Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
* harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability
I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your account.
Harmful content is a tough one because you either have free speech or you don't. Judging content is a slippery slope that every generation before us has warned us about.
Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.
Data portability is always good for the consumers I don't think anyone would argue against that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook.
What's the state of the discussion on how to do this sensibly?
The fact that this defends FBs position is just a coincidence...
It's also the exact feature that allowed Cambridge Analytica to happen ("Push this button to share your address book with this third-party company") - seems like people are vocally against allowing that to happen just as strongly as they are vocally in favour of implementing all the features which allow it to happen, somehow not connecting the two...
Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased.
Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?
Yes, the loss of privacy the internet has brought has been immense. However, the complete overhaul of social structures, the influence of large platforms on them (such as by optimizing for clicks/adverts), and the social pressures and influences that come with these by default is something that directly impacts most people for literal hours a day, and has run-on externalities that will affect the whole of society for the rest of our lives. Most people are only tangentially and occasionally affected by their numerous privacy losses.
Sure, I'm not certain in the studies showing that Facebook is negatively associated with wellbeing. I'm not certain that the degradation in conversation quality due to platforms optimizing for controversy is a real effect. I'm not certain that echo chambers preventing people from hearing moderate opinions of opposing sides is going to permanently damage public discourse. But these are not small risks, they are almost everything when it comes to humanity's ability to steer its future, and the potential impact on people's lives should not be so easily dismissed.
Say I’m selling highly profitable, highly addictive opioid painkillers. Hydrocodone has been around forever, so what do you do?
You use your access to workers comp and insurance claim data to find doctors treating conditions likely to require pain treatment. Then you find populations with high densities of patients and market heavily to their physicians. You buy ads that appeal to insured people who aren’t working.
Result: $$$
But more generally, how employers, insurance companies, etc trawl social media.
Similarly, Google's profiles help push people to 'engaging' content on YouTube. It just so happens that extreme claims (anorexia is good, x was a conspiracy, group y is inferior) happen to be very engaging.
Our loss of privacy has a lot of responsibility here. It has allowed for a very subtle division of the public forum.
My question is: So what?
If we have good privacy laws tomorrow (assume temporary magic), how does that do anything but change the modus operandi of manipulation?
wait for a large event, and then flash your ads. Similar to pre internet behavior, true. But it’s still at internet scale, and you could target via groups right?
If you cannot target your message, you need to take into account everyone who will hear it. This requires a more palpable message, and almost forces the adoption of a universal framework of facts.
Similarly, the profiling has lead to echo chambers. Having that fall away also helps create some universal discourse.
The problem is that most people are more comfortable around people that they identify with. This naturally trends towards echo chambers as people gravitate towards 'similar' others. And this is probably unstoppable. Companies rapidly accelerated the process of it by doing everything they possibly could to drive "engagement" but in the digital age you're not going to be able to stop people from forming 'like minded' groups, regardless of whatever rules and regulations somebody might try to dream up.
You need your private web - build it. Yourself.
To rely on fb to provide you with a private web - are you nuts?
This is fundamentally an issue of what rules apply to modern spaces where the masses congregate and interact.
And, importantly, all the 'solutions' I've seen amount to either public or private censorship with little direct accountability to the public and insufficient due process (1). That doesn't seem like a clear improvement over the status quo.
(1) Yes, even private governance needs due process protections.
I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important.
Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?
If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"?
> putting controls on campaign spending is important
That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?
Controlling campaign spending is a ridiculous notion anyways because there is (fortunately) no global law. Even if there was, you can bet there would be a black market.
So, while I appreciate your "Americans aren't poor, they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires" version of equality for the farce it is, I'd appreciate it if you tried mangling the truth somewhere else.
That's absolutely correct. If you donate more than a certain sum to campaign, you should be forced to be transparent about it.
> That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?
I live in a country where all political parties are bound by exactly such rules. Moreover TV advertising by political parties are is explicity banned. Instead parties are allocated short 'Party political broadcast' slots on the main channels.
It doesn't feel particularly "dangerous".
There doesn't need to be a global law.
Persuasion works and can be bought with money. It would be naive to think any of us in this thread are immune to persuasion.
Character
Emotion
Rational
Seriously? There is a $20 Billion dollar advertising industry with countless studies behind it, and hundreds of thousands of people working in, all of which says persuasion works. You’re going to need a little more proof.
