No. It's more effective to lobby your local member of parliament/congress to pass laws restricting what media organisations can or cannot do.
Granted, by "more effective" I mean something like 0.1% instead of 0.01%, but it's worth a try.
Granted, by "more effective" I mean something like 0.1% instead of 0.01%, but it's worth a try.
But a corporation should have no such leeway. Companies exist for the mutual benefit of the citizens, and their shareholders. Just because we've lost that sense of ethic doesn't make it not true.
Now, the predominant view is "A company can fuck over whomever they want, as long as it lies within the confines of the law", is preposterous. Public corporations are already required to be sociopathic, given the legal requirement of profit (exception given to benefit corps).
Or in much more shallow words, "I'll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas."
The law is the ONLY thing that curbs their bad behavior, other than publicity so bad that it (temporarily, until forgotten) causes a sales drop.
Yeah, I'd like to see more corporate death sentences handed out, as well. It may or may not deter any other bad corps, but it would cut down on second offenses :-)
Laws can either be created (legislature), or interpreted (judicial). The basis of corporate law has been founded upon the judicial branch, as well as the requirement to shareholders.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. (1919)
eBay v. Newark https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/cases/3472 (2010)
Disproven.
Fiduciary duty is not profit optimization. It basically means you need to be responsible with the company's money. You can't spend it on hookers (well, unless that's your companies business). It's basically a "don't waste money" rule, not "earn lots of money". Basically, the idea with corporations is that the shareholders own everything and the management is taking care of all the assets; it's not the management's so the management has to be careful not to waste money.
For example, legal guardians have a fiduciary duty.
> Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.
"The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries. In its opinion, the discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto. Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company's assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19.3 million. It said the following." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.)
"Among non-experts, conventional wisdom holds that corporate law requires boards of directors to maximize shareholder wealth. This common but mistaken belief is almost invariably supported by reference to the Michigan Supreme Court's 1919 opinion in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.[5]
Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn’t that interesting.[6]"
> eBay v. Newark
"When eBay refused to sell, Jim and Craig deliberated with outside counsel for six months about how to respond. Finally, on January 1, 2008, Jim and Craig, acting in their capacity as directors, responded by (1) adopting a rights plan that restricted eBay from purchasing additional craigslist shares and hampered eBay's ability to freely sell the craigslist shares it owned to third parties, (2) implementing a staggered board that made it impossible for eBay to unilaterally elect a director to the craigslist board, and (3) seeking to obtain a right of first refusal in craigslist's favor over the craigslist shares eBay owns by offering to issue one new share of craigslist stock in exchange for every five shares over which any craigslist stockholder granted a right of first refusal in craigslist's favor. As to the third measure, Jim and Craig accepted the right of first refusal [7] offer in their capacity as craigslist stockholders and received new shares; eBay, however, declined the offer, did not receive new shares, and had its ownership in craigslist diluted from 28.4% to 24.9%."
" eBay asserts that, in approving and implementing each measure, Jim and Craig, as directors and controlling stockholders, breached the fiduciary duties they owe to eBay as a minority stockholder of the corporation."
I didn't understand this completely but it looks like craigslist was trying to restrict eBay's usage of the stock and that's a breach of fiduciary duty because eBay is a minority shareholder of craigslist and so craigslist is harming shareholders by their actions.
> Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the topic, so we conducted a systematic analysis of a century’s worth of legal theory and precedent. It turns out that the law provides a surprisingly clear answer: Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person. What’s more, when directors go against shareholder wishes—even when a loss in value is documented—courts side with directors the vast majority of the time.
https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism
Real world example: Tim Cook said outright, in an Apple shareholder meeting, that he did not consider the ROI on every decision. He's still CEO; to my knowledge no one has even sued over the statement.
Not saying this chain of authority micromanages every decision, but I suspect it's the rare CEO who goes out of his way to upset the board. Or is there some law that allows the CEO to say "You cannot fire me" (outside of anti-discrimination laws or such)?
How much "charity", percentage wise, do you think corporate management could actually take part in? (I don't mean P/R posing as charity costing 1% of net profit, I mean things like deciding to do something cleaner/safer which would cut net profit on a major product in half)
I doubt such treatment will come to pass anytime soon though. It's Facebooks infrastructure, and the EULA everyone agreed to gives Facebook, contractually, the power to engage in this censorship. If you don't like it, then maybe you shouldn't have agreed to their EULA which basically says all of your contents is not yours it's theirs. And this is something people who actually read these EULAs warned about and most people just gave it a hand wave as if it wouldn't actually ever be an issue.
