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Comment by propman | Hacker News Reader

Yeahh we need regulations on Facebook. The fact that he retains a majority voting share in the company, the fact that I now have zero trust in Zuckerberg AND Sandberg into doing the right thing, AND that there is no viable competition/users are too psychologically entwined to make the decision to detach from Facebook means the only checks and balances left against this unscrupulous individual is the US government. Unfortunately 80% are in his pockets, but that's the best bet we have.

What's stopping him from using his master access to obtain any info he needs for a presidential election? Trust? Trusting him?

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> there is no viable competition/users are too psychologically entwined to make the decision to detach from Facebook

People literally said the same thing about MySpace when it held the “network effect” throne. And in hindsight after it lost its users to facebook people came up with all kinds of “well, duh” reasons, such as the profile pages automatically playing music or being so customizable to the point of not having any visual consistency.

Well there’s a ton of things wrong with facebook too right now that will be so easy to point out in hindsight. Facebook is just as vulnerable as MySpace was.

You know you could uh, stop using it. That goes for everyone else too.

Exactly. I dont believe we are there yet because there any sexy alternative (seems like nobody is trying to make social networks nowdays).

But seriously facebook is fragile. If lot of people started to leave then they would be gone. It is not diverse company like amazon or google.

They are lucky they own instagram.

Maybe nothing, but in practice this would be hard to do. Access to this data would amount to material support from a company to a presidential campaign which under campaign finance laws would need to be reported and scrutinized.

Additionally, Facebook is not just Mark Zuckerberg and likely the company would not like the data being used that way because it would risk their relationship with their users, which is far more important than Zuckerberg being president.

I get what you're saying, but considering what we've witnessed in 2016 and how ethics, honestly and law no longer plays any part in the White House, what used to be unimaginable to me, now is.

That being said, I could see the future in which the next elections are a full blown, all-gloves-are-off one year long fight between Trump (Republicans) and Zuckerberg (Democrats). Partially because Zuckerberg really does seem like he's aiming for this with its actions, and partially because Democrats don't really seem like they've learned their lessons from two years ago.

Now I'm not saying that's definitely going to happen, nor claiming that it's inevitable, nor that the chances of it actually happening are anything but minuscule, but I wouldn't be too surprised if such thing actually happens.

In other comments people are stating that Mark was a different person back then, but that he doesn't seem to have learnt from his mistakes.

Assuming that's going to happen. What do you think would be a realistic response to the simple critique "American people deserve better" ?

> likely the company would not like the data being used that way because it would risk their relationship with their users

Not that I subscribe to the same fears of the parent comment, but they’ve already shown plenty of willingness to abuse their relationship with their customers for business gain. It reveals their character (or lack thereof).

No reason to assume that character would change given a different arena like politics. Although neither is there a reason to assume that Mark has political ambitions.

+1, I have absolutely zero confidence in Zuckerberg and Sandberg. The board should ask them to resign and appoint new people (obviously the most extreme ask from this scenario). As a user, I want facebook to stick around and be more useful to me in the future. Unfortunately I don't see the current people doing that.

Why include Sandberg? Isn't she generally considered a professional grown up providing adult supervision for Zuckerberg?

Didn't Sandberg recently suggest something to the effect that opting out of privacy violating "targeted ads" is something you'd need to pay facebook for? That wasn't in the script. Even if rationally true, stating something like that so bluntly is bad PR.

Sandberg may be a "professional grown up adult", but that doesn't preclude her from being a liability to the company.

Sandberg appears to have vast culpability for the current mess. She was brought in in 2008 and given responsibility for Facebook's privacy department. [1]

As one example, because Sandberg was at least partially responsible for blocking attempts at reforming data policies inside of Facebook that likely made the Russia tampering mess worse. And then Facebook corporate attempted to cover that up by pushing the NY Times to alter its reporting:

https://lawandcrime.com/exclusive/facebook-forces-nyt-to-qui...

Further, Sandberg was the core architect behind Facebook's ad business and shift to aggressive monetization. She was brought in from Google precisely for that reason, that's why Facebook recruited her from there.

[2008] "Ms. Sandberg, currently vice president for global online sales and operations at Google, joined the search giant in 2001 and helped develop its immensely lucrative online advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense."

"She will also oversee Facebook’s marketing, human resources and privacy departments — essentially guiding how Facebook presents itself and its intentions to the outside world."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/technology/04cnd-facebook...

As a user, your opinion rarely matter.

Zuckerberg compared to other CEO level executives have a fairly good track record. Somehow his mistakes were not an issue for you for last 10 years and now you have a tough stance against him. What you are buying into now is a form of propaganda where it is fashionable to bash him.

> What’s stopping him ?

People’s intelligence? People are still able to tell lies from truth, media pressure from propaganda. The best proof is all media told americans not to vote for Trump, yet they did so.

And to the point, Zuck’s understanding of its electorate will get him votes or not. For example, Facebook’s censorship of republican topic is not something that gets votes. Facebook’s employment culture of getting rid of males and whites won’t get him much votes. It doesn’t depend how you spin it. It doesn’t matter how many times we explain or how much data they have on us, what matters is whether Mark personally understands whites, cis, both genders including males, etc.

Milo even made a tutorial about how Democrats could win back the white/male/cis vote again, it’s not like it’s not ELI5’ed already. Some people, from the top of any aparatus, still wouldn’t understand that stirring up hate against whites doesn’t get them votes.

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