I don’t use Facebook. When I tell people this, I often get responses like “oh, good for you,” followed by peoples’ excuses for why they use it. It’s almost like they feel guilty about using the platform, but also somehow aren’t able to pull away. What you’ve described here is probably part of that.

None of what you wrote is really shocking to me though. Facebook is a corporation — by definition an entity whose sole purpose is to make money. Why any user of the platform thinks they are anything other than a rivet in the machine designed to print money is beyond me. This is the world we live in. Sad but true.