I could easily write a headline such as, "We can't trust the New York Times to regulate itself," and be just as misguided as the headline above, for the same reasons.
Even if the Times went completely far far far left, they aren't the only game in town. I can choose to read any of a number of other papers, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist etc..
What alternative is there fire FB?? Mastodon.. Hubzilla..? They're great, if someone has the capability to run the service. I'd argue that most users can't be bothered to learn more than a chromebook let alone understand how to run their own server.
When you have a monopoly like this, it either needs government regulation, ( which is generally bad because it tends to hurt other similar companies), or break them up, i think this is the ideal option, but i don't know in this case.. Break it up by forcing all their code to open source, of perhaps force them to run it more federated or diaspora like and mandating interoperability with these other services..
I'm not sure what the answer is. Of course the real answer is nobody has to use Facebook.. But for a lot of people, that's not an option they're interested in, and since fb literally have all the data, it likely needs regulation which i find very distasteful and terrifying.
Are we breaking them up because they have "too much information"? What does that even mean? A move like that would be beyond unprecedented.
NYTimes is far from a monopoly - there are tons of news site with more traffic. But there's no competitor that comes close to Facebook
[1] http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
Why? Do you find it terrifying that your doctor, hospital, and health insurance company have very strict regulations on keeping your health data private? I, frankly, find it distasteful and terrifying that they have essentially no regulations on the data and can do whatever they want with it. I mean look at what happened at Equifax for example.
Early in their history, credit agencies collected very private personal information about people for inclusion in their credit files. The information in peoples' credit files was frequently inaccurate, and consumers had no way of correcting that information, and no way of even knowing what was in their credit file.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act [1] limits the information that credit agencies can keep on people, mandates that people be allowed to access what is in their file, mandates that people be able to correct inaccurate information, and restrains how third parties can access the information.
In fact, that all sounds like a great start to regulation for social networks and other internet giants!