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Pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion of Mark Zuckerberg donning a white hat and rescuing Twitter users from the villainous Elon Musk.
When it comes to signing up for Threads, Silicon Valley’s hottest new app, count me out.
I see it as just another means for the 39-year-old gazillionaire to mine users’ data for another big payday. In Zuckerberg’s eyes, if he destroys Musk’s latest toy in the process, all the better.
Never mind if Threads is used as yet another means to spew more misinformation and disinformation as we approach a critical election year.
Don’t get me wrong. I see innovation as the cornerstone of sustained economic growth and prosperity. I also know that all technological breakthroughs carry the capacity to do both good and evil in the world. What I expect — and users should demand — is that tech leaders use those tools in a responsible fashion. Especially when they involve users’ private data and dispensing information that can influence elections.
I don’t trust Zuckerberg to do either. I’m among the 70% of users who don’t trust Facebook to responsibly handle their personal information. His track record on disinformation and misinformation is equally bad.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the beginning. In 2014, contractors and employees of Cambridge Analytica, owned by right-wing donor Robert Mercer, obtained the private Facebook data of tens of millions of users to build voter profiles for use in the 2016 presidential election won by Donald Trump.
