Although Facebook recently changed their mission statement, their previous mission statement in their ascent to the pinnacle of social media power was: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” In fact, Facebook has never given people the power, rather, it provides more power instead to governments and institutions that are able to manipulate, organize, and analyze all the information that people have posted on their Facebook accounts, so that people rather than being empowered are actually putting themselves into the position in which governments and outside agencies know everything about them, and that information, properly correlated, is an awesome from of power as well as control. When it comes to sharing, there is real sharing voluntarily made between people that have similar mindsets, are friends, or associates, or family members, as well as valued others, of which such sharing often times, allows these people to become closer to each other, though not always; for some forms of sharing, can be divisive or misunderstood or misinterpreted or just not be appropriate. In addition, the sharing of personal information with people that are not friends but have taken on the guise of being a friend, or jealous ex-friends with an ax to grind, or people of nefarious intent, are not the people that personal information should be shared with, but Facebook is an environment that permits this rather readily to happen. To make the world more open, necessitates that governments and institutions are more transparent and open in all that they do, so that the people have a better understanding and comprehension of what is really going on, and to the extent that Facebook aids and abets such, this is a very good thing; but if such a government and institutions are not fundamentally open or transparent, then when one side, that is, the people provide a wealth of information, but the other side, does not, signifies that rather than such being seen as open, it would be best be seen as one side being able to siphon real information of value, from another, without giving up much in return. To the degree that Facebook helps the world be more connected, and therefore allows people to better understand that we have things and attributes in common, in recognition that we are all citizens of the same world, so much the better, but to the degree that Facebook encourages people to be more divisive and cliquish in their behavior and outlook, the less connected that world is.
Facebook likes to say nice and wonderful things about how valuable and important that social media is, but Facebook itself, does not disclose the fact that its market capitalization and all of its wealth fundamentally is because they have reams and reams of very personalized data from all of its users, created by those users, and that data has a value that is apparently worth billions upon billions of dollars. If Facebook was truly a social media site then what Facebook would do would simply be the conduit to allow seamless connections between people that desire to connect with each other on Facebook, and would not make it their place to collect very personal data on each of its users, and whether they own up it or not, or utilize semantics, or doublespeak, essentially sell such access to that data to the highest bidders.