A corporation crosses the line when it has a single person who is protected from the legal actions of the corporation by statue (i.e., a shareholder). At this point the quasi-libertarian theory of a corporation as "just a bunch of guys" completely breaks down as there is a special legal protection for shareholders.
A corporation isn't a partnership. A partnership is just a group of people who have agreed to do business together. All of them are jointly legally liable for the criminal actions and liabilities of the corporation.
A corporation, on the other hand, has legal protection for shareholders. A VC can bankroll eMurder.com and the VC isn't liable when the officers of the corporation go on a shooting spree. The options are : Investors get no special legal protection, and creditors and the law can pursue them and their personal assets for the liabilities and crimes of the corporation OR a corporation really is a special instrument of the State, and only has particular standing because we as a society believe the corporate veil provides social benefits.
But if that company decides to, say dump toxic chemicals in the waterways, it's only a few hundred thousand dollars, versus millions to dispose of them. Or if the company decides to refuse doing a recall because the cost of recall doesn't equal or exceed its liability, well, too bad.
Corporations can, and do, a great deal of harm. And many of those behaviors are collective across multiple levels and people. But yet, the most we do is a hand-slap of a fine.
Is that wrong (I think that's what you're implying)? I'm serious. More money can be used to make things safer, but there's a point where the benefits become marginal compared to the costs.
People can, and do, a great deal of harm. There's nothing in corporation that is not actions of people consisting it. Corporations are not able to do anything by themselves, there's always some person that takes specific action. "Company" never decides to dump toxic chemicals, there's always a person deciding to do it, and there's always a person doing it. At least until we invent AI, then we may have something else. Until then, there's only people all the way down.
False.
I have some sympathy with this point of view. I would like to see a world where anyone can build whatever website they want, and the amount of attention the website gets is determined by its "worth" as defined by how many people choose to use it.
However...
> The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.
...there's the rub. The usefulness of a social network depends on how many people are already on it. Network effects mean that its very vary hard to build a competitor to Facebook or Twitter.
One possibility might be if social networks, one they reach a certain size (say >10 million users) be required to put all their public data on standard APIs (such as RSS feeds) under terms that allow anyone to re-use them.
This would make it a lot easier for anyone to piggyback a service on top of Facebook/Twitter/etc and if their censorship or other policies got too cumbersome, there would be much less stickyness preventing people from moving to sa competing service.
I'm genuinely glad that someone had made this point of putting public data accessible to other people after reaching critical mass.
I'm equally sad that it might never happen.
PS: There are other discussions going on having a common standard/protocol for social media communications so that it can be picked up by anyone like an email provider without locking out the people using a particular service. I'm now wondering what is stopping this from happening. FB and other private monopolies can be forced to adopt the protocol and data from them can be shared between other services like FB. How FB would react to this is whole another matter.
After all, opening up their API would completely defeat their current business model.
If an entity has no say what another entity can do within some domain, then the first entity is not the government with respect to the domain, and (assuming that no other entity has such a say), the latter is the government.
Except in matters of de-segregation, food and drug safety, safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women, a minimum wage, waste disposal and environmental protection, truth-in-advertising, Employment and Labor discrimination, privacy of employees and customers, and licensure of trades...
The reason I'm asking is that if a Facebook user decided to send out full instructions about how make a pneumonia virus with home dna equipment, for example, how would you feel about that?
Let's say they were in another country where they law couldn't or wouldn't stop them? Is it ok for Facebook to keep distributing the information in its walled garden?
Your statement is "a priori" false.
We place limits on private businesses all the time over issues relating to discrimination, employment benefits, etc.
An entity that has that much influence over public discourse almost certainly does needed to be overseen.
As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own".
So, even if I would want to "get off" FB and decide to ignore it completely then I would just have an "inferior" experience as a citizen of my country, i.e. I would not have first-hand account on what's shaping the things around me. It's not that I like what Facebook has become, but there's nothing that I can do to change it at this point.
Whether you're a private or public platform here is not as relevant as the fact that is is a public forum, it is practicing certain forms of censorship, and it a medium of information. Other platforms get regulations applied to them in many respects too.
