But the ‘like’ has become somewhat like ‘salam’, for many people, if not most. We say “assalamualikum” to people but we don’t consciously choose to wish them “peace”. It’s just our traditional greeting now. So, we ‘slammalakoom’ away without ever giving mind to the actual meaning. If everyone was really thinking about what it means when they give the salam, we might have found being nasty to each other slightly more difficult.
Regardless of how close that analogy is, people are liking things on Facebook for a myriad of reasons, (apart from doing it habitually). Someone’s “like” may mean “I see what you’re doing”, almost in a challenging undertone. Many yet like things for the “why not” – “my friend just ate dinner and I can click to like it? Why not?”
But those who are more discriminating about what they like on Facebook may have real reasons for doing so. First of all, Facebook profiles you from your activities. One of the ways that affects a user is that the information from the user activity shapes the “news feed” on your Facebook homepage. So, if you don’t want to know every time your friend’s cat barfed then you may consider not liking those kinds of posts in the first place.
But there are other concerns too. If there is someone enjoying something somewhere, then there is a chance that someone else is making a buck out of it. Facebook, being one of the richest entities in the world – hold your breath now – does not care about you at all. Not in a humane way anyway.
Facebook’s algorithm that decides what’s on your “news” feed has come under frequent and heavy criticisms. It can, and has manipulated in Facebook’s great experiment, how to make a user more happy or sad or angry by tweaking the posts that user see. Almost 100 percent of your personal data is used to employ targeted advertisements, Caitlin Dewey reports in The Washington Post.
Facebook advertisers have targeting options using your location, age, generation, gender, language, education level, field of study, school, ethnic affinity, income and net worth, home ownership and type, home value, property size, square footage of home, year home was built, household composition among other things.
If you haven’t noticed already then here is a fun experiment for you. Search a product on Amazon or anywhere else on the web. Soon enough you will be seeing ads related to your search on Facebook.
You may be thinking that this article is written on the presumption that someone educated enough to read an English daily in Bangladesh is not somehow informed enough to know the simple reality that big companies use our data to place advertisements.
But you will be wrong (and a little egocentric) to think that. We all know that our data is used. But we all don’t think about the implications. Facebook doesn’t just have the information about all the things you like on Facebook. It literally sees nearly everything you do on the web, even if you are NOT logged into the site.
“While you’re logged onto Facebook, for instance, the network can see virtually every other website you visit. Even when you’re logged off, Facebook knows much of your browsing: It’s alerted every time you load a page with a “Like” or “share” button, or an advertisement sourced from its Atlas network. Facebook also provides publishers with a piece of code, called Facebook Pixel, that they (and by extension, Facebook) can use to log their Facebook-using visitors,” Caitlin Dewey’s report in The Washington Post reads.
Even though you don’t care now, it may have immense consequences in the near future. A near future that is, in all likelihood, going to be severely regimented by A.I (artificial intelligence). In fact it already is well underway (how else does Google know when your next flight is, even when it was your wife who booked the tickets and when you did not receive any email?)
Pioneering tech inventor Elon Musk thinks that development of A. I potentially poses danger akin to the Terminator movies. Stephan Hawkins also famously warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
Although you wouldn’t be looking over your shoulder anytime soon to see if a T-900 is approaching, it would be wise to limit your engagement with a powerful apparatus that gathers data massively and indiscriminately about all of us. Unlike the terminator, your data will not be back. While Skynet is not here yet, a system of predatory capitalism is. And you have no control over how your personal information is used by that omniscient, greedy, robot-like system.
Thursday, June 04, 2026
