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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has become a de-facto political "agora" for the politicians and high-Government officials from my country (I live in Eastern Europe). More exactly, that's where now they first express their views on current political, social and economics affairs affecting my country. Nowadays I would say that most of the important stuff first gets posted on FB, and only then it gets re-published by the local media (whatever it's left of it at this point).

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.

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So once your platform gets popular enough, the government can tell you what to do with it? Why? It's not Facebook's fault that politicians started using it.

Yes.

It's astounding so many people defend variants of 'power to the mighty'. Are you so naive you believe you are one of the mighty?

Huh? What are you talking about? I'm defending the right of everyone to be free of excessive government interference, whether it's an individual or a popular company.

But you're totally ok with people having no right to be free of corporate interference?

It's never clear, with these arguments, why being oppressed by a corporation is better than being oppressed by a government.

They can tell you what to do with it and not use it too. This is the way it should be. Think of the harm that can be done in all sorts of abusive ways if there was no regulation of sites and services.

Yes. You become a medium of public discourse with network effects. That seems perfectly fine to regulate.

I disagree that anything on Facebook is "public" in the sense of "public ownership". Facebook is a private platform. Just because things are (maybe) publicly visible doesn't mean they're public property. Should the government be able to force people to put up or take down posters in public-facing Windows?

If I buy or rent space for a billboard I am not allowed to put anything I wish on it. That is no different than putting a poster in a public-facing window. It gets more interesting when a website in one country is offensive to another country.

I'm pretty sure that if you put a two-story tall porn image on your property it's not going to last long. I'm pretty sure that if you post a hugely racist message as big, or some other things, not matter how public that space will be, you'll run into some problem with the law whether at local or federal level.

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.

Governments do in fact regulate posting of notices, including both commercial and political speech, routinely. This includes both forbidding specific types of notices in some instances, and compelling them in others.

As only one of literally millions of examples: http://ij.org/case/gilliland-et-al-v-city-of-dallas/

Because with great power comes great responsibility, and companies like to cherry-pick only one out of two. It's in the interest of society that when something becomes mainstream enough to be considered "infrastructure" - something with so little competition that ignoring or bypassing it is infeasible given the state of the market - that this infrastructure works within frameworks that we've built and refined over centuries.

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.

Exactly yes. Once your platform becomes this popular, you wield real power over human society. And society should absolutely start to dictate to Facebook what it can and cannot do to prevent it from abusing its power. How many times do we need to go over this?

Any organization, when it becomes sufficiently large, essentially becomes a government.

> Any organization, when it becomes sufficiently large, essentially becomes a government.

Remind me when Facebook used violence to enforce laws or take taxes?

Along these lines, the argument says "Facebook is large, and should therefore be subjected to regulation".

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.

>Government is... far more insulated from the people than is Facebook

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.

Any given API change, content promotion or censorship, freebooting support (or restrictions), represents a taking of usefruct or allocation amongst various parties. With little or no recourse to them.

> With little or no recourse to them.

Did those parties enter into a contract with Facebook that said that Facebook owed recourse if they changed or censored something? Evidently not.

Does the victim of pollution, or of a highway rerouting, or a relocation of a major traffic draw for brick-and-mortar foot traffic, have any contractual claim to their previously-enjoyed benefit?

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.

>And society should absolutely start to dictate to Facebook what it can and cannot do to prevent it from abusing its power.

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.

The problems of power abuse and effective communications are ancient ones. There's nothing that prevents private individuals or corporations from abusing power either, and there's a very long history of them having done just that.

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.

> once your platform gets popular enough, the government can tell you what to do with it

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.

>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?

I don't think Facebook has changed society in a way that isn't repeatable. It's a low risk to the system when google+, or any other competitor, could meaningfully take its place given enough pressure.

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