The Shanda of Facebook

I am ashamed to admit that among my addictions is an addiction to Facebook, which I first “joined” about ten years ago. So much fun it was, and in many ways remains, to see that this-or-that former high school or college classmate is now a grandparent or has, after divorce, come out as a lesbian and married her longtime girlfriend. Photos of puppies, photos of mountains, photos of family reunions and birthday parties; photos of groups of women (circa 2016) wearing cat-ears and marching; bits of family news; and these days—at least on my own FB feed—endless paid advertising for wildflower seed, natural fertilizer, turtle rescue, French country style fabrics, and anti-aging skin products. In my Reels section, my feed feeds me standup comics, terrible-hair to great-hair makeovers, rehabbed and upcycled furniture, thrift-shop treasure-hunting, and Siberian Huskies howling. Yes, yes, the algorithm. I once made the embarrassing mistake of clicking on a video of a young woman popping a giant pimple on her nose, and for days afterwards, I got a whole series of pimple-popping videos, leading to the question: why would anyone ever put a video on the internet of them squeezing their pimples?

Since you asked: my other addictions are to coffee and dark chocolate.

Which isn’t the point. The point is that Facebook is and continues to be one of the leading manufacturers of all the bad things that both Western Democracies (including Israel) and Jewish religious values expressly forbids.  I’m not just talking about what everyone knows: that Facebook hoovers up user’s data to be used against them, that scrolling through Facebook can make ordinary people feel like losers, and for ordinary people who also happen to be teenage girls with self-image problems, Facebook usage, along with its attendant cyber-bullying, can lead to self-harm, including suicide. Its lack of accountability over the years has led to the spread of hate speech, incendiary fake news, violence-causing memes, the suppression of democracy, the jailing and torture of dissidents, and ethnic and religious murder. Such was the case of the genocide (including widespread gang rape as well as murder) of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar in 2016 and 2017, when Facebook knowingly did nothing to stop the spread of hateful disinformation on its Myanmar networks, the theory as I understand it being: who cares?  Closer to home, remember the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottenburg, Virginia? Facebook’s willingness to spread word of it—and its refusal to shut down anti-Semitic and racial slanders—are perhaps the single most important reason the event happened in the first place. Some say that Facebook put Trump in the White House in 2016, and did it again in 2024. Since October 7, Facebook has helped spread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda.

That I know about Facebook’s ongoing complicity in making bad things worse is because I’m reading Careless People, a tell-all by mega-Facebook-insider Sarah Wynn-Williams. Wynn-Williams came to Facebook as a wide-eyed idealist hoping to encourage Facebook to use its technology for the betterment of the world, and finally got the memo that Facebook was not only a terrible place to work but as evil a machine as any yet invented by humankind. All in service to a combination of bottomless greed for wealth and an unquenchable thirst for status. The details are horrifying.

It makes my liver hurt to point out that the top dogs and fattest fat-cats at Facebook are Jews: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan.

During the nightmare that goes by the name of the first Trump administration, I liked to play a game with myself: who is the worst Jew in the White House? Jared Kushner? Stephen Miller? Steve Mnuchin? Now, during the second Trumpian nightmare, we’ve got a return of Stephen Miller, and the addition of right-wing lunatic Laura Loomer, who in addition to her other merits calls herself a “white advocate,” and has gained the admiration of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Then there’s Lee Zeldin, who is rapidly dismantling environmental protections as I type, and despite his having affixed a mezuzah to his office door, has clearly never heard of Tu Bishvat. But these guys—who by any measure of decency fail the test—are mere beginners compared with the folks who’ve turned Facebook into the misery-and-profit-making machine that it is.

All this while our President uses Jews as human shields in order to strangulate science, the arts, education, discernment, discussion, education, and medicine. He calls this fighting antisemitism, but it isn’t. It’s merely one more land-grab, another attempt to own the libs. This will not end well. Not for anyone, but particularly not for Jews. Facebook—as well as other social media platforms—will be sure to make it worse.

Just a hunch, but my hunch is that none of these powerful Jews—no matter how well they may have performed at their b’nai mitzvah—has ever read Ecclesiastes. Alas, when it comes to this bunch of narcissistic clowns, all is vanity.