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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

> This is an industry that sells influence at scale. Anyone with a credit card can start changing how people think and act but there are absolutely no real consequences for bad actors.

Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs?

I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications? Maybe I missed something, but it seems like everyone just assumes that advertising is the #1 biggest influence on most people, and was used to completely change the tide of democracy, when in reality it seems to me that it's a small part of the problem, at most.

I'm serious about the question btw - what would you do? You say regulate at the core. I'm not saying necessarily don't regulate (though that is where I lean) - I'm asking, what exactly do you propose?

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> what would you do?

1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share.

2. Pass an American GDPR. Consumers get an absolute right to audit and delete their data. Explicit consent is required for each instance of third-party sharing. Companies are liable to their users for breaches, with a minimum amount claimable through an easily-accessibly regulator.

1) requires a doj investigation and high court ruling, not to mention your particular case "social media share" is without precedent

Time to set a precedent then.

Well, 1 could also be taken care of by Congress passing a new law. But I think the more interesting alternative is Zuck deciding to do it on his own. There's no reason he couldn't create a nonprofit and give it the "natural monopoly" pieces. That would certainly include identity and the social graph, and maybe a publishing interchange.

Then Facebook could step back and compete on the non-monopoly pieces. The client, of course. But all the add-ons. Groups and events and marketplace and whatever else. Google, Twitter, Amazon, and probably Apple would probably quickly create their own social clients. And would also join some nonprofit advisory board, which would help to set protocols and standards.

Sure, but neither of those have anything to do with what this thread is talking about. Data ownership and privacy are important, but this thread is about GP's claim that (paraphrased) the fundamental problem is that advertising is the ability to buy influence at scale, and that "bad actors" aren't prevented from doing so.

> the fundamental problem is that advertising is the ability to buy influence at scale

Breaking up Facebook reduces all those scaling factors.

Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying.

I'm still not so sure it's true though. Is it materially different to go buy from 5 ad brokers instead of 1? Or from ad exchanges that automate it for your? It's hard for me to see how this would have much of an effect, beyond mildly increasing the cost.

What would breaking up Facebook look like? Most features of Facebook couldn't operate as standalone businesses without creating their own massive ad networks.

Facebook the company, not facebook the application.

Instagram and WhatsApp worked fine before they were part of Facebook.

Both were being run off of VC money when Facebook acquired them. They would be in Snapchat's shoes right now if they were still independent.

They are not the issue so much as FBs core business.

> What would breaking up Facebook look like?

Crack it along its social graph(s) or separate the platform (which would become a regulated utility) from the advertising business.

Mergers offer four broad categories of synergies [1]: demand-side, supply-side, political and administrative. Airline mergers are usually about demand-side synergies. Having more market share gives you better data about future trends. It also gives you pricing power. Media/telecom mergers tend to rely on supply-side synergies: prices won't be raised, but content suppliers can be squeezed for distribution. When Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky it acquired lots of employees in Connecticut [2]; that bought them some bulldogs in the Congress. (Administrative synergies are mostly B.S.; they fall into the "you have an accounting department, we have an accounting department, combined we can have just one" category and were mostly disproven in the post-WWII conglomerate boom.)

Facebook is a super aggregator [3]; it has both demand-side and supply-side monopolistic synergies. Cracking the demand side means users go to sleep with a Facebook account and wake up with a Facebook No. 3 account. (Or to sleep with an Instagram account and wake up with an Instagram account.) This worked for AT&T and could be done today (at significant expense to Facebook's shareholders as it was to Standard Oil's, AT&T's and Microsoft's). Cleaving social graphs is complicated. But we understand graph theory better today than we did in AT&T's days. Bonus: require an open inter-operability standard if these networks want to interconnect.

Cracking the supply side would involve taking related advertisers and hiving them off into a separate advertising company. The Facebook platform left would be a natural monopoly, regulated like a utility, serving dual profit and public roles. (Messenger, Instagram, M, and other relatively-discrete products would similarly be spun off.)

TL; DR The novelty of breaking up a Facebook is superficial and finds precedent in antitrust enforcement history.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/synergy.asp

[2] http://www.courant.com/business/hc-sikorsky-connecticut-2016...

[3] https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/

Good analysis, but the inherent nature of Facebook (and indeed all social media) is that it bridges these social divides.

Who cares! Why should companies that only work as monopolies receive extra leeway against anti-trust laws? I cannot think of a compelling reason.

This: "Pass an American GDPR."

> 1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share.

