Excuse me, what? As an advertising company, you don't ensure the integrity of a sovereign nation's election. You can at most abstain from unduly interfering with it (and of course you should, it's not particularly laudable or supererogatory).
Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we
can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional
object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the
three-dimensional world we recognize.
> Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.
Formatted for mobile readers.
But what had been presented as a democratic town hall was
revealed to be a densely interwoven collection of parallel
media ecosystems and political infrastructures outside the
control of mainstream media outlets and major political
parties and moving like a wrecking ball through both.> But what had been presented as a democratic town hall was revealed to be a densely interwoven collection of parallel media ecosystems and political infrastructures outside the control of mainstream media outlets and major political parties and moving like a wrecking ball through both.
Tip to HN commenters: don't indent block quotes and break them up into lines. That is for code formatting, and it makes the quote hard to read on a mobile device.
Instead, put the quote all on one line in this format without indenting it:
> *Quote here.*
If the quote consists of multiple paragraphs, I like to follow the above formatting for each paragraph separately. Put a blank line between each paragraph so they don't run together.
And then be sure to check the format after commenting. It should look like the quote near the beginning of this comment. If it doesn't look right, edit to fix it. And no, you do not need to add an "Edit: fixed formatting" note. That would be silly, just fix the thing.
HN's comment formatting options are rather meager, so this is about the best we can do.
Thanks!
I'd rather see either the CSS fixed (to pre-wrap or whatever the directive is), or actually have real motherlovin' blockquote support. But I'm not holding my breath.
(Lists would be another nice add. Markdown...)
Another recent article that I can't stop thinking about also covered the malign naïveté of Facebook -- "Zuckerberg's Preposterous Defense of Facebook" by Zeynep Tufecki [0].
The entire thing is so well reasoned it's hard to choose just one snip, but here's one:
For those of us who are tolerant of a wide range of ideas and arguments, but would still like deception and misinformation to not have such an easy foothold in society, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments do not inspire hope...
Since Facebook has no effective competition, we can look forward only to being lectured on being more tolerant of "ideas" we don’t like, and to smug talk of the false equivalency of "both sides."
By the way, thank you for "supererogatory", I didn't know there was a word for "good but not morally required to be done".
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and-contro...
(BTW, regarding "supererogatory" = "good even beyond what's required" - awesome word, isn't it, and I've been looking for an opportunity to drop it into a sentence :-)
At most he/they took sides and interfered.
On the other hand it's hard to enforce election silence on social networks.
What if I only saw this political article because someone else promoted it? What if was one-sided or even false? How does Facebook detect that?
There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook" or twitter, while allowing people to talk politics.
Advertising on Facebook is a specific, paid mechanism for delivering messages to an identified target audience segment, that is completely distinct from their social content sharing features. Heck, you might not remember it, but there was a time when there was no advertising on Facebook at all.
Regulating that specific mechanism is well within the purview of the FEC, and can be done without interfering with the ability of Facebook users to share content with their own network of connections.
Do I need to mention the nirvana fallacy again? ;)
Maybe I'll phrase it differently: don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I take the point about paid ads, but that does not cover all of "propaganda" any more.
I suggest that it is very possible that Facebook, with its access to something like 1 billion MAUs, needs to be regulated, and regulated possibly differently than companies before it. The FEC has some rules for political ads with respect to the Internet, but I am in favor of revisiting those to see what rules need to be established for the greater good of the public
>There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook"
It appears that Russians bought $100,000 worth of ads, so that is some place to start looking that is wholly different than a discussion on politics of users.
This is HEAVY intervention. Specially if it is more specifically to "russian".
So, just to restate my position, if what Facebook meant by upholding the integrity of elections amounted to preventing foreign nationals (non-Germans) from buying political ads on their platform, I'm all for it.
I totally agree with it! Now I ask you, do you agree? Because US institutions bought a lot of political ads in the past years when the Brazilian government was overthrow. Now guess which side did these institutions support? :)