Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

The most dangerous company in the world

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
Get posts in your inbox:
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Facebook thumbs up icon, inverted to thumbs down.
PainScience.com will be free of Facebook in 2019. Yesterday I removed all Facebook “like” buttons from the site. If someone wants to “like” one of my articles on Facebook, they’ll have to do it on Facebook itself.

I have done this because I think Facebook has become a horrible corporation, and I sympathize with many readers’ concerns about their privacy while browsing here. Removing social media buttons is more of a symbolic gesture than a technologically meaningful one, but it’s worth something. I don’t want the Facebook code and brand stinking up my domain.

I agree with John Gruber that “Facebook is … the most dangerous company in the world, and ought to be broken up and then severely regulated” and “Facebook is to privacy and civil discourse what Enron was to accounting.” The writing has been on the wall for years, but it started glowing and pulsating in 2018. John was commenting on a New York Times article about leaked documents that “raise serious questions” about Facebook’s approach to moderating user behaviour. Just when you thought Facebook couldn’t get any creepier about privacy…

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher