Life in Facebookistan: Can We Escape?

“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . .” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, July 7, 2016

Map of global connections between users of Facebook and its other platforms

Four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, announced that “the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people.” It took the platform a little more than eight years to reach one billion users, and just less than five years to get to the second billion. Now it is estimated to be more than 2.9 billion. Close to two-thirds of its users visit the site at least once a day.

It’s not just dominant in the United States. In many other countries, including Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, the European Union, Ecuador, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, and Vietnam, Facebook is the dominant online social network, with between 40% and 90% of the local population using it (source).

There is no other human entity on Earth as big as Facebook; no country, no business, no single religious denomination.

Remarkably, though it is seventeen years old and worth nearly a trillion dollars…