For years, Facebook has been not-so-secretly collecting all of its users’ private data. But why? Was it trying to improve the Facebook experience by analyzing how people use it? Was it trying to manipulate your emotions? Was it selling the data to advertisers? Well, yeah. It’s probably all of those things, but for the purposes of this article we’re going to say it was because—as reported by Variety—Facebook is making a TV show.
The pilot has been picked up by HLN—the network that’s like CNN but isn’t CNN—and it will somehow “use the popular social network to find and tell interesting stories.” HLN says it doesn’t want it to “feel like The Facebook Show,” whatever that means, but beyond that we don’t know much about the project. Variety even says that “the network remains uncertain so far as to what form the program will ultimately take.” However, “the initial ideas…are very encouraging,” according to Facebook, which doesn’t really tell us anything.
So what should a Facebook TV show be like? Given the network it’ll be on, we’d assume it’s not an adaptation of The Social Network. It will probably be just a normal news program done through a Facebook lens, with talk of most-liked stories or whatever, but that’s not very exciting. However, we think it should be a Colbert Report-style humorous news show inspired by Facebook’s “[Satire]” tag. After every joke, the host can explain that whatever they just said should be treated as satire, and also here are some other examples of satire in case the viewer doesn’t know how jokes work. Actually, that sounds perfect for Facebook.