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.
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.
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/
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?