Did you catch Mark Zuckerberg’s performance?  Not great but apparently, good enough to bring the stock price back up so…goal met.  He dumped his trademark t-shirt and put on a suit.  You’d think with the kind of money he makes, he could find somebody to cut his hair for him but apparently, he prefers to do it himself.  In the dark.  With his eyes closed.  It was a dog-and-pony show.  The whole thing felt, to me, like it was set up on purpose to prop up a big business (donor) in trouble.  A whitewash.

He lied.  The Congress critters let him get away with it.  Asked about allowing users to control their own data, he was ready with his stock answer.  “Oh, we have a button for that”, he intoned without mentioning that the button is strategically located in some difficult to find spot and only works if you also check another box in a different strategic location.  No follow-up question.

Asked about Facebook collecting text and phone data, he claimed they only collect texts and only if the user opts in.  He got to say that even though recent news stories have claimed they were collecting text AND phone information.  No follow-up question.

He claimed users can delete their information and it’s gone.  Users can’t even delete their own accounts.  If you try to leave, Facebook just deactivates your account.  It’s a service done for you, you see.  All you have to do is sign in again and – voila! – you’re back in the saddle.  Meanwhile, Facebook will just hold on to this data – for your protection, of course…

Ted Cruz was kind of funny.  Cruz was a likely victim of the “election” irregularities and, I imagine, might well have some issues with the Data Analytics “breach.”  But he went all in on the ‘conservative-posts-are-being-deleted’ position currently being enjoyed by conservatives across the land.  I don’t accept the position.

Facebook makes it’s money selling YOUR data to other people – just like the hackers on “the dark web.”  It doesn’t serve their bottom line to marginalize any group, so long as the group itself won’t drive away a larger number of users.  In fact, it came out that Facebook has found a way around it’s own age limit policy by allowing younger people to “join” on their parents accounts.

That’s why people keep finding various unsavory accounts that Facebook “misses” until someone complains.  That’s why so much propaganda was allowed to flow so freely until the public became aware they had been duped.  NOW, Facebook has to make a big show of deleting “fake news” posts.  (Don’t worry, conservatives.  It will pass just as soon as the heat is off and the stock price rebounds a bit…)

Facebook habitually gets “caught” misusing the data they collect on their users.  From time to time, Zuckerberg is required to come out and claim “mistakes were made” and promising to do something about it “the very next time” a breach is discovered – or maybe the time after that.  Or perhaps the time after that…

I’ll tell you this: actions speak louder than words.  Call it an axiom.  Facebook isn’t going to stop doing what they’ve been doing.  They’re just going to engage in damage control from time to time.

Now…let’s see if I can post this to Facebook…