Zuckerberg's Thieves
- realityskimming
- Jun 30
- 4 min read
by Melissa "Yi" Yuan-Innes
About the Story Thing (2025) - 03
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"About the Story Things" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces will appear every other Monday Jun 2 through to the end of 2025. Query us about contributing at https://facebook.com/relskim or Lisa.RealitySkimming@proton.me
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Have I ever stolen anything?
Sure. When I was a kid, I stole a chocolate bar. My parents didn't let us have a lot of treats. We'd go trick or treating, and they'd take our candy to give away to other kids.
Yes, I feel bad about stealing that chocolate. But I also understand the kid me who craved sugar.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s Meta, the owners of Facebook, Instagram, etc., took in 164 billion US dollars in 2024.
Hard to imagine a billion dollars, but say I gave you $10,000 every day (yeah, not happening, but let's pretend). Amazing, right? Monday, $10,000. Tuesday, another $10,000. That's $20,000. By Wednesday, you're swimming in $30,000 if you didn't spend it. If you sat on that cash, you'd be a millionaire after only 100 days.
How long would it take you to get to $1 billion? All you have to do is not spend a penny for about 274 years. Getting close to three centuries of $10,000 per day. Meanwhile, Meta hauled in $164 billion in 2024 alone.
No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of cash. Yes, they have expenses. In 2023, their profit was "only" $39.1 billion. Waaah, waaah. Think of their 10,712 centuries of cash for 2023 alone and weep.
What could they do with that money? Save forests and clean water and magnificent animals. Cut poverty and illness. Help children. You know.
Instead, they're stealing from us in order to make more money.
Did Meta steal from you? Easy way to find out. Plug your name here: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/
Yes, this billionaire company wanted to train its AI, so instead of using a fraction of its billions to pay for any rights, it ransacked from writers like me.
I have 14 items in this search combined under Melissa Yi and Melissa Yuan-Innes. What guts me is that I spent my entire life devoted to writing. My mother says I started reading at age 3. I immerse myself in books. I can watch movies, but it's not my modality of choice. Let me read the words, or listen to them, and make up my own images.
Writing is a sacrifice. For example, my sole vacation time is 99 percent dedicated to writing. I'm a doctor who doesn't like to be away from my family, and as an environmentalist, I limit my air travel, so with rare exceptions, my only "vacations" take place where, as Red Smith put it, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”
I attend such challenging workshops that another physician writer warned me, "They broke me down and built me back up again." I replied, "I'm going back to the ICU. I don't have time to get broken down and built back up again." So I skipped the late night talk sessions that are supposed to be the meat of the conference. I made sure I slept instead. And I got back to the ICU for my next residency rotation with my cranium intact. But even with a truncated experience, that kind of craft conference comes at a mental and physical cost.
I literally left my breastfed baby to attend one conference in rural Oregon. Don't worry, baby thrived, Dad took care of him, and I pumped in advance like a champ so bébé didn't starve, but the cross-continental trip did break the pump, which was very painful for me.
I tell you these things not to claim that I'm a heroine. In fact, these stories probably make you mad because you want me to stick to medicine and baby-ing and forget about words.
Guess what? It's not your choice. It's mine.
I made serious life decisions to put writing first, because it's my calling. Writing is my through line. Books—both reading and writing them—wake me up and keep me up at night, the way others obsess over a new lover or Taylor Swift. I love my husband and my children, and I do my best with every patient, but they have their own lives. My book babies can only be nurtured by me.
To have my work, and all human stories and art plundered by corporate greed so they can make extra billions of dollars?
NOT OKAY.
What can we do?
First, Avoid AI
Easier said than done, but one of the first things is to check your search engine.
Here are some approaches:
1. Add a swear word to your search, as in "Let's F***ing go, Oilers!"
This scares off the AI, for now.
Search with this website, which is also an extension.
Thanks to my writing friends, I'm making more of an effort to switch away from Chrome, which Google uses for advertising.
3. I customized Firefox to run Duckduckgo, which has an added benefit of offering me an easy, free email address. I also have Safari. Both of them are good at notifying me about cookies and avoiding that annoying, inaccurate AI summary.
In future articles, I'll do a deeper dive into avoiding AI.
Stay classy,
Melissa "Yi" Yuan-Innes
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Melissa Yi is an emergency physician and award-winning writer. In her latest crime novel, WHITE LIGHTNING, Dr. Hope Sze’s romantic getaway at a Windsor Prohibition hotel morphs into a ghost-ridden historical crime scene with potential links to Al Capone. Previous Hope Sze thrillers were recommended by The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and The Next Chapter as one of the best Canadian suspense novels. Yi was shortlisted for the Derringer Award for the world’s best short mystery fiction. Under the name Melissa Yuan-Innes, she also writes medical humour and has won speculative fiction awards.
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