LinkedIn’s success in disintermediating its groups from their “owners” did not go unnoticed over at Facebook, now the 900lb gorilla of social networks. In 2014, the company began its own campaign to kick its stakeholders from their positions atop “their” business pages. This was done via, in Facebook’s own jargon, by “reducing organic reach,” in other words, blocking people who signed up for “your” page from seeing “your” posts in “their” Facebook News Feed. Prior to this, if you had a following of 100 people, between 20-to-30 of them would typically see your posts, and the number could be much higher.

Now, that number would be much lower. How much lower? Facebook was a bit coy on the topic, but the answer turned out to be one, or two, or maybe none. What was going to appear in your network’s News Feed instead? Whoever Facebook wanted or whatever and advertiser paid for the privilege.

In other words, Facebook had succeeded overnight in turning your business network into their business network.

The hijacking was accompanied by the usual dose of marketing Newspeak and techno babble the industry had learned to spew when they were pulling a fast one. For example, in 2018 Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that the company had:

“…a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being.”

An online presentation deck proclaimed that:

We want the time people spend on Facebook to encourage meaningful social interactions.

It turned out that “meaningful” interactions equated to anything that disgorged more of your personal information into the Facebook maw.

In addition to the creepy feeling generated by a corporation attempting to manage your well-being and deciding what constitutes a “meaningful” social interaction, Facebook’s disintermediation movement also gave rise to the logical question “How does blocking posts (content) from sources I’ve picked of my own free will contribute to my well-being and meaningful interactions? Maybe instead of worrying about that, you should be spending more time preventing the myriad of data breaches your system has suffered, privacy and data breakdowns that really can hurt my well-being?” Facebook responded to these questions with more techno mush and babble.

That benefited both them and Facebook. They had driven millions of people onto the platform, where Facebook could categorize, data mine, and package them up for sale as lists at great profit. What was their reward for this?