Did you just compare a Silicon Valley tech company selling ads to IG Farben? It’s very hard to take this post seriously even though your point stands.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...
The way you've phrased that makes it sound as though Facebook were trying to hide the actions they took to facilitate things, which I think is a miscommunication.
People on the Fediverse get high and mighty about the Myanmar incident but in a Fediverse world the Myanmar government would have run the big instance in their language and would have defederated anyone who tried to stop them, alternately outsiders could have defederated but then they wouldn't have any influence.
Fediverse folks could have refused to run a server to support genocide but there is no way they could stop their software from supporting genocide. A centralized system like Facebook does have more control and more responsibility but when they took that responsibility later on Myanmar kicked them out
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-censorship-virtual-privat...
Or in words of Umberto Eco ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ):
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
You are underestimating the horror that Facebook did to human society. I am accusing them of crime against humanity. And all that, just for selling ads - where you will be able to see the comparison with IG Farben, do whatever it takes, to earn money.
I accept the argument, that if they wouldn't, someone else would, but nevertheless THEY did it or we would be talking about someone else.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/nobel-disease-great-scientists...
Fun fact, they didn't have large budget for shooting so they were searching for footwear that would look futuristic. They found some unknown company producing cheap "shoes" so horrible that the director wasn't worried for it to succeed as "no one would wear that". The company was Crocks.
https://media.snopes.com/2023/09/idiocracy.png
Anyway, this whole thread is actually proving my point. It wouldn't happen before Facebook.
That alone should be a very strong signal that maybe your nostalgia is not based on a rational unbiased observation of the changes in society.
edit: and to be clear, obviously there have been times in history where things really did get worse for a period. But if you're proposing that that's happening now, you have a massive burden of proof to overcome, and you should be absolutely really totally sure that you're not being influenced by rose-tinted glasses. Which I'm not even sure is possible.
Correlation does not imply causation.
But Crocs had actually become somewhat popular already before Idiocracy.
The more realistic full picture explanation being that they chose something that they or someone on their staff, like many "look at those idiots" types (myself at the time included), already knew and considered a stupid trend is much more likely. It doesn't at all negate that they in fact thought nobody with taste would wear those shoes, but I don't think that choice was entirely made in isolation not aware of the trend.
The effect of watching the movie and seeing Crocs worn was yet another of those pieces of evidence that the stupid people of today connect to that fictional future world, like all the other stuff on the movie dialed all the way to the top (energy drinks, corporate sponsorships, etc.)
The mere fact that someone knew of Crocs, thought of them, and chose them because of their ugliness, means they were popular/successful enough to pop up on someone's radar, despite them ostensibly not being something that would be worn by anyone. Perhaps they didn't know how much more popular Crocs would become but they for sure must have picked them as an artifact of things already going in a weird direction (Why can you get this? Who would want this? Someone must, these will be the stupid people of tomorrow.)
But also, actually, so what?
Look at some of the fashion of past decades older movies. Some of it is cool but a lot of it is super ridiculous.
And if you look at Crocs, are they really objectively stupid? Treating them as a high fashion item probably is. But they are versatile and robust, good for many types of use cases were people used to wear other types of cheap plastic sandals. People wearing leather shoes surely thought sneaker were stupid until they became so mainstream that they were evaluated more objectively.
Citing idiocracy and Crocs seems like a very weak argument to your case and even Idiocracy's point (fashion choices don't indicate the world is getting stupid). Mind you I'm not disagreeing that things have gotten worse in many ways and social media is definitely not helping. OTOH, Facebook actually was somewhat reasonable for a long time, and useful to connect with people. Only once the Twitterification of it started did it get so bad. But somehow Twitter never gets the bad reputation.
What these normie-networks did do was make a UX for public posting so easy that scores of low-education users were able to be influenced and re-share low-infromation-quality stuff in huge magnitudes. FB is guilty of making a super accessible user experience, and then in not being aggressive early enough in having high standards for its userbase. But it didn't invent society's ills.
The influx of normies circa 2000 did not seem so bad to me but Facebook and Twitter were another thing.
Let me repeat him as you probably didnt catch it (I dont understand how, but this is one of the things, I dont understand, so I wont argue about it):
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
I can just confirm that what he has seen and described is correct. And the more that you are standing your ground, the more you are proving, he was correct.
That Facebook?
Also the Russians sitting around posting on social media meme is still actively in use. I’ve seen it at least a handful of times this month