We are being had by Facebook and Google

The business model of Facebook is to get paid by serving advertising to you and me - the ads that show up in your NewsFeed in between posts and ads on the side panel. The more time we spend on Facebook, the more ads we "pass by", the more money FB makes.

So if I were Facebook, I would work on setting up my algorithms in such a way that people spend the maximum amount of time on FB. I would find things that make people stay online longer and post more. Posting a pic of a flower or your meal will get a few likes that take less than a second to click on and then we move on. But arguing and "debate" - well that is endless.

If I were FB, I would set the algorithm to show me posts which I am more likely to "engage" with and these days that means argue and disagree with. I would make it so that if on a thread of comments somebody has called me an idiot or a "moron" in the past, those should be the posts that I see first. Because it is more likely there will be more time spent arguing and "proving the point" again, while FB makes money on us.

I tried to adjust my NewsFeed settings to "see their comments" first for a few people and repeatedly it did not work. For some reason if my wife posts a pic of our puppies, it is not in my NewsFeed on top even though I specifically requested it to be. But anything that Randy or Henry post will most definitely be in my feed (because I am very likely to disagree with it).

And what do we do when we argue with people about something - we look things up so Google gets plenty of business from disagreement too. We all want to make our point by quoting "evidence", showing that perfect clip or news story that illustrates it. And if you are doing all of this on an Android phone or an iPhone or MacBook - well congrats - you just hit the trifecta of making more money for the 3 richest corporations in the world.

All the while they are telling you that they are there to "do no evil" and that they are "non-political". That they value freedom of speech above all and so on. OK, how about giving me 2% "cash back" on all the ads that you got paid for from my looking at them and people who I debate with seeing them on their FB pages? How about giving cash back to people of Charlottesville or Ferguson who were geo-targeted with ads at a premium paid to FB because there was trouble in their communities?

Those 3 corporations have $400 billion in cash that they are sitting on. They shape the "public opinion" in the largest "public square" there is - online. And we are being had, bit by bit every day by them like compliant sheep.

JP Morgan, Rockefeller and Rothschilds had terrible businesses by comparison and yet we think of those are "robber barons" and worse and these guys are being glorified as leading lights of our age. And they were that perhaps at some point but now, they are just making money.

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