October 1, 2021
This past summer, Mark Zuckerberg signed off on a new effort to boost Facebook’s public image. It’s called Project Amplify.
Designed to counter the spate of criticism the company has received lately, the project is stunningly simple: use Facebook’s own News Feed to “amplify" flattering stories about itself.
Executives have adopted a “no more Mr. Nice Guy” approach. They’ve drastically curtailed the amount of data available to academics and journalists, since it was routinely uncomplimentary. They buried a report on the platform’s most-viewed posts after it was found that the top performer was a news story suggesting a doctor had died after getting a Covid vaccine. And Zuck himself has shied away from controversies, casting himself as a benign “innovator”
At the same time, in the first half of 2021, Facebook spent a record $6 billion on marketing.
Psychowarriors of the Mental Liberation Front: It’s time to put these techno-propagandists on notice! Storm their headquarters. Pie the C-suites. Jam their algorithms with whimsical mischief. And let these mind-scramblers know that we’re going to keep coming at them, again and again and again, until their reality-warping algorithms come crashing down.
Do you smell that? There’s a pie in the oven with Zuck’s name on it.