Mereja.Forum

Money may mean a lot of things but money alone is not all that you need.

There is a saying in Afan Oromo which goes like "ilmi namaa maqaan bula" (humans live from their reputation). If you have lost your reputation, then you have lost your dignity, undignified life is not worse of living it any more, is the core message here.

Facebook (FB) is one of the top richest campanies of this world, with an annual revenue riching upwards of 85 Billion $, which is a lot of money. According recent news it generated upwards of $9 billion for the III Quarter of 2021 (if multiplied by 4, then over $30 billion a year). This makes the investors of this mega company the top richest people of the planet.

Facebook said on Monday that revenue rose 35 percent to $29 billion in the three months ending in September compared with the same period last year, while profit rose 17 percent to $9.2 billion, a sign of the social network's financial strength as it faces a public relations crisis over troubling disclosures made by a

But money is not all and at the same time this company made a name for itself as "hate subsidizer" of this world and this was also reported over the company at the same time it was reported to have gained the above profit.

Critics of Facebook have long argued that while the platform doesn’t monetize hate or disinformation directly, its reliance on microtargeted advertising encourages that stuff to exist. A social network that’s free for users makes money in proportion to how much time those users spend on the platform. More time means more opportunities to serve ads and to collect data that can be used to help advertisers target the right people. And so for a long time, social media companies have designed their platforms to keep people engaged. One thing that tends to hold people’s attention really well, however, is polarizing and inflammatory content. This isn’t exactly surprising; consider the old journalistic mantra “If it bleeds, it leads.” An algorithm that prioritizes keeping users engaged might therefore prioritize content that gets people riled up—or that tells people what they want to hear, even if it’s false. Even if advertising isn’t directly funding divisive or false content, that stuff is keeping people on the platform. Facebook’s own internal review concluded, for example, that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”

In fact some of the issues on the ground that Ethiopia is making through at this jucture of history may not have happened if it was not for FB (and to a lesser extent other so called social media platforms), so we were/are generating the above quoted profit and other monetary gains for those who are keen in generating money at the cost of anything, deploying no other weapon but their algorithms.

FRANCES HAUGEN: My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning. What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it.

Today, I heard on BBC that the company is working hard to rebrand itself, in an apparant attempt to distance itself from the reputation of "hate subsidizer".