Why Mark Zuckerberg’s ’empty chair’ policy is backfiring | Hacker News Reader

Why Mark Zuckerberg’s ’empty chair’ policy is backfiring

politico.eu

50 pointshoward94122 comments

I remember listening to a UK Parliamentary Committee that had invited the head of a popular grassroots anti-TTIP campaign to give evidence. There wasn't even a pretence of trying to be even-handed or gain a better understanding of popular objections to TTIP. Instead, all the MPs present took turns to berate him in an imperious manner. He was simply a prop for them to lecture at.

I suspect many of the forums Zuckerberg is invited to participate in are similarly vehicles for politicians to gain exposure by being seen as attacking a popular bogeymen. I can't really blame him for not wanting to spend his life traipsing around world capitals helping these politicians get TV coverage by acting as a rhetorical piñata.

These nations feel their sovereignty is threatened by Facebook. Him ignoring them isn’t exactly helping, nor is the fact that he did submit to Congress which does the same pointless lecturing.

These nations are all losing face from being snubbed. They are going to take increasingly drastic measures to assert their authority - this is not something that will go away. You already saw this with the UK parliament seizing documents which is unprecedented in recent times.

here is the long term trend of that..as each decade advances and it takes 50% less people to create and operate firms like facebook a political storm gets bigger and bigger due the state having gutted certain small business loan and other safety nets..politically high tech firms need to understand the political cliff they are racing towards before its too late

> feel their sovereignty is threatened by Facebook

That’s kind of like saying that coka-cola feels threatened if the CEO reports an illegal lemonade stand that’s blocking his driveway.

The scales are not just different, they are absurdly different. UK is NOT afraid that they will lose sovereignty because of Facebook. Thats just ridicules.

Social media were the future of democracy up until Trump and Brexit happened, now they are the world's greatest threat to democracy.

A populist beat the incumbent and started taking America in a direction in which the majority of the voters represented by the electoral college approve of, is that not a success of American democracy? Or should are we deciding what’s right and wrong based on a different yardstick now?

You can bet both parties are going to use similar tactics next election.

It still is the future of democracy, just not the version the media and legacy nations had in mind.

And lead was a perfectly fine material for cups and plumbing once, so that in itself says nothing.

If there was a national scandal in the UK I can almost guarantee the coke CEO would be out placating politicians. Lip service is important in politics as is keeping up appearances.

We all knew that the UK didn’t have much real power over these US multinationals, but Zuckerberg made it visible. A government looking weak In the face of a single 36 year old is a sovereignty issue. It’s a huge loss of credibility at home and abroad. It has shockingly little to do with the underlying issue.

Well, if any EU country finds any evidence, they now have a huge stick to beat him/Facebook with (GDPR). Not that they don't deserve it.

As it should be. These nations need competition. Maybe then we can go beyond 'sounds good' politics.

Facebook isn't competing on reason or critical thought, it's competing on superficial appeal and clicks, as well as bots.

Exactly. And that's the level of thought running our nation states. Hence the competition idea.

With Facebooks business goals and reach if you can't eat a bowl of shit every so often to keep the facade of humility going then you need to step aside for someone who will.

You're not wrong, but the fact remains that Facebook and Zuckerberg should be accountable to the nations in which they operate. Parliamentary Committees are one of the mechanisms the UK uses to investigate and hold organizations and people to account. By refusing to appear, he encourages nations to use other powers to discover information, which we saw earlier in the week when documents from Six4Three were siezed by Parliament.

It's important that it's Zuckerberg because the buck stops with him. When other executives appear they can just pass the parcel up or down the heirachy or claim they have no knowledge of what they are being asked about.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike Facebook, and I myself have almost entirely stopped using it. However, most of these politicians are yelling at Facebook for only one reason: they want to bully it into implementing whatever censorship they desire.

You don’t see politicians hauling the inventor of email onto TV and demanding that someone do a better job of censoring email. They know that email is a decentralized system, and for this reason it is respected as a neutral medium of communication (at least in countries who don’t censor the entire internet).

Facebook having an easy to dislike figurehead and centralized company behind it makes it much easier to turn into a bogeyman. This can get citizens in liberal countries who would never agree to a great firewall to agree to some kind of censorship of Facebook.

Hopefully someone can make a decentralized social network/messaging platform catch on sooner rather than later, so that we can return to a world where blanket censorship is considered wrong, instead of something for politicians to aspire to.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are starting to make editorial decisions of what counts as hate speech, what accounts and pages should be banned/removed, what affect do algo changes have on the content surfaced, what suggestions should show up in auto-suggest or the front page, etc.

I don't see the same choices being made in regards to Gmail spam filters for instance. I'd say we're at a time when this conversation is necessary. And I'm not one to trust the politicians with this decision, but it'd be nice if he showed up to some open forum on the topic.

They're doing that largely because governments have forced them to: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook...

Exactly. Also hopefully we can create a world where politicians aren't enemies of the people.

> You don’t see politicians hauling the inventor of email onto TV and demanding that someone do a better job of censoring email.

I wish they would. That guy's (http://inventorofemail.com/) a piece of work :b

When I send an email, it goes to the group I sent it to, every one, every time.

When I post to Facebook, it goes to some percentage of my friends, some of the time, different every time, totally unpredictably. Plus Facebook sends them all sorts of content they didn't ask for, like recommendations, ads, an article some friend "liked", etc.

Facebook practices censorship as a business model. It's not a neutral communications platform; it hasn't been since they started running the timeline with an algorithm. It's a publishing operation.

No government made them do that. The point of these government hearings is to make them acknowledge and be accountable for the censorship and promotional decisions they are already making.

By refusing to take an L, Zuck is just making legislators more interested in regulating speach and fucking up a good thing for all of us.

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