It is both amazing and deeply concerning that one corporation has influence over 1/4 of the world's population. It is even more concerning when you consider the outsized voting power of 1 person at that company.
Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Or plenty of non-tech companies, as the sibling commenter points out. Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc.
But leaked documents from their internal policy allows for displaying the Female nipple under certain circumstances.
See => https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fb-art-...
Source: Leaked Document Lays Out Facebook’s Policy on Sex and Nudity in Art => https://hyperallergic.com/380911/leaked-document-lays-out-fa...
How do they / their algorithm decide if the nudity is "only contours visible" but not "sufficiently detailed"
Cheap third world labour radicalizes with this impression of a corrupt west.
Cheap thirld word labour joins terrorists and produces horrifying pictures/videos - posted to facebook.
Thus the circle is closed.
In any case the rules determined for their human or algorithmic content filters are culturally arbitrary, and Western-biased. For example, if Facebook was a Saudi company, you can bet more than nipples would be banned.
Ahem: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
Edit: Why do people think these are unreasonable questions? Does Google attempt to influence by ordering search results? How can any publisher avoid attempting to influence when any difference in content is potentially influential?
It's a platform that has algorithms to pick what news 1/4th of the world reads. And who has access to the personal data of 1/4 of the world.
>Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Yes, but Apple just makes devices. Their Cloud services are not of the type that expert influence of FB or Google kind.(Neither is Microsoft's products).
edit: sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648521
>[..] on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. : https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
For more interesting stuff on this topic, look up the company 'The Groundwork'.
When a single platform has the eyes and attention of a third of the world's population each day, even the smallest things, purposeful or not, could cause a ripple of change.
I would argue Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc are different. They can't make instant changes or do AB testing on a scale that Facebook can. Facebook could give a single page over to an algorithm that runs millions of experiments a day to learn how best to influence a person in a certain way, iterate on that and continue. A single engineer, with their scale and data, could set this up given the proper permissions.
It is remarkable that one corporation owns the infrastructure on which 1/4 of the world's population communicates. That makes it an exceptionally good platform for surveillance because even people who are good at keeping their activities hidden now have to make sure that everyone they know is as good as they are.
No doubt because of that risk, any good operational security training will include an example involving leakage through Facebook.
Facebook is a lot of people's primary source of news or even communication.
Humans are a social species and massively influenced by what they hear from others.
One need only step between rabidly conservative and rabidly liberal enclaves on Facebook to see different groups surrounding themselves with their own messaging.
To date I don't see Facebook exerting an editorial influence that is swaying meaningful sized groups. Sure there are groups that use Facebook to do that, but it isn't something you can buy or arrange for from the company.
EDIT: I believe this is also the secret to Reddit's success...
I see Reddit, Facebook, Topix, Google+, HN, all providing "watering holes" or a place for a community to form, and these days there is always an algorithm connected to a mechanism for the community to use to signal its approval and disapproval. In "broad" community sites like Facebook and Reddit there is an explicit 'hands off' policy on how those communities operate (until there isn't). That supports a wide number of communities and optimizes for high user counts. In "narrow" community sites like HN and various forum sites, there is an explicit 'hands on' policy which drives the community to a particular place. That optimizes for content/discussion that is highly aligned with the owner's editorial goals even at the cost of ejecting users who don't align with those goals.
The way I think about it, for a multi-community site to actively "influence" its users, the site operator would have to apply some mechanism for shaming or promoting specific communities within it. Further it would associate users with that level of compliance which would signal to them if they were 'betting better' or 'being worse'. The signalling is needed to help the users understand which way they are "supposed" to go, without that signalling it is much harder.
So multi-community sites don't (and won't) do that because it results in users leaving and taking their eyeballs with them. And ultimately the point of such sites is to collect as many people there as possible with as wide a demographic as possible, so that people can advertise goods and services to them.
Imagine if the government hadn't stepped in to limit Microsoft's monopoly; today there would be no Facebook; everyone in the tech industry would be a Microsoft employee and everyone in the world would be using Microsoft's "Human Social Monitoring System"... and we would chant praises to our dear leader Bill Gates.
I agree the pervasiveness of Facebook is a problem (one of many). But from a legal standpoint, what have they done that can bring a viable antitrust complaint?
A better dream is a world free of marketing of any type
That seems like a stretch. Microsoft has drastically decreased in influence because they didn't get in on the big new trends soon enough - web search, social networking, and mobile. I don't see how anything the Government did enabled that. At most, the implied threat of further Government action might have prevented them from more drastic efforts to block those things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
It's difficult because it's not something that neatly falls into established categories, and it quite obviously touches on free speech issues. You can be absolutely sure that, if Facebook were to use its power to promote a political agenda, they'd quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a law. But as long as it's incidental damage, and hard to show with statistical significance, it comes down to the fundamental law of laws: that what doesn't do harm is allowed.
What I suspect will emerge rather soon is a DMCA-style notice/takedown/counter-notice protocol for libel and fake news.
When you interact with coke does it gently tailor what you see and what you do not see, month after month?
If you cannot understand how people are influenced, maybe you'll never see the influencing happening. That doesn't make you immune, on the contrary...
Facebook can, has, and certainly will continue to monitor and influence MOST aspects of peoples lives - social, political, religious, economic, etc. Just ads and subtle filtering of walls and ads alone is provably HUGE impact-wise.