(Heart you. Mean it.)
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Okay, it’s time. The wait is over. After nearly entire minutes of research, my studied analysis of facebook is finally finished. I know that many or nearly none of you have been eagerly waiting for the results, and, at the risk of jumping the shark, here’s the recap:

Facebook. It’s free … and it’s worth every penny.

First, some history. The social media juggernaut we know as facebook has become staggering popular, particularly among people who think “ur funny lol” is a complete sentence. But during the ongoing Great Mexican Beer-demic of early 2020 AD, facebook has become even more popular … which was hard to do. According to one source¹, as of the first quarter of 2020, facebook had over 2.6 billion active users, which is eight more people than Madonna has dated. To put that into perspective, if every facebook user walked across the US/Mexican border into America, California would give them free health care.

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Footnotes
¹ – some web page
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So, it took some doing for facebook to become more popular. In fact, it took a global outbreak of bat-juice uber-flu, released on accident² from a top-secret Chinese laboratory that apparently had impressively stringent security policies, and a screen door³.

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Footnotes
² – or not
³ – Home Depot, Wuhan Province
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According to one source⁴, the entire population of Earth in 2018 was over 7.6 billion people, not counting dead voters in Ohio. That means that, at any given time, nearly a third of the planet is on facebook, sharing the same eight memes and disclosing their plans for dinner. And remember … not only is that global census two years old, but thanks to the Cerveza Virus, everybody’s been stuck at home for three months, so for next year’s headcount, all bets are off⁵.

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Footnotes
⁴ – a guy I know
⁵ – pretty much any back-issue of Playboy
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Increasingly, for many people, facebook has become their sole source of news, and deservedly so: why, just a few days ago, I saw a facebook post promising to share a curated list of the Five Best Deodorants⁶. Click around in facebook and you’ll find hundreds of high school yearbook photos, friendly groups of vegetarian bisexual vampires, and opportunities to date people from any of the available genders⁷. You can get into rational, well-mannered debates over the political issues of the day⁸.

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Footnotes
⁶ – a guy I knew in college needed all five
⁷ – seventy-six, not counting the vampires
⁸ – No, you can’t.
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As with all things, of course, there’s some potential for danger. According to one source, 160,000 facebook accounts are hacked every day⁹, which means you can never really be sure what your friends are preparing for dinner.

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Footnotes
⁹ – some facebook user from China who, oddly enough, has the same name as me
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Facebook also allows you to shop for stuff, buy stuff, wait eighteen weeks for your stuff to arrive from China, and hire professionals. For example, I saw a guy who bills himself as a DIY expert. How, exactly, would that work? You hire him, and he comes over and doesn’t say anything?

“Figure it out.  That’ll be fifty bucks.”

But the mostest awesomest new news at facebook is this: the facebook developers¹⁰ have added a new emoji! Everybody remembers those dark, dismal, medieval days when all facebook offered was a thumbs-up “like” emoji. People could respond to facebook posts, and still refrain from actually employing words from the English language, by simply clicking the “like” emoji, which signified … wait for it¹¹. Then, as increasingly desperate facebook users realized they still might have to construct a sentence, Team facebook conjured up several more emoji (Emojis? Emoja? Emojipod?) Suddenly, people could communicate several emotions non-verbally, such as Love, Ha Ha, Wow, Sad, Angry, Sneezy, Dopey, Doc, and Ibid¹².

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Footnotes
¹⁰ – seven guys, all named Thad
¹¹ – “like”
¹² – Ibid.
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The new member of facebook’s emoji family is Care.

According to facebook¹³, the animated image is a tame happy face that suddenly starts hugging a heart. Okay. So you say. To me, it looks like some jaundiced fathead trying to snort a camelia. But the point is, you can now project empathy and emotional support without ever actually calling, being there, saying, or doing, anything.

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Footnotes
¹³ – duh
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It’s like sending a hug via PayPal. Thanks, facebook, for your continuing efforts to turn a third of Earth into mindless eight-year-old drones.

Facebook. We’re free. Because we want you to nearly care.