Is Facebook Too Big?


Social media is technology we use every . We may not use the same platforms or apps, but we are all familiar with how they function. While almost all social media apps and websites remain free to use, the general public seems to never ask themselves how and why social media companies make money let alone that one of these social media empires represents one of the richest people on the planet, Mark Zuckerberg. Companies like Facebook make their money off collective data-mining of all their users, and, for those of you who are unfamiliar, data is now the most valuable resource in the market.


When companies like Facebook have access to large swaths of data given to them freely, they do not simply sit on that data, protect it, and respect your privacy; companies like Facebook sell your data to other companies or even other nations and will create algorithms to track your virtual records to influence your viewpoints and influence what you buy. These things may seem trivial, but we can already see what happens when people abuse their social influence for personal gain (i.e. Trump), so why should we ignore the truly tyrannical monopolitic control that Facebook has over its 2.45 billion users? A single company has direct influence for over 2/7 of the entire world’s population. Regardless if they are a moral company or not, that is too much power for a private company.


Social media is constantly evolving, and our interactions with the internet are also constantly evolving. No one understands this better than the Sultans of Silicon Valley, and they will lead you to believe that their success is made because of their hard work when, in truth, people like Mark Zuckerberg should be paying people to use Facebook based off the amount of data he mines off of his users. Zuckerberg has a net worth of $101.7 billion; he could literally give $40 to all of the 2.45 billion people he mines data off of a year and he would still be a multi-billionaire. If you do not understand the power of that much money, imagine seeing this number in your bank account: $999,999,999.99. That is so much money the average person would not be able to adequately or responsibly spend it, and that is not even a billion dollars. 


Businesses like Facebook are so large and so established and so vital to our society that any competition against Facebook can easily be bought out by Facebook or stomped out in a way newer innovative companies simply cannot compete with due to the limitations of their capital. Giant tech companies like Facebook cannot responsibly exist due to the nature of their business origin models. I’ll end with a quote we are all familiar with by John Dalberg: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…”


- Jo