The importance of being Mark Zuckerberg
The importance of being Mark Zuckerberg

If you find yourself dancing out of step with Facebook’s algorithms, you are likely finished. 

Thousands found this out the hard way (including this writer); people who trusted and thought they were friends for life with Facebook, until one day came this message:

“Your account has been terminated.”

Huh?

“Failure to meet community standards.”

Such as?

For this, the pop-up has no answer. 

But from checking around, it appears that it’s all about those algorithms, which, people say, were set up to target and eliminate the pro-Trump audience at Facebook. 

From Breitbart News, we read -- “The algorithm change caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.”

Being no expert, I can’t say if those algorithms were meant for that purpose, but that is how it’s been working out, for supporters of Israel as well. Thousands have been terminated.

Say something contrary about the Squad, and you will be watched. Say it again, and you will be dismissed.

For the record, Zuckerberg has been drawing rebuke from all sides, as reported from The Hill. Some Democrats even accuse him of being pro-Trump. 

But I have heard from many of these pro-Trump friends, who feel that for that alone they’ve been purged. These are not statistics and these are not algorithms. 

These are people…people who feel hurt and damaged at being so ostracized. It’s that feeling of sitting alone in the cafeteria. 

For many, Facebook has been their only neighborhood.

Overnight they lost thousands of friends, business contacts, and political chums. The world is full of desperate people. Life is a lonely trip. Facebook offered companionship.

We are not talking about the multitudes who have nothing good to say, but say it anyway.

This we know from social media altogether, sometimes a revelation, that there are masses of nasty people out there in the world, now, to our chagrin, out of the shadows.

The shame of it is that the good get trapped in the same net with the bad.     

The danger…the real danger, is when Facebook becomes Big Brother.
Zuckerberg is on the road justifying Facebook’s practices.  

We must be fair to this man. He got rich too fast, too young. He got lucky too early. He got himself an empire too unprepared. 

He gets credit for understanding that the culture at Silicon Valley is largely to the Left, and that perhaps he is the man to introduce some equanimity. He has said so.

We cheer for him to succeed.

He still needs time to figure things out, and we were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Until, a few days ago, when he sat down for an interview with Dana Perino at Fox News for what seemed like an hour of sanctimony. 

There was this howler of the year --

“Even when people disagree with what I think would be good to happen in the world, I still want to give them a voice — that's what we're here to do."  

Oh please…

The word went out that if you depart from his views, you are a “danger,” a danger to be summarily dismissed.

That makes it a cult.

The danger…the real danger, is when Facebook becomes Big Brother.

Charged with apostasy, you are shunned to everlasting, and there is no recourse.

Go argue with an algorithm.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His Holocaust to Montreal memoir “Escape from Mount Moriah” has been honored from page to screen at CANNES. His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com