'Facebook is a toilet': Watch John Oliver's hilariously harsh PSA for developing nations

On Sunday's edition of HBO's "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver devoted his signature extended rant to Facebook's international expansion—and, more specifically, some of the many ways the social network has screwed up on the path to global domination. In the nearly 20-minute segment (which, as always, features strong language, so wear headphones if you're watching this at work), Oliver says that "for years, Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg pushed his utopian idea that all connections are good connections with feel-good ads," and then shares clips from those ads. "Unfortunately, thinking things through has never really been Facebook's strong point," he continues, before drilling down on what he calls the company's "hugely consequential mistakes" in foreign countries. "For the worst distillation of what Facebook can do to a country," he says, "just look at Myanmar." Oliver details the country's "long history of religious and ethic tensions" and the military's "ethnic cleansing" of the Rohingya, which has caused an estimated 725,000 of them to flee to Bangladesh and a "conservative" death toll of 10,000. "By all accounts," Oliver states—citing various news reports and a U.N. study—"Facebook absolutely did inflame preexisting tensions there" and was woefully ill-prepared to deal with the rise of hate speech on its platform Myanmar. At one point, he plays a news clip of a local teacher calling Facebook a "toilet"—a slam that becomes the recurring theme of the "Last Week Tonight" segment. As Oliver puts it, Calling Facebook a toilet is a little unfair—to toilets. Because they make shit go away, whereas Facebook retains shit, disseminates shit to your acquaintances and reminds you of shit from seven years ago, all while allowing corporations to put their shit in front of you. What I'm saying is, there is a purity and integrity to toilets that Facebook seriously lacks. Keep watching the segment for a fascinating and definitely NSFW digression about some of Facebook's content rules (e.g., the platform has internal guidelines regarding what sorts of images of anuses Photoshopped onto faces it allows, and we get to see permissible images such as President Trump with a butthole for a mouth and Taylor Swift with buttholes for eyes). And definitely watch until near the end (starting at the 16:51 mark) for an example of the type of not-feel-good ad Oliver thinks Facebook should be releasing to "prepare countries for how to deal with their product." Spoiler: the toilet theme comes back in force.

'Facebook is a toilet': Watch John Oliver's hilariously harsh PSA for developing nations

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