Shut down Facebook as a company and three of those four problems are solved.
It's not about forcing people to do something.
No ads, about any topic, can force anyone to do anything.
Yet billions of dollars are spent every year on ads. This money is spent not because it can force people to do things, but because it can influence people. This influence leads to real, concrete effects.
Coca Cola isn't forcing anyone to buy Coke, but they can influence people, and on a population level their ads can lead to more people buying Coke.
The key to understanding this is to not consider the matter in terms of any one individual, but in terms of a population of people, and thinking of the influence as a statistical nudge in a particular direction.
This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them.
They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else.
Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like.
Real competition.
Facebook is the only place some of these people get their "news" and Facebook does nothing to distinguish an opinion blog from an actual journalist. We have millions of people flocking to Alex Jones for information and calling into question the authenticity of Reuters.
That and it's 2019 and we don't even have a secure MEANS of voting. We can make Facebook, which is probably a billion LOC with hardly any security flaws yet our voting machines have default credentials of admin/admin and run on decade old technology that has never been peer reviewed.
Hard problems require complex solutions. It’s not easy for small companies to get “a foot in the door” in the space or auto industries either. Content moderation is a hard and unsolved problem — so yes, companies with more resources will have a better chance of succeeding.
The idea that small competitors should be able to launch with minimal capital, and the idea that social media vendors should protect users' data, are fundamentally in tension. It costs money to protect user privacy, full stop. Yeah, it's possible for a Facebook/Microsoft/Google/whoever to bend the regulations to widen their moat, but it's the job of the regulatory bodies to ensure that the regulations are fair.
The question shouldn't be "should we regulate social media?" The answer, IMO, is a resounding YES. The real question should be "who should be in charge of building those regulations?"
That's an interesting idea, is it actually what you are suggesting?
The line of demarcation could be storing personally identifying information, interfacing with advertising networks, or maybe even ownership of certain patent/intellectual property rights.
The big players will push for regulations, licencing, and standard, ensuring that their next competitor can't come from a few smart people tinkering in their garage or their dorm room.
A good example is the toy industry, where requirements for chemical and safety tests which cost tens of thousands of dollars per SKU, keep mom and pop shops making wooden toys from their garage. (Well, they do anyway, but can be stopped at any time if they get too big.)
Based on his total disregard for privacy and his clear thirst for power, I want nothing coming from him or his company to ever influence actual policies.
[1] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/01/30/quoted-mark-zuckerberg...
Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.
Depends on what you mean by "function". Enjoying cat photos or playing a round of a video game doesn't take any stake at all.
This is a great concrete example of a rule that Zuckerberg himself worked to promulgate, and is presently causing real ongoing harm.
Awesome. So you're going to change your HN username to your real name and put your address and phone number in your "about" section?
Facebook on the other hand is a network for the exchange of private or personal information, including for example people forming groups about particularly sensitive topics (abuse experiences, disease and so on), in which personal identity is important to not open yourself up to potential intrusion by people who are not trustworthy. (Cynically enough stalkers for example trying to inject themselves into support groups)
Which is also of course why privacy and identity considerations between HN and Facebook differ.
No, it's not for me.
It seems exactly the opposite to me: I would not want to use my real name to publicly discuss sensitive personal topics.
For example, I may not want my friends or employer to find out that I'm a drug addict. In many workplaces, it could cost me my job. What if someone else in my support group happens to be a co-worker of mine?
Also, maybe some of us don't want to live in a creepy ad-supported pan-option where the links you click become your actual identity.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
No, it doesn't. People are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. When Youtube forced people's G+ accounts to merge into their comments and people suddenly found themselves commenting under their real names, it stopped the trolling and hate... for like a week.
Hell, plenty of people on Usenet were assholes with their real names and emails in their signatures.
I'd argue as far back as 2010 that indiscriminately selling user data was a bad idea especially when you are the sole network. A lot of people on here (HN) and elsewhere have been repeating those sentiments for years. As naive as it sounds, I simply wish Facebook was not so focused on building its ad platform but rather took on a more custodial role (albeit much less profitable).
Do note: Facebook doesn't sell data directly, they use it to sell ads. They actually buy data so that they can get more insights than what they get from only their own direct tracking.
