representatives to get behind a bill that would regulate what can be posted on Facebook and other social media platforms -- likely the best solution to a quickly growing threat to our democracy.

If only we can agree on what that threat actually is.

Oh, yeah....