The following is an open letter to Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Spotify, from Matty Boy Anderson. Mr. Anderson is a 28-year veteran of newspaper comics, and has self-published his own comic books for equally as long. He has created Internet content for 20 years, and authored three websites. In 2008, after three years of production, he released a homemade movie that won Best Animated Feature at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival.
Dear Facebook:
As of this writing, I have been a user of your social media network for almost nine years. I have over 600 “friends”, and have made many lasting relationships on your site. My experience has been generally positive, at least until the last three years. However, the negatives I have experienced on Facebook have been so outrageous that they’ve far outweighed the positive, and thus I am writing to you now.
The only reason I am continuing to utilize your site is because after my last public tantrum, my friends recommended a third-party application that scours Facebook of anything I don’t want to see. For some insane reason, Facebook does not offer this option to its users.
You must understand that Facebook is responsible for a sizable percentage of divorce cases. This is a result of the anti-social algorithms your site employs, that cherry-pick people’s sore spots and rub them raw against one another. You openly abetted what’s being called the largest hoax in American history; the idea that Donald Trump colluded with Russians to get elected in 2016. You spread that falsehood like anal lube across computer screens around the world.
You were wrong. Just like you were wrong for stoking the lies about the Covington kids, although you came in second to Twitter regarding washed-up actors commenting about a teenager’s “punchable” face. Just like you were wrong about the Jussie Smollett hoax, which you crop-dusted into our lives like digital defoliant. And don’t think we didn’t notice that the instant Felicity Huffman was indicted, Facebook suddenly “suffered an outage”. Nothing to do with protecting yet another criminal Clinton donor, of course. I can’t imagine where I would get the idea you’d do that.
Oh, I know where; Facebook. The site that, until I started blocking links with the third-party app, filled my daily life with egregious propaganda about the lowest slime in our government or anyone else’s. Sites like Washington Post, with their mewling masthead of “Democracy Dies In Darkness”. Or Buzzfeed, and Vice, with their incessant anti-white rhetoric and open blacklisting. And of course CNN; once I blocked them, all the terrible “news” about “school shootings” magically disappeared. Oh, and if I complain, you have spooks employed to either verbally attack me, or “get me into trouble” for my opinions.
If I could, I would file a class-action lawsuit against you for causing me grief and unnecessary anxiety for years. But I’m not one of those punks who likes to waste tens of millions of dollars on litigation. I’m just an independent creator, doing my best to make a living, which I did a lot better before you and your rules came along.
It’s clear now what you are. A tool to keep people down. Either stop being one, or close up shop. It’s a miracle that I even use you at all anymore. I witnessed first-hand the mass exodus of users that resulted after your last “major glitch”. The only people who still trust you are teenagers who don’t know any better, and literal non-English speakers. Everyone else is just waiting for you to fuck up again so badly that leaving you is the only sensible option.
Q.: When should Facebook censor?
A.: Never.
What about “hate speech”? Read the above answer again, plus there’s no such thing as “hate speech”, and you should be ashamed for suggesting as much. What about “racism”? Read the above answer again. What about “_____phobia”? READ. THE. ABOVE. ANSWER. AGAIN.
Facebook was founded in 2004. I caved in to using it in 2010, because I was newly-single and wanted to actually communicate with women, who in 2010 seemed wholly unwilling to use any other method. Believe it or not, from 1999 to 2010, I got along perfectly fine on the world wide web. We ALL did. But once you took hold, you did two things.
- Gave idiot celebrities a platform to say egregiously stupid and incendiary shit about politics, while pretending to be “regular people”.
- Gave politicians a new way to lie about what they are to the public, with one rule: more money, more clicks.
You did this while censoring regular Internet users for their opinions. You did this while trotting out your android founder as though he’s a human being, and then you banned people who made fun of him. You did this while spreading lie after lie after lie; so many lies that the average user can’t even keep up.
IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT. ALL OF IT. Right down to anything with a “-gate” suffix. You perpetuated it gleefully and amorally, without a second thought. You made our lives exponentially worse, all while acting like WE’RE the problem for using you in the first place, all while you crushed and destroyed any competition. You fucked with our heads. Willingly and without remorse or compassion.
It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do at this point, Facebook. History will not favor you. No matter how much of history you bias, corrupt, fudge, or erase.
As is often quoted in the memes you so eagerly suppress: You get nothing. You lose. Good day sir.
Dear Amazon:
Congratulations on your status as a monopoly. Normal package delivery had become such a joke in America that all you had to do was make ordering convenient, and you triumphed. Like Facebook, you happily exploited womens’ natural OCD and gained billions of customers for life. Women want things their own way, much more so than men do, and you played them like a champ. Walk down any affluent suburban street in the afternoon, and you’ll lose count of how many doorsteps are laden with cardboard Amazon boxes of every shape and size.
I’d be borderline-cool with your monopolistic delivery hydra, if it weren’t for the fact that your founder is another meddling douche-bag with more money than common sense.
You can sell books through Amazon… unless your “politics” are deemed “inappropriate” by their staff. Then they ban you and your work.
You’re a delivery service. Unless someone is mailing hazardous materials, you’re not supposed to care what’s being mailed. And you’re goddamn sure not supposed to play Stalin with your printed matter.
Your founder, Jeff Bezos, purchased the Washington Post in 2013. You know, “Democracy Dies In Darkness” on the masthead and all that. Guess what, Jeffy- democracy has been dying in darkness. Because you’ve been personally murdering it.
Remember these words. The second that something better than Amazon comes along, and it will, you’re dust. Bank on it.
Dear Google:
I have not used your search engine for many years now, and in fact I openly discourage anyone from using it. When friends use your company name as a verb, I insult them, even though their practice only erodes the solidity of your brand. If you were aware of the full extent of my loathing for your company, you would call the police on me. Oh sorry- I mean a SWAT team. I forgot to whom I was speaking.
A search engine with a political agenda is corrupted and must be destroyed, regardless of what that agenda might be. You broke your biggest rule: you’re evil. Pure and simple. You are the very definition of an evil monopoly, and I will eagerly and ebulliently celebrate your passage from our world.
Google is the perfect example of a company masquerading as a person. It’s a cute little quirk that you have to enter the Konami code to remove Google’s search bar from your Opera browser, and not insidious manipulation of customers. It’s a cute little quirk that there’s a “Google Doodle” celebrating the life of a murderer or an anti-American politician. Google is all about the cute little quirks.
It’s a good thing you gifted us Gmail back in ’04, or we wouldn’t even be having this “conversation”. You’d be long gone.
As with Facebook, it matters not what you do or don’t do. I use DuckDuckGo, or even Bing. Thus far no political agenda has leached into my searches thanks to some billionaire founder with shit for brains, or a boardroom stuffed with meddling milquetoast busybodies. I contend that anyone who still uses Google is stupid. The lot of you get what you deserve.
Dear Spotify:
I confess, I only included you for the acronym. I smelled a rat with you right away, even before you pulled that “hate-band” jazz. I think anyone who expects to make a living on their music in 2019 is a dunce, and I say this as a cartoonist who’s never made over $15K a year in his life.
Plus, your headquarters is in Sweden, and you’ll be extinct soon anyway. I don’t feel the need to twist the knife while you’re being invaded and raped into oblivion. I’d bet money you aren’t even permitted to read this.
Maybe someday, you’ll understand why we have a Constitution here in the first place, and why some of us defend it so staunchly.
Because of F.A.G.S. like you.
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