The popular liberal site U.S. Uncut had to surrender its name this week due to a court settlement with a former employee, but according to the site’s creators, the downfall of U.S. Uncut contains a scary lesson for anyone who relies on Facebook.
The problem began in August when Mark Provost, one of the site’s primary operators, tried to log in to U.S. Uncut’s wildly popular Facebook page. (The site, which posted memes and clickbait articles about liberal political issues, was ranked the 23rd largest publisher on Facebook in March 2016 according to social media analytics firm NewsWhip.) Provost and his partner Carl Gibson soon discovered that a former employee had taken over the account to create a clone site.
Ultimately, the two creators lost their page through litigation, and Provost has a chilling warning for any person, group or organization that relies too heavily on Facebook.
“There’s a terrifying power and there’s a tyrannical power in it,” he said. “The absoluteness of it, the spread of it, the fact that how deep it is in people’s lives and how I think going forward, it’s going to be even more of an exclusive source of information for people and how they experience the world.”
Indeed, Facebook has infiltrated so much of our everyday lives that it’s probably not a good idea to give the site too much of your data. If it ever went down — or got taken away — it might bring all of your private info with it.