There are probably plenty of ways you could word statements along these lines that make them technically correct. I've got a two-word response to all of them: Cambridge Analytica.
An academic from Cambridge made an app on the FB platform. That gave him access to data which he then sold for commercial purposes. When FB found out, they sent a legal notice to delete this data and cease using it.
Like gdpr on steroids? I think this would ruin a lot of companies and make a lot of really interesting and useful services no longer possible... but I'm rather curious what it would really mean. I've never seen it proposed by someone who actually recognized what it would mean, though.
At the very least, there's been no societal consensus that we want the trade-offs that come from allowing every click, view, email, and contact to be scanned and used for profit in whatever ways companies want. It happened by pure assertion: the companies just did it and did all they could to avoid even letting people actually know so they wouldn't have to ask.
Maybe we overall would rather lose all the benefits in order to block the harms and dangers.
I'd much rather have the status quo (and stronger) around privacy regulations for medical records than live in a world without that but then be one of a few people who forgo use of common medical facilitaties over personal privacy objections.
It is a deeply troubling mindset that goes beyond just being 'out of touch'.
That has never been Facebook's business model. The Hacker News crowd is smart enough to discuss these sorts of topics without dumbing down and misrepresenting the facts.
Facebook indiscriminately sells ads. In the past they also indiscriminately gave third parties access to user data. Doing that let them grow their market share and helped their primary business, but is not how they make money and is not a core part of the product.
then, does each user with multiple friends sub-lists exhibit a lack of integrity as well?
only if by 'identity' he means 'set of collectable data' and this seems to be the case.
"Having two identities is a reflection of how much trust I have in your integrity." -- me, to Mark Zuckerberg.
Over the past decade, I've probably had ~50 identities. Most have been minor, basically just an email address for some project or activity that I don't want linked to such persistent personas as Mirimir.
And it's also somewhat amusing, given how Facebook doesn't exactly advertize its origins as FaceMash. And this gem:
> I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Having two identities can save your life if you're a battered woman. Or of the wrong political persuasion in some countries.
I'm ok not 'liking' Zuckerberg's idea of integrity.
Facebook is not a small entity, they have overthrown governments and caused civil wars in third countries already.
However, FB needs a moot around their castle, so it acts via third parties, such as Cambridge Analytica.
And even if FB would not engage in large scale behavioral influencing, then through US law, various three letter agencies can force FB to hand over the data, all the while muting the company to disclose such practices.
He has been victim-blaming since Facebook was founded. (Remember the comments about how FB’s users were stupid to hand all that data over?)
Why expect him to stop at battered women or political refugees?
That isn't dishonest, that is behaving according to the role given.
They obviously don’t care.
"An identity is the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person. For example, individuals have meanings that they apply to themselves when they are a student, worker, spouse, or parent (these are roles they occupy), when they are a member of a fraternity, when they belong to the Democratic Party, when they are Latino (these are memberships in particular groups), or when they claim they are outgoing individuals or moral persons (these are personal characteristics that identify themselves as unique persons). People possess multiple identities because they occupy multiple roles, are members of multiple groups, and claim multiple personal characteristics, yet the meanings of these identities are shared by members of society. Identity theory seeks to explain the specific meanings that individuals have for the multiple identities they claim; how these identities relate to one another for any one person; how their identities influence their behavior, thoughts, and feelings or emotions; and how their identities tie them in to society at large." - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/identity-theory-9780...
It does make sense though. He can finally see the tide of public opinion turning against him. Facebook's business metrics will be fine for a while but the pace at which they are losing people's trust is increasing. He needed to make a grand statement now while there are still large swaths of the population that view him as somewhat credible.
[Edit]
Also note the timing. This op-ed comes literally one day after Facebook made headlines for "mistakenly deleting" a bunch of Zuckerberg's early posts, including all his posts from 2007-2008. Which is completely absurd on the face of it. (Yesterday's HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19527200)
Luckily, one way to ensure people don't ask too many questions about this story is to make some new headlines. Sure enough, google news is linking yesterday's story and today's post under the same "Full Coverage" page. As I write this, the "mistaken deletion" story is indeed getting buried under the avalanche of new coverage:
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqOQgKIjNDQklTSURvSmMzUnZj...
