Hello all, I'm writing you because of your involvement in SaveTheInternet campaign. We all have been outraged by Facebook's recent "Save The Free Basics" campaign and it makes it very important to look at the implications of monopoly by Facebook from a larger perspective. Facebook is not only the new TV and the newspaper and but it is also the new Town Hall and the cafeterias. Facebook is now dominating both the public and private spaces of our lives on internet. This company which controls so much of the internet is fundamentally dishonest and its power is increasing without checks and bounds. A world dominated by Facebook is a deadly combination of George Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World" where Facebook not only twists the facts so that it is never wrong but also keeps us perpetually distracted so that we never stop to question the "world" around us. Even if we stop "Free Basics" the internet won't be saved unless we stop this giant Facebook which is becoming "the internet" for many of the people around us, that's why I demand a all-out anti-facebook campaign.
First off all we need to understand and communicate the evils of Facebook. The most comprehensive anti-facebook resource that I've found on the internet is this personal page by Richard Matthew Stallman, the founder of the GNU project. https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook2.html Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam have organized conferences have written a book named UnlikeUs. I'm half way through the book and it talks about important theoretical and pragmatic issues concerning social media monopolies. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/unlike-us-reader-social-media-monopolies-and-their-alternatives/ And for the record I've also written a blog post about the issue: https://medium.com/p/leaving-the-evil-empire-of-facebook-7f7b1955bb37 Then I propose that we create a website to curate all this news and media a publications to communicate the case against Facebook. It should be clear by now that you cannot launch an effective campaign against Facebook using Facebook. It can block your posts, delete your posts, block your account, artificially suppress your posts and what not citing all sorts of reasons from spam to trademark violation to simply a bug. In the worst cases you won't even know that Facebook has done something wrong. The strongest signal you can give to your friends and family is by deleting Facebook and communicating why you did it. * Those of us who have connections in big organizations and media houses should encourage them to delete their Facebook pages say their users can know why they did it. Those of you who are involved in non profit should know that Facebook is not good for them as it is known to suppress page reach to make way for paid promotion. And it has been known to delete pages by activists and protesters. * Those of us who have friends who are lawyers and who have contacts in Legal firms should attack Facebook from the legal front by filing lawsuits and Public Interest Litigation. I'm impressed by the "Europe vs Facebook" [1] case and the recent legislation by Belgian court which stopped Facebook from tracking non-facebook users [2]. Anyway I want to listen to your opinions of what should be done. And I'm keen to meet those of you who are in Delhi/NCR this December. I've got your email addresses through your github and twitter accounts and I have included local lugs. I would like to reach out to more people who care about saving the free internet (free as in free speech). [1]: http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html [2]: http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/12/facebook-bows-to-belgium-will-stop-tracking-non-facebook-users/ -- Harsh Gupta Fourth Year Undergraduate IIT Kharagpur http://github.com/hargup/ -- -- Mailing list guidelines and other related articles: http://lug-iitd.org/Footer --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Linux User Group @ IIT Delhi" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