You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen. It is not that privacy activists have not been warning all the time...

To give a little background: In Germany (where there is a lot more concern for privacy) Facebook never got that deeply ingrained into the daily habits of most people. It is also not uncommon that at a social gathering people explicitly tell you that they don't desire that any photos that were taken here to be put on Facebook.

> You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen.

Social networks gravitate towards oligopolies(+), because people go wherever everybody else is. Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account.

(+) Oligopolies, because there seems to be a age generation effect: children don't use the network where their parents are.

This is one of the areas where self-regulation simply doesn't work.

> Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account.

I often write here at HN that there is no "objective" status in society, but rather status in various, often vaguely defined groups in the society, where the individual status symbols can even contradict each other.

It is not my impression that all in all I had to pay a social price for not having a Facebook account at any time (quite the opposite). Rather in some groups this lead to a social malus, but in other groups it gave a large social bonus.

I fully agree that this highly depends on the groups to which you belong. Personally, I have not experienced a malus for not having a Facebook account, but I know of occurrences (e.g., a student learning group organizing their communication via Facebook). For myself, I have faced a potential social price for not having a WhatsApp account that was large enough to let me create an account.

People keep seeing "regulate" and reading it as "ban".

The UK regulates what you can advertise (no prescription pharma, for example) and extremely limits political advertising and spending. This results in a culture where local volunteers are important and you don't get weird lie-based adverts smearing candidates all the time. (The smearing is done for free by the press instead)

The only point at which I would say this was overreach was the period when Gerry Adams MP was banned from speaking on televion and had to have his words read by an actor.

WRT Facebook, a good start would be to guarantee traceability of ads, plus the ability to see all ads run by a particular entity even if they're not targeted at you.

You started to make an argument for how "regulate" doesn't mean "ban" but then immediately cited how Rx drug ads are banned.

The part about ad campaign transparency was good though. Corporate facebook page data doesn't seem accessible at all. Is there an API for this data that I don't know about??

Post I was replying to said (hyperbolically) "ban all communications".

Well, technically we do things like ban outright lying in advertising already, but it's called regulation. Usually when people talk about "bans" they mean blanket bans for an entire industry, like, banning guns, banning fast food, banning drones, etc.

It is definitely not true for news and book publishing.

For news, consider things like the Chinese wall [1] between news and ad sales, the formal ad standards that news organizations will have, and the fact that at least traditionally, humans manually sell those ads, resulting in oversight.

For books, I'm not even sure what you mean. Book publishers sell books that they think will do well and, mostly, that reflect well on them. You can't just walk into Random House with a credit card and say, "Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide."

Personally, I'd just ban all advertising. The economic-theory reason we need it, purchasers discovering better ways to solve their needs, has been made mostly unnecessary by the Internet. Now if you want to buy a foo you just search for "foo reviews" and you're off to the races. We'd figure out other ways to fund things.

As an aside, that justification was always a little... generous. Coca Cola doesn't spend billions per year on ads because they're just trying to reach people who've never heard of their products. They do it because they want to manipulate people into buying Coke. I say we can trust people to find unhealthy addictions all on their own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Journalism

I think the same way. In the end, advertising creates harm to people. Put aside the numbers, and vacuous phrases like "creating value to the shareholders". The net impact on advertising is harm to people. It's about using tricks, potentially with very harmful side effects, to manipulate people into buying your stuff.

Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be...

>It's about using tricks, potentially with very harmful side effects, to manipulate people into buying your stuff.

There is a lot of this, but that is not the whole of advertising. Ads can be informational and useful.

Take the previews at a theater before the feature. Those are ads, they are paid for, and a lot of people like them. If you like movies you'd probably like to know what movies are coming, it's useful for you and useful for the studios. It's a positive sum game.

>Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be...

There would be more of a concentration on other ways to get messaging out. If companies couldn't buy search engine advertisements they would concentrate more on SEO. It's not "advertising" but it has the same effects. There are plenty of side ways into achieving the same propaganda goals.

People could also watch trailers on the Internet without being forced to. In fact, people already do.

If your theory is correct that people want to watch trailers in theaters, then if we ban advertising (that is, the paid placement of content), then they will go on watching them because theaters will show them without being paid to do so. Although they'll likely see fewer misleading trailers for low-quality films, because theaters will no longer have a conflict of interest when deciding what to show.

It's true that companies would spend more on SEO, but that's in effect a fight between search engine companies (who want to find what users want) and other companies (who want to be found whether or not it's what users want). That seems like a fair fight to me.

