Facebook and Google got rich. Users paid the price. | Douglas Rushkoff

- Facebook and Google began as companies with supposedly noble purposes. - Creating a more connected world and indexing the world's information: what could be better than that? - But pressure to return value to shareholders came at the expense of their own users. Read more at BigThink.com: http://bit.ly/2HDG05B Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: http://bit.ly/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink The reason why Facebook and Google are so easy to hack is because their business models are so easy to hack. Both Facebook and Google, when they started out, said that what will make them superior to the things they're replacing is that they're going to be ad free. Because they knew, from square one, if they were going to have advertising, then the entire platform could be leveraged for the opposite of its original purpose. So Google, when they were fighting against Yahoo, they said, oh, no, we're going to be the people's algorithm. We're going to use the way that people all link to other things as the way in which we deliver search. And unlike Yahoo, which is basically ad supported and all this, well, what is Google now? Google is the world's biggest advertising agency. Likewise, Facebook said, 'no, no, no, we're not going to use ads.' We're just going to be there for people to be able to connect with one another. It's going all be social, so it's going to be honest and free. They became an ad-supported platform, too. So what's happening is their business models are being leveraged by companies that understand Facebook wants attention by any means necessary. And as long as that's their goal-- they might not be conscious of it. As long as that's the goal of the platform, then they're going to be used that way...