Edit: Sorry for the snark. The idea that Zuckerberg is “helping” us with his lack of integrity is so absurd that I assumed you were trolling. It’s not just absurd but dangerous as the other reply to your comment stated better than I did.
Perhaps the regulations could be written to be more onerous for the incumbents to implement?
E.g. a new entrant below a certain size is allowed to get away with a good-faith effort and only subject to small fines, while an incumbent is required to have a massive and empowered internal compliance bureaucracy and is subject to massive fines when non-compliant.
All that does however is ensure the competition will ALWAYS be small.
where I am There are alot of employment regulations that kick in when you hire your 51st employee, under 50 and you are exempt, so guess what there are CRAP ton of businesses that can not expand beyond the 50 employee mark, they would love to higher more people but the burdens placed on them once they did would likely cause huge amounts of harm to the business, increase costs and revenue where they would no longer be able to afford that new employee.... Generally it makes is hard for a business to go from 50 to about 75 or 100 employees where the extra burdens no longer matter. So unless a business can double in size it is hard for those business to grow, they end up stagnate and often fail as a result
For a good example, look at the history of BTs enforced breakup in the UK.
Under what circumstances is a company evil for not allowing a user to delete posts? and under what circumstances are they evil for the reverse?
In a democracy, you want the thinking at the top to reflect the thinking at the bottom - I.e. the adults of a country must be the ones making the rules. What that thinking must be must not be up to those in power to decide .. unless people want that. This has so many tangled loops that no single programmer or one trained in logic is equipped with the skills to provide good "solutions" with full understanding of long term consequences. A good book to read about the possible cognitive failures of highly "educated" people is "The logic of failure" by Dietrich Dorner.
In the case of FB, I think the illusory privacy of a personal network combined with the ability to centrally target these personal networks from the outside has been a mixing of gunpowder and fire.
Will FB stop all targeted ads during an election?
Also, can we have less ad hominem attacks on Mark here please? It is harmful content for the mind, detracts from discussing the points he makes charitably, and unfairly spreads bias against him. (Ha!)
There has been a lot of evil committed in the name of 'stopping harmful content'. Civil War veterans, maimed from the war were made to not appear in public from 'ugly laws' because of bullshit religious pseudoscience about maternal impression would cause birth defects. Women wearing pants is 'harmful content' because it 'corrupts the morals'. Dissent against corrupt powers is 'harmful content' to 'public order'.
Given the myriad abuses I would recommend inverting Hanlon's razor and assume they know exactly what they are doing until proven that they really are that stupid.
Facebook could do all these things in isolation, but generally speaking this could be really bad for long-term revenue. Essentially Facebook is stuck between a rock here; big moves will satisfy their user base, but annoy their large investors. On the other hand, doing nothing will harm users in the long run, but probably they could generate plenty of revenue in the process, so share holders would encourage this. Additionally if Facebook did this on their own, but other platforms are not subject to the same restrictions, they are at a huge competitive disadvantage.
I think this is the key value in broad government rules. Regulation here is both good for users and good for FB (and other platforms) in the long run. They can protect their users without having to explain to investors why they aren't just going straight for profits, because they will be bound by the rules established by regulation.
So in the end, FB should WANT regulation, because it's better for them in the long-run. I'm glad to see Mark appears to have finally realized this.
He's rational in a sense, but he very well might not have ever stepped back far enough to really consider broader perspectives with an open mind, even as he reads and hears concerns. He probably reads them all with some strategic/tactical mindset that blocks him from truly getting the point.
Or, in other words : "Let's regulate the loopholes that we used for success so as to diminish the opportunity for competition to arise in the same sector."
I don't think I expected anything different. Without choosing sides, I have to say that it all sounds very corporate, and I didn't expect anything else from him.
Understanding Philip Morris’s pursuit of US government regulation of tobacco
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/14/3/193.short
Cause hey, if you're going to get regulated, you might as well write the rules yourself.
Mark Zuckerberg, go away. The problem isn't the internet, but people like you. Not that you will take that to heart at this point, but maybe others will figure you out the more we talk about you openly and outside of your crumbling castle.
That's a nice sounding platitude. It'd be fucking terrible for privacy and data protection, though.
My irony just exploded. My solution is to say goodby to your Facebook “friends”, switch off the computer and go outside and socialize with real people. Yea, I know you can't unfriend people when they annoy you, but that's a small price to engage in a real social life.
https://www.greenwichtime.com/opinion/article/The-internet-n...