As only one of literally millions of examples: http://ij.org/case/gilliland-et-al-v-city-of-dallas/
Rent-seeking is bad, it's facilitated by ownership of too large a share of the market. In return for allowing Facebook to leverage its size and influence for rent-seeking behavior, we as a society, a.k.a. the government representing us, have the right and responsibility to set the ground rules for what we get in return.
That's not about fault or entitlement, it's about how we can continue to uphold the values that are important to us. Free speech and the ability to publicly disagree are a crucial part of that. If your platform gets popular enough that strengthening or suppressing your voice has a material impact, profit and shareholder interests can't be the only thing that decides how things are supposed to work. There's a lot more at stake here.
Any organization, when it becomes sufficiently large, essentially becomes a government.
Remind me when Facebook used violence to enforce laws or take taxes?
Government is far larger than Facebook, and far more insulated from the people than is Facebook. I can't imagine why we extend trust to the government to fix a situation where we don't trust facebook.
It's all run by people, with their own competing goals.
And lets not forget that facebook could collapse overnight if enough people decided to stop using it. I don't think a population could exert that level of influence over a government.
Is it? Facebook doesn't hold elections. It seems entirely unaccountable to me, with no system of checks and balances to reign it in.
>facebook could collapse overnight if enough people decided to stop using it. I don't think a population could exert that level of influence over a government
They could and do, all the time. See: any successful rebellion ever. See also: the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Did those parties enter into a contract with Facebook that said that Facebook owed recourse if they changed or censored something? Evidently not.
Power and rights are far more about the ability to effectively press a claim than specifically detailed binding pacts.
The matter was whether or not Facebook could effect a taking. Not the rights of recourse of others. You're dragging goalposts.
We have no good mechanism to prevent the government from abusing its power.
Those here defending FB are not arguing that FB can do no wrong, they are arguing that fixing a problem _with another broken system_ is not an improvement, and is, in fact, a step backwards.
I can opt out of FB, and I have. Facebook exerts no influence over me, compared to the influence the government exerts over me.
Government, for better or worse, is a vehicle for channeling and aggregating power, in a way that at best benefits society as a whole, expresses the preferences of the majority, and respects the rights of the minority. It's far from perfect. But it's better than most alternatives.
Facebook is granted rights by governments, ultimately also to benefit the public at large. Facebook is not itself a government, though it transacts the online communications of a population larger than all but the very largest countries.
I'd say there is considerable public interest, yes. Facebook without the users is nothing, but the users without Facebook are the same society, just using another software.
When the software shapes your interactions to the degree that Facebook does, I'm not so sure. You don't think Facebook has changed society?
Start criminally charging Facebook for every criminal act they fail to remove. If they're playing the censor, then they need to be punished when they fail in that role.
The other choice, is not to censor anything, other than by the requirements of the law. Like the telephone system does.
If I don't like the Times, I can read the Guardian instead. If I don't like what's on at one cinema, I can go to another (granted this may be harder in a small town with only one).
Of course I can close my facebook account and move to diaspora, but then I'd lose everything from keeping in touch with my friends' latest accomplishments to the schedule of my local hiking club.
I already find if I'm away hiking for a weekend without internet access and couldn't be bothered to catch up on facebook on Monday morning because there's already a pile of e-mails to deal with, at coffee break it's like I've missed some important social information that everyone else knows, because team member A has done something and posted about it on facebook and everyone else has been liking and commenting on it, and everyone expects you to be up to date with this. Without a facebook account you may as well wear a badge that says "antisocial".
I personally think governments should regulate media outlets in proportion to their influence on people's lives. FB is the new IE.
It's perfectly possible to be happy and healthy without a Facebook account. You might lose out on one particular kind of "social" connection, but that doesn't mean you lose actual social connections. You just catch up with people in person, via telephone, via email, via chat, or a million other ways.
Personally, I don't really find the "social" information Facebook has to offer all that valuable. It's just a stream of trivia from extended not-really-friends.
FWIW, I deleted my FB account months ago, and my quality of life has gone up. If someone expects me to be available via FB, I give them my email address.
IE went into a decades-long decline, because superior products came to market. No regulation required.
Who regulates the governments in proportion to their influence on people's lives?
