Did you get to know about the study conducted by Instagram which showed that the platform was extremely toxic to teens and negetively affected their mental health? You didn’t? I’m not surprised – they kept in under the covers since 2019. If you are using Facebook, Instagram and other such sites regularly, you may not realise it, but these ‘services’ are slowly taking over your social and personal lives.

I’m not gonna focus much on that.

These sites have become the breeding ground for fake news, misinformation, very skewed political opinions presented as facts, terrible low quality memes and people caring more about their faces (pun intended) than the brain once behind it.

I’m not gonna focus on that either. This is a tech blog.

Have you watched the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’? Its really good. Social media websites seemingly track your clicking behaviour, browsing habits, things you seem more interested in etc. And use it to create very detailed profiles about you. They even modify your behaviour by showing you specific things you would like if you do specific things they want you to do. All this mind control constant surveillance stuff just to decide whether to show you an ad for Washing Powder Nirma or Shuddh Plus paan masala? Seems a bit sus to me.

Still too human-adjacent. Not acceptable. This is a tech blog, for goodness’ sakes.

Fine. Did you know whenever you see ads on a website, it is almost guranteed to be served by the two advertising giants, Google and Facebook? (Google is a whole separate beast and deserves a whole other article.) Since almost all websites nowadays have ads (except satvik.ml, of course), and Google and Facebook are the once serving you the ads, they know what websites you are visiting – they are tracking you throughout the internet, whether you know it or not. Since they know what websites you tend to visit at what time and how often, it doesn’t take a genius to make a very detailed profile on everything you do online – which, unfortunately, probably means by extension everything you do.

An example for this is Facebook pixel, the dreadful existance of which is spoken of glowingly on this page. Warning: it is the website of a ‘social media management’ company, and it is stuffed to the brim with scripts, trackers, ads… most of which was blocked by my adblocker, and then some more by Firefox, but I am sure something still managed to slip through. Also happens to be a really good example of sugarcoating the horrifying. Just like how the plot of the Pokemon games could have been described enslaving and forcing other creatures to fight for pleasure, which I would have done if Pokemon Emerald and Pokemon FireRed weren’t a few of my favourite games.

Another great example is Google Adsense, which has become almost ubiqutous anywhere you go. But of that I won’t speak right now, I will talk about it in the aforementioned potential Google article.

And even those are slowly being phased out, being replaced with horrors like browser fingerprinting (identifying you by what browser you use, on what device, and other stuff to help identify, which browsers like Google Chrome for Android happily spout out just in case it will help Google identify you and give targeted ads) and Google’s FLoC (a whole other beast. Man, Google sucks far more than Facebook. Should have written about that earlier), but that is a matter for discussion elsewhere (the Google article, in case my repeated mentioning of it was too subtle).

Mr. Trump, ex-president of the USA, was banned from Facebook earlier this year following the USA election and following Capitol riots. Without getting into the politics, who else does Facebook have the power to ban, as social media becomes the only source of outside information for more and more people? At what point do these companies have too much power?

(Incredibly attention-catching title inspired from the Youtuber hbomberguy)