Come to think of it... was the HTTP code chosen after Fahrenheit 451?
Homogeneity favors business but does not foster independent or challenging thought.
Converging on a "baseline" common set of standards for "harmful" speech and what constitutes "privacy" is only going to reach the lowest common denominator.
Let people opt in to the level of control and sanitization that they want, but do not apply global restrictions without opt-out.
Anybody wants to tell me I am still too paranoid when I think Zuckerberg and likes want to destroy free speech on the internet and turn it into a platform controlled and policed by major providers, where speech not approved by them and the government would be suppressed? That article certainly confirms every suspicion I had.
It's no longer "you don't like FB censorship, find yourself another platform". It's "now that we built censorship in FB, look how nice it is - why not have the government use it as a model to impose it on the rest of the internet?"
Privacy policy, protocols, rules, process, identity and what not are strictly off limits.
Also, if MZ says something ought to be done in this way, I would give a serious look at the advantages of not doing it that way.
Facebook blocks you exporting your contacts, to prevent you from taking your social network elsewhere.
Rather, it actually appears as though he is being intentionally deceitful.
Perhaps his rationale is based on some measured or calculated outcome, maybe he actually thinks he's doing some good in the world. Hopefully his intention is positive!
Or, maybe he is beholden to investors.
He seems to be a fool with power, not someone with anything meaningful to say.
Is he a classic case of the old adage: "absolute power corrupts absolutely"?
Platform! Graph! Stream!, and, abuse people for profit!!
Are Facebook/Insta/Wechat/etc. good for the long term prosperity of humanity? I would argue that the answer is a hard "no", and I think there's ample evidence.
If he were a noble person, he'd shut his harmful systems down.
Shame on Mark Zuckerberg. History will not remember him kindly.
Zuckerberg is forever apologising and promising to do better, and this article is only the latest attempt to try to manage the repetitive poor news cycle that Facebook has generated over the last year.
This is when you sue, hard.
Translation: I want regulatory capture so no startup can ever compete with Facebook, ever.
Shouldn't "generation" be plural? It seems like he is being myopic, ignoring other generations of "entrepreneurs" that built the infrastructure upon which these "services" can run.
How do you reconcile this opinion with the knowledge that copycat crime¹ occurs.
One would imagine that an adult with critical thinking skills ought be able to observe that some people are easily influenced at least some of the time. Elsewise we wouldn't be here having this conversation.
There's no perfect answer to this problem, but censoring information just because it might reach a few unstable people is not the way to go.
One example that comes to mind is the film and TV rating system.
Plenty of reactionary assholes have been triggered to violence by disparaged groups having the gall to think of themselves as equals or transgress their taboos against things like interracial marriages. Heck, under that standard we should ban irrational numbers because they caused Pythagorean to drown their discoverer!
It does seem reasonable that there might be scope for regulation at least in the form of viewing guidelines.
I don’t know what that would look like in practice.
So content posted online should be moderated by the government. Fuck Zuck. He's advocating for the Chinese model for the entire world.
Start dictating rules to government so they stop harassing you, make it even harder for other competitors and as a bonus be the hero in the eye of the public.
All hail our digital emperor!
Data portability is kinda useless if all your contacts are on a single network. What we really need are federated social networks.
If Facebook loves the GDPR so much why did they move all non-EU users out of its scope when it came into force?
A simple fix to get rid of targeted political ads would be to scrap the ad network altogether. Of course, this is anathema to Facebook because they would stop making money.
Finally, the problem with harmful speech is not that there are multiple services but that the definition of harmful speech differs around the world. What good are independent bodies in the US that regulate Facebook when other countries want different standards?
If you care about privacy and how your data is used and who has access to it, federated networks are probably the worst. You do get some benefits for the loss of those things, though.
the first enables the second (and iirc facebook has generaly been quite generous with exporting data)
> why did they move all non-EU users
"duh, because the frameworks were not harmonized"
As summarized by the BBC, calling for the following things:
* Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content
* All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months, to put it on a par with financial reporting
* Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections, with common standards for all websites to identify political actors
* Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other "divisive political issues", and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods
* New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online
* More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last year
* A "common global framework" that means these laws are all standardised globally, rather than being substantially different from country to country
* Clear rules about who's responsible for protecting people's data when they move it from one service to another
He's open to GDPR, but only if the same standards work everywhere, and only if it shuts down everyone who doesn't have Facebook's capabilities to adhere and lobby against laws. Of course, the focus isn't on minimizing data, but rather making sure that data can flow cleanly between the monopolists.
