Facebook. Instagram. WhatsApp. Threads. One corporation — three billion users — and a data power without equal. What Meta knows about you, how it influences you, and what that means for you.
In Myanmar, Facebook was the internet — and algorithms fuelled a genocide. In the Philippines, Meta trained a disinformation election campaign. Then came Trump.
Meta's own engineers knew: the algorithm rewards anger. The documents sat on the leadership's desk — and were set aside.
You don't have Facebook — and Meta tracks you anyway. On news sites, health portals, in patient portals. Invisible, impossible to switch off.
Cannot be switched off in WhatsApp. Your conversations feed into advertising data. And contractors in Kenya saw footage from glasses — in bedrooms.
Messages encrypted — metadata not. The FBI receives real-time data every 15 minutes. A journalist's source was convicted without a single message being read.
"It is better to buy than to compete." — Zuckerberg, 2008. 94 acquisitions, a spyware operation against Snapchat, targeted app shutdowns.