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Following Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s transparent sucking up to President Trump and a change in content moderation policies across Meta platforms that allow for what is pretty unquestionably hate speech against marginalized groups, lots of people are looking for ways to part with the social media giant. You can count John Oliver among them. On Sunday night, the host of Last Week Tonight spent more than a half-hour laying out all the ways that Meta is actively harming people—and armed users with a way to make themselves less valuable to the company.
Oliver covered a lot of ground over the course of the segment, ranging from how Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar to election misinformation—all while sprinkling in his standard tangential asides and analogies, like saying Zuckerberg looks like “Eddie Redmayne was cast to play Ice Cube” and “white Macklemore.”
He also gave viewers one call to action: make yourself less valuable to Meta. The theory is pretty simple. Meta generates 98% of its revenue through advertising, driven by its powerful ad platform that allows companies to micro-target people based on massive troves of data collected by tracking you and your online activity. So, to cut into Meta’s revenue, cut off its ability to track you across the web.
“They would probably not want me to tell you that you can change your settings so that Facebook and Instagram cannot profit as much from your data anymore,” Oliver said, before directing viewers to a guide set up in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to prevent Meta from tracking you. “If you’d be interested in a step-by-step guide on how to do that, simply visit johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com.”
Yes, the URL is JohnOliverWantsYourRatErotica.com. Try not to focus on that. Again, it’s standard Last Week Tonight-style comedy, please do not let it interfere with the worthwhile work the show does.
The guides are pretty standard fare if you’re privacy-minded—but it’s useful for Oliver to point his audience of millions to these tools, which include advising people to adopt a privacy-focused web browser like Firefox and install Privacy Badger, an extension that blocks third-party advertisers from tracking your activity.
Is this likely to put much of a dent in the bottom line of Meta, which Oliver described as a “company struggling to stop people from accusing random pizzerias of human trafficking?” No, it almost certainly won’t. Back in 2021, major advertisers pulled their money off the platform, and even that barely stopped the money machine from printing infinite cash. User boycotts come and go and in most cases have very little lasting impact, largely due to the sheer size and monopolistic grasp on its audience that Meta has.
But there’s no harm done in making people aware of how their activity is tracked and their usage of platforms monetized, nor is there any downside in pushing people toward protecting their privacy. Oliver’s message is a net positive…even if it means having to type “rat erotica” into your URL bar.