It would be very very very very boring. There would be very little entertainment, at least no professional entertainment. It write all be small amateurish stuff. But you wouldn't know about it, because it couldn't be advertised.

That's just ridiculous. I hear about plenty of professional entertainment even though I very rarely see ads. How? Reviews, bookstore clerks, word of mouth, online recommendations, social media discussion, and event listings.

Entertainment is a big industry because people want to be entertained, not because somebody told them what to watch. They would seek out entertainment in a world without ads. How do I know? Because they already do.

> Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide.

I suppose you heard about a company named Amazon. This is basically one of the services they offer for years, if you're OK with selling an e-book.

If your audience prefers dead trees, print-on-demand offers are also numerous.

The problem, as usual, is to make the existence of your book known to potential readers, and this is done by... advertising. And you want it to be targeted unless you enjoy burning money on spamming innocent disinterested people.

Yes, that is called "self-publishing" because it is distinct from what a real publisher does. Vanity presses have existed for decades at least before Amazon, but they too are irrelevant to the point here.

What a real publisher does is to market and promote your book in addition to just running the presses. Aka advertising. You're just making the GP's point for them.

A real publisher handles editing, fact-checking, copyediting, layout, cover design, and distribution. As well as marketing, which is distinct from advertising.

Yes, they do also sometimes advertise books, but I don't see how that proves that "anyone with a credit card" can "put out information" of their choosing through a real publisher.

You can't just expect to search for review of a product and get an unbiased review. Companies caught up on that ages ago and pay bloggers money for good reviews. This is how bloggers make money so they can live on their blog after all.

> Personally, I'd just ban all advertising.

That won't happen. The First Amendment would see to that.

That's not as clear as you suggest. Some advertising restrictions are clearly constitutional (note the lack of cigarette ads, for example), and in the past courts have found that no commercial speech is protected under the constitution. Notably, that includes even the Supreme Court in Valentine v. Chrestensen.

All of which is beside the point, in that my aside was clearly meant as a "if I were in charge" hypothetical. And since it's my hypothetical, I can posit that your puny mortal constitution would not stand up to my hypnobeam powers. So there.

The FCC can regulate or ban certain kinds of advertising on the public airwaves, but a dwindling number of people watch terrestrial OTA television exclusively or predominantly. Private networks (cable, satellite, internet) can set their own rules.

> For news, consider things like the Chinese wall [1] between news and ad sales

Literally the second line of the two lines of the linked section talks about the (increasingly common) cases of it being breached, a natural consequence of increasing ad-blocker usage. Also, everything in the example you're giving relies on old distribution methods, not "news". There's no longer a line between news and "random website who publishes information about events", and I'm not sure how anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 15 years could be naive enough to think otherwise. For God's sake, Buzzfeed was a Pulitzer Prize finalist a year or two ago!

> For books, I'm not even sure what you mean. Book publishers sell books that they think will do well and, mostly, that reflect well on them. You can't just walk into Random House with a credit card and say, "Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide."

Amazon is the largest bookseller in the country IINM, and you can very much give them a credit card and start selling your books nationwide. Again, you're confusing increasingly-unpopular (for market reasons) distribution methods with types of media.

The very existence of advertorials is a refutation of the notion that there's any principled way to legally distinguish between advertising and other forms of information, even less so one that wouldn't be riven with loopholes (cf limits on campaign spending and Super PACs' technically-not-for-the-candidates' spending).

> Personally, I'd just ban all advertising.

You seem to be confident that you have a definition of the word advertising that would be robust enough to implement this without enough collateral damage that it wouldn't be trivially unconstitutional. What is your rough proposal for what that definition would be?

FWIW, I generally agree with you that advertising is a collective-action/net-loss problem, but I think you may be falling into the classic trap of "this thing is bad, we should just wish for it to disappear and hold all else equal".

That the Chinese wall has been sometimes breached is not proof that it doesn't generally still operate. There is definitely a line between real news and random-ass websites. That Buzzfeed is producing some real journalism is definitely not proof that real journalism has stopped existing.

If you think I'm wrong about this, please do go buy an article in one of the top news sites with content of your choosing. And if you can't, then that's a pretty clear sign that it's different than advertising.

That Amazon sells self-published books is definitely not proof that real book publishers just print any old thing. If you think otherwise, again, please demonstrate it. (And that you'd suggest it as equivalent strikes me as either not understanding the point or a desire to be contrary.)

