I don't use Facebook either, and I've suffered for it, but I find your analysis here both overly simplistic and hampered by an obsolete framework.
With a billion daily active users, the problem is well beyond the individual human scale. Facebook lives, in its own right. If those users were cells, Facebook would be an organism of quite respectable size. There's only one action I can see, on the part of the individual, that poses a credible risk to the health of the whole.
Find a way to give Facebook cancer, and we can talk about individual actions affecting the problem as a whole. Until then, I don't see what it helps to throw around ultimata, especially ones like yours which in the past have embodied a significant threat of politically motivated violence - not, to be sure, something of which I accuse you, but connotations do matter, and those in particular are not conducive to worthwhile discussion in any way I can see.
I agree with this. Google and FB are semi conscious artificial intelligences. I further doubt that the chief executives or technologists at either firm enjoy direct conversation with said entities - they can communicate with them, but only in the crude reflexive manner of a doctor hitting your knee with a hammer.
I don't think they are conscious, i.e. self-aware, at even a minimal level; it's a human conceit to imagine that such awareness is other than orthogonal to intelligence. And even as intelligence goes, I should have to think theirs, whatever there is of it, is akin to that of an ant colony, rather than anything more like we'd recognize as resembling our own selves - and even that is really something of a philosophical point.
In any case, I'm less interested in parsing details of precisely which speculative definitions of artificial intelligence Facebook taken as a whole might satisfy, than taking the view (if perhaps only for the sake of this argument) that it does certainly satisfy at least some definitions of life based on its behavior, in particular its evident tropisms toward growth and self-preservation, for which no particular intelligence is even necessary - kudzu need not be intelligent to be a pestilential and highly effective thief of the resources required for a proper ecology to thrive.
With a billion daily active users, the problem is well beyond the individual human scale. Facebook lives, in its own right. If those users were cells, Facebook would be an organism of quite respectable size. There's only one action I can see, on the part of the individual, that poses a credible risk to the health of the whole.
Find a way to give Facebook cancer, and we can talk about individual actions affecting the problem as a whole. Until then, I don't see what it helps to throw around ultimata, especially ones like yours which in the past have embodied a significant threat of politically motivated violence - not, to be sure, something of which I accuse you, but connotations do matter, and those in particular are not conducive to worthwhile discussion in any way I can see.