"Can we just say it? Facebook is evil. Its entire raison d'etre is the balkanization of communities and nations in pursuit of financial profit."

"It monetizes and sells the most intimate details of private human relationships. It conflates human friendship and sincerely political beliefs with unrestrained consumerism and campaigns of disinformation. Facebook revels in the glories of unrepentant and unrestrained narcissism. It captures us and seduces us and then uses us for its own very specific ends. It elevates the id and destroys the super-ego. It gives mendacious trolls the powers to usurp our democratic freedoms. Isn't it time for us to stand up as thinking, self aware citizens and just say no?"

That's the top-rated comment — with 2,200+ likes — at the NYT article "How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions."

This is my third post on the Facebook story. The other 2 posts are directly below this one, so try to aim you comment at the most apt post. I'm resisting the overheated fear of Facebook (even though I broke my own Facebook habit a month ago).

Let's look closely at the basis of this fear. The commenter says that the "the balkanization of communities" is a terrible thing to do — or is it just terrible if you make money doing it? You wouldn't say a car company is evil because its entire raison d'etre is the mobility of individuals in pursuit of financial profit. What's wrong with making a profit delivering something good?

So let's assume that the commenter thinks "the balkanization of communities" is evil. But why isn't it good to break up insular groups and give individuals new power to find others who think like them and share their goals? Why do you want people to stay put where they are, speaking within a preexisting set? Because the preexisting set of people is a "community" and the new set formed by new connections is  insincere or not really human or based in character flaws like narcissism? It's the counterpart to "fake news" — "fake community"?

But that assumption could be wrong, and it's good or neutral for people to be able to form new communities through very efficient on-line speech, but it's bad for a company to facilitate this process for profit. But why would that be? Do you need humanity in the mechanism of forming new communities for those new communities to be genuinely human? If your answer is yes, please observe that we are only talking here because Google gives us Blogger. And I have had people I know in my real-world community tell me they think the comments community I have here is evil.