Regarding your constitutional whataboutism, it may be that we would need a constitutional change to fully ban advertising, but I don't think that changes my view that were I king for a day I'd ban all advertising.

> What is your rough proposal for what [the definition of advertising] would be?

I like the definition of "getting a material benefit from someone for singing their praise". I'm fairly confident this could work with German law (where I live). In the US, it will be more difficult given Citizens United vs. FEC and other such absurdities.

No, this isn't about banning all communications. Publishing requires you to earn an audience. You can start a blog today but you won't have millions of readers. In fact, audience size is often used as a proxy signal for authority and quality.

Spend a few thousands on Facebook though (or other ad networks), and you can easily get in front of millions of people with whatever message you want, completely subverting all the usual signals. Many people can't discern authority very well, and that's if they even recognize that it is a paid ad.

There must be more regulation. TV, radio, print involved considering time and effort which was a natural barrier, but digital is much too granular and fast for the same rules to apply, and we actually have even less governance.

I think the solution to most problems in the economy is to limit how big companies can get.

Competition keeps organizations honest. It forces them to conform their beliefs to reality and discard whatever is incorrect or counterproductive. It's the only mechanism we've found in thousands of years of institutions that preserves the valuable correspondence between belief and truth.

When an organization becomes big enough that its survival ceases to depend on the correspondence of belief with reality, other concerns take over: usually, primate-hierarchy status games. And these games escalate until the organization fails or people die, depending on the organization.

Competition does not exist when companies get so large they own the whole market.

That's my point.

Concerns s.a primate-hierarchy status games, antitrust laws, and so forth.

>Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs?

Advertising is not information. If it were merely data being exchanged, we wouldn't call it advertising. Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert

>I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications?

Start by acknowledging the problem. Dodging it hasn't worked. Then we can learn more about it, how it works, the complications of it's side effects (like directly incentivizing privacy abuse) and come up with hopefully a sufficient and efficient solution. In short, we would do Problem Solving, very different from the other option of Not Trying.

Because I'm familiar with HN's penchant for being black-and-white about things, I'll preface this with: I think advertising is very much a net loss for the world and would be pretty happy if it all disappeared tomorrow, magically ceterus paribus. I just don't think that it makes any sense to redefine a word instead of actually addressing a point you disagree with.

Yea, and "villains" are just farmers (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain)

Come on man, there's no way that you don't know how dumb it is to pretend that the etymology of a word is more relevant than its modern definition. '

> Advertising is the part that changes one's mind.

You can't just assert something insane like this without any attempt at backing it up. Advertising is 100% information being exchanged; it may be subjective, but the dirty secret that everyone ignores about epistemology is that all "knowledge" is socially-constructed. Thank God we've (generally) agreed on a few high-quality sources like the scientific establishment, but it's hopelessly naive to pretend that you can find the line where something ceases to be "real" information. And clear lines are incredibly important in legislation, particularly when there's a trillion dollars of incentive to find loopholes.

I never redefined anything. I’m just trying to help you with the nuance in the language that you must be just willfully avoiding. Otherwise, you have found a rhetorical loophole. Doesn’t mean you are right.

“Information” is a poor term for this discussion. “Data” draws the more useful distinction. I should have said “Advertising is not only information”. It would just be stubborn to insist that advertising is merely data sharing. I’ve been working in advertising most of my life and we do more data distortion than data sharing. We make a living on dishonesty and manipulation.

It's funny how your line of argument can seem so obviously accurate to one person (like myself) but so obviously wrong to another (like whoever has downvoted you here). FWIW, I think your distinction between advertising and dissemination of information is a good one.

Those who disagree might nevertheless be surprised to learn that recognized protection of commercial speech (i.e. advertising) by the 1st amendment is only a fairly recent legal development. I would suggest to anyone interested in the topic to revisit the arguments in Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council. This case, from the 1976, was a key stepping stone that paved the way for the rampant drug advertising that we have in the U.S. today. In fact, the lone dissenter, the late Justice Rehnquist, foresees precisely this outcome in his opinion, predicting almost the exact "talk to your doctor" phrasing that we have become so accustomed to decades later. By contrast, the majority justices sound like nothing other than hapless and naive dupes of an astroturfing campaign, speaking guilelessly about issuing their decision on behalf of "consumers of prescription drugs" and their right to receive "information". I doubt that they anticipated anything remotely approaching the ravages that, for example, the opioid epidemic would bring.

It's easily on my own personal "top ten" list of bad Supreme Court decisions.

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