Call to Action to Zuck and/or to its disappointed Users

Dear Mark,

I love what you're doing and I can't wait for the day you give me access to the perfect algorithm, tailored on my actions and interests, that will help me get to know myself better, make the best possible choices and take the most reasonable guesses across all aspects of life.

In this leap of faith, I try to play my part by liking with the appropriate reaction the posts you feed me, signaling to you what contents I'm really not interested in (especially when you try to push them to me again and again) and even taking time to 'add notes' when I report problems or temporarily delete my account.

And I don't care if along the way some bad judgement calls were made, if the future implications of some carefree choices were not fully understood – I will even agree sometimes money does come before morals. Honestly, as long as you keep within the path set by Bill & Melinda, I'd probably still be on your side if you killed cats in your spare time!

But, with all due respect, is this really the time to be an ostrich and avoid expressing your stance on the whole Cambridge Analytica-gate? I'm not saying you shouldn't take time to process recent events, but I'm also not saying you didn't see or couldn't have seen it coming (leave this excuse to us, the 99%).

We get it, you got yourself a very comfy spot over the years (as gray areas tend to be), but you must have known the moment would come when you'd have to publicly choose sides and disclose your updated vision for your company (in a nutshell, whom do you want your data to serve?) – and that moment is now. (it's probably been now for a couple years, but now that it's all out in the open I don't think procrastination remains an option.)

I might be completely naive (and wrong) in trusting the potential of your platform, you will probably find a way not to step up (thus implicitly picking the wrong side) and even manage to avoid the public backlash. But I'm also naive enough to hope this scandal will open the public's eye about the importance of getting involved and (properly!) informed about data collected from and about us, to the point that, by acting coordinately, we can manage to influence and shape the direction this company takes from this moment onward.

.

I'm not actually naive enough to think the day is actually today, but for those of you who are less optimistic and more angrily questioning Zuck's motives and awareness of facts, I'd like to suggest a constructive solution: check out Minds.com, the Anonymous-friendly social network! (no, they don't pay me for this I swear...)

I know you think we reached a point where it'd be too hard to shift to a completely unknown social network, but we don't have to take the whole billion people on Facebook (and possibly the other billion Zuck is currently targeting) at once – start with your close circle and spread the word online and offline to anyone complaining about data breaches (great encryption, blah blah blah), as well as to anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and any other population particularly susceptible to viral spread of ideas and habits (one problem at a time: quantity is the initial obstacle, quality will have to wait).

Personally, I don't know if it's still realistically possible to ever get another social network to compete with Facebook, but I do know some healthy competition to Zuck's monopoly would probably help him make up his mind much faster, so one way or the other giving ourselves and other (fairer) platforms a louder voice is our best shot at trying to control this technology rather than being increasingly controlled by it. (cheesy ending, but luckily no-one will read this far!)