I keep hearing that analogy but it doesn't really hold water. Telephone companies don't coerce you into becoming an addict, manipulating their UIs so that you subconsciously associate their platforms with the words "friend" and "like", shove controversy and irrelevant comments from strangers into your feed so that you get annoyed and feel like you're missing out when you clearly stated that you want a chronological ordering of what your close friends and family posted, and then innocently call it "engagement" or "connecting people". So no, it's not like a telephone company.
The analogy is still broken because the Facebook memo, although cold and calculating, is still blatantly sugarcoating what they do and why they do it. It's not about connecting people at heart, and they do it through much more nefarious means than simply potentially letting their tools fall into the hands of bad actors.
FB is like a phone company where everyone can call everyone else, all the time, in some type of huge broadcast style phonecall, where people who miss the calls can listen into the recording later. As a matter of fact, that's where the analogy between phones and the internet breaks down too.
> Telephone companies don't coerce you into becoming an addict
If you were around at the turn of the 20th century, you might think very differently. Gossip lines, heck, when lines were shared you could ease drop on your neighbors conversations. The telephone company must have had some idea of what they were enabling in society at the time.