I wish my government didn't bomb other countries. Can I stop paying taxes, so I can stop supporting the murder of people around the world?
You're asking an organization that backs its wishes with the threat of violence and jail to regulate an organization that lets you keep up with your friends hiking accomplishments.
Facebook could be irrelevant in five years. The laws you're asking to be implemented would be in place for another 100. Are you sure this is a good idea?
The decline followed behavioral changes in response to regulatory action and ongoing litigation (even it began before the resolution of the litigation), so I'm not sure you can concluded from it that regulation was unnecessary to the outcome.
Holmes (the supreme court justice you are quoting) said this with respect to this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States where they prosecuted Schenck for anti-war pamphlets. This is something that would be protected by the constitution today. This quote is a pretty lousy excuse for suppressing free expression considering Holmes's track record of dismissing free speech.
With regards to Facebook removing posts, why should there be a "due process" for a (specific) company to remove posts. What sense does this make?
Unless that was your point?
The first amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
Where do you get that we should regulate the press?
Obviously you could argue that the constitution is wrong, and that's fine with me. It's just a document, but when you say "it has to be regulated..." what is the mechanism you're referring to?
If a newspaper published all letters, then government could act on behalf of citizen to protect freedom of speech, by making sure there's no arbitrary censorship of publications.
Although it's irrelevant to the point, I also don't totally understand the nature of your objection. If you are saying that any publication gets to define what it does and does not publish (i.e. Facebook says "I am a company that publishes non-nude photos" or "I am a company that publishes censored material"), then they merely have to re-define their service in order to censor people while complying with whatever scheme you have in mind.
No. Facebook has far more lobbying power ($) than any of us. There is a reason why you see the FB logo in the background of the presidential debates.
Boycotting their service directly negates that power.
I would rather punish them through voluntary market mechanisms than by using the government as a blunt instrument to force them to behave as I like.
Now, you can say, employing threat of government-mediated violence through congressional law is not the same as employing the threat of direct violence. But the only real difference I can see is that you can claim "it's all for common good". Oh, wait, they do the same too...
The marketplace solves these problems. Nobody is forced to use Facebook. If so many people care, perhaps they ought to vote with their dollar and seek alternatives. If they are unwilling to do that, it's on them and not the company that would support censorship.
Don't like tacos? Don't buy tacos. The government ought not tell taco vendors they can't sell tacos but instead reduce regulation to make it easier for a pizza guy to start a business. Less regulation by definition, increased freedom.
Do you believe that billions of Facebook users will switch to another social network because they are some sort of moral saints who recognize Facebook's mistake and act accordingly? Or do you instead believe that the majority of Facebook users are that much of a moral authority that we should readily concede that Facebook is right, because almost none of their users complain?
"the market solves this" is a funny meme, but it's often plain wrong. Markets can solve certain optimization problems and find price equilibria, but they cannot somehow magically solve the vexing moral question of how much (if at all) a social media company should censor their user's content and who should control this in which way.
It's almost impossible today for a person to switch SN, because for this to happen it has to be a group decision - most of the contacts must do the same switch. I have accounts in Path, VK and few more "yet another" social networks, but they are useless without social graph and it's beyond my control to move this graph there. It has to be regulated, because having freedom of speech in hands of a single corporation is wrong.
Except because of network effects, if everyone's preference is tacos, then all the grocery stores will sell only tacos.
There is a difference between bad regulation and good. Some regulation is necessary in many circumstances. China's strong laws over media organisations are an example of over-reach: Not calling emergency crews to your house to complain about how your think they are misusing tax dollars isn't bad to regulate.
The marketplace solves some problems, but definitely not all of them. Discrimination is a lot harder to solve just relying on the market, for example. Regulation comes in to help.
> Perhaps they aught to vote with their dollar and seek alternatives The problem with alternatives is the same problem folks have with seeking alternative utilities. The alternatives are few and far in between and offer an inferior service comparatively. In fact, facebook is more like a telecom that refuses to connect to other telecoms at this point. Your basic options are to participate... or not.
It isn't like buying tacos at all - tacos has a market that competes to an extent, and this just isn't such a thing. And to get it to the point that it is easier for other folks to start the business, you are knee-deep in regulation, including standards so the different services can communicate with each other easily and other such monopoly-busting sort of regulation, which will probably last for many years.