I haven't seen a leader (of a company) or CEO being so obviously ingenuine, its worrisome. I am not sure if he really believes his own words at this point or if he realized the ship hit the iceberg and he is now frantically trying to safe it but the long, painful submersion is inevitable... and he knows it too.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-...
1. Nobody listens to anything Zuckerberg says.
2. Regulate social media platforms with >1M users. Require that they support federation through open standards with published, open-source reference implementations of all required software.
3. Enact EU-style privacy protections, with the explicit goal of destroying the tracking/surveillance industry, both on the net and off.
4. Require that service providers, regardless of size(1), keep hate speech off their platforms. This includes calls for the establishment of ethnostates and other speech that stops short of literal calls for genocide but that has an obvious, well-established trajectory in that direction.
(1) This may not be entirely practical, but it's a place to start. Also, the definition of "service provider" may be tricky to establish.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Now how can your proposed policy reconcile this?
The Internet is doing just fine. It's these paperclip/engagement maximizing websites and crack-apps that are a problem. And the founder of one of the largest ones of these, after having built surveillance profiles on everybody, right as he's tightening the noose of censorship, is telling us that ambient "new rules" are needed now? Give me a break - Zuckerberg chose profitability over credibility a long time ago.
How about this - any rules that Zuckerberg thinks are "needed" can be simply tried by Faceboot itself. Then we can see if they actually fix the mess he's had a large part in creating, whether a different approach may be necessary, or whether the resulting environment ends up too draconian. This approach is blatantly obvious, but he's taken to lobbying rather than doing. So the actual question is what exactly is he trying to sell us on?
I'd love to hear about the behind-the-scenes politicking that led to this mode of public outreach.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-glob...
I'm not sure that's such a sure thing.
One only hopes there is some free room for small companies from regulation, so this helpful regulation doesnt end as a moat for FB and others.
This is what has me worried. If regulations go as far as requiring content filtering, it would effectively cement Facebook/YouTube/etc as the dominant internet platforms, because small competitors can't afford to build those systems just to get started.
I assume Zuckerberg is primarily interested in this for exactly that goal.
You’re right as far as the origin goes though.
Probably "flak", then.
I just checked the article. Proposal #1 is primarily there to limit Facebook’s liability. That said, it is incompatible with the First Amendment. A government or government sponsored regulatory body deciding what is socially harmful speech is precisely what the First Amendment guards against. You would have to go with a corporate governed body on a corporate volunteer basis for it to be a meaningful proposal. Essentially, Facebook can ban le Nazis, but the US Government can’t.
2 is arguably a good proposal, but it isn’t a new proposal. To the extent that the People in Power give a damn about protecting the integrity of elections, it is to protect their own seats. When election integrity is inconvenient, it gets pushed down as a non-issue. The real goal here is to force Facebook’s ad competitors to play on the same playing field as Facebook has been pressured into to stave off further regulation. This is regulation to protect their business, and if it happens to also protect what is left of the integrity of our elections, elections that the Russians didn’t make a considerable dent in the last time around despite their best efforts, great. There are however more effective measures to defend the integrity of our elections, if we care to.
3 and 4 are both items that Facebook could roll out globally if they cared, so I’m inclined to believe that on Facebook’s political calculus, they have determined that it is politically expedient for them to come out for GDPR-style rules globally, even if they could already provide their global user base the same tools, rights and privileges afforded their European users by GDPR. Data portability is a technical challenge that is relatively easily resolved. The primary politics involved in preventing this are corporate, not governmental, and back when Web 2.0 was hot stuff, open standards were both expected and the default. Facebook played an enormous role in data portability backsliding on the web.
If Facebook wants to bring out data privacy protections and data portability, then I’ll believe it when I see it. There aren’t any laws preventing this now.
We had something like that already, too.
They are not worried about the elections ..
I've seen it used so casually and often that feel like that has become a meaningless phrase that amounts to "anything established in any way, anywhere, that I don't like and I wish to add a negative connotation to those things, people, or whatever I don't like".