While the breathless media coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal paints the revelations as a disaster for Facebook, the story actually plays right into Mark Zuckerberg's hands. Cambridge Analytica tells us nothing we didn't already learn from previous scandals that received less media coverage. Facebook gets to act shocked, pretend this was an anomaly, a freak incident and not simply business as usual, and act really sorry for abusing users while continuing the abuse. The US government gets to pretend to discipline Zuckerberg while continuing to hoover up users' data via NSA backdoors. Mainstream media gets another bedtime story to tell itself while endlessly replaying the 2016 in a desperate quest for a scenario where something other than "Americans voting for the lesser of two evils" gets Trump in the White House. Everybody wins, except Facebook users! Actually, they can win too, as long as they #deletefacebook.

Social media doesn't have to be evil. Alternatives like Minds, Gab and Steemit have somehow managed to avoid selling their users out to the surveillance state and advertisers while imposing Kafkaesque restrictions on their speech - and there are more platforms being created all the time. We need a mass migration to one (or all!) of these platforms if we hope to escape Zuckerberg's data mining operation - many of us remain on Facebook only because most of our friends and family use the platform, and any campaign to #deletefacebook must necessarily reach beyond ourselves (it is social media, after all).

(earlier article here )