Facebook: Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer | Hacker News Reader

Facebook: Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer

nytimes.com

37 pointstysone26 comments

What absolute mindless drivel! Mr. Clegg starts his opinion piece with a nirvana fallacy: breaking up Facebook won't solve all the world's problem, so why bother? More appeals are made throughout to Facebook's large user-base, as justification for continued market dominance. Yet Mr. Clegg claims anti-trust laws do not apply to Facebook those laws are to ensure "low-cost, high-quality products" - and since Facebook is free, they're immune from such rules. He proudly denigrates and defies the laws simply because they were "developed in the 1800s" which is an outright disgrace. I find his arguments wholly unedifying and severely lacking in substance and creativity. That pro-Facebook propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of publishing (in NYTimes of all places!) is frankly a disappointment.

>That pro-Facebook propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of publishing (in NYTimes of all places!) is frankly a disappointment.

Ehh this seems completely appropriate to me. NYT often publishes controversial OpEds (including from Putin in the past). This seems well in line with the mandate of established media outlets.

Moreso, given that it's a direct response to a previously-published op-ed arguing the opposite side: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hugh...

I agree that this response is drivel, but not affording FB the opportunity to respond in kind smacks of bias. If the NYT had really sacrificed all objectivity in their campaign against their main rival for eyeballs, they would simply have not published this and allowed their readership to assume that the anti-FB piece had gone unanswered. In this case the NYT is acting as a somewhat neutral stage for a public debate, a role which I think is important when it's very easy for both sides to talk past each other to different audiences.

Think for a minute on whether you'd have read this rebuttal if it were posted on FB, instead of in the same medium as the argument it is responding to. Would you, as a presumed Facebook detector, have even read it then? I probably wouldn't have.

I largely agree with the sentiment in this article, despite not really liking Facebook or using it too much. Does anyone here in HN favor a FB breakup, whatever that would look like, and why?

Facebook (and other SV mega corps) are monopolies, and they're growing too powerful, both in the market and in the government, for our society.

Regulation will be captured by Facebook to cement their monopoly position.

The only antidote to this is competition- and that means not only breaking facebook into separate companies, but also prohibiting them from buying new entrants into the market.

In which line of business does facebook have a monopoly?

In which line of business does google have a monopoly?

Social media. Search.

What are they monopolizing in social media? People? Are we going break up Facebook by telling Jim and Dan that they have to use two separate social media sites and can no longer communicate via the same social media site?

With Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram, Facebook has a near monopoly on messaging and social media in a solid number of countries (e.g., the Netherlands or Brazil). At some point such a product ceases to be a thing you buy or opt-in to out of a fair balanced choice (in the capitalist sense), and becomes something you are coerced to use because 'everyone' expects it. Simply put: you either agree to Facebook's terms of service, or, depending on your social circles, you become a digital hermit.

At that point regulation becomes a necessity to safeguard citizen's rights and freedoms. Such regulation includes more stringent checks on the permissiveness of corporate takeovers by the behemoth (again, this is nothing revolutionary, it is common in all capitalist democracies).

Start with breaking out Whatsapp and Instagram. Those mergers should never have been approved. Either that, or force the platform to be open to third party clients and introduce a fairly priced way to use those services without paying with your data.

I favor a breakup. Generally I have viewed Facebook and Instagram as honeypots which attract people who otherwise would just involve themselves in other equally damaging addictive activities. In that sense, they wouldn’t really affect the lives of those who choose not to use them.

The problem arises when those who are addicted to the services get to vote in elections. At that point, the damage escapes the honeypot and can influence others in meaningful ways.

Breaking them up helps solve this by preventing any one company from essentially taking over the world’s democracies by steering allowable debate and therefore votes. It also distributes the attack surface area for other countries who want to influence elections.

I absolutely believe undoing the Instagram merger and stopping Facebook from copying the features of other networks to kill them would help accomplish this objective.

I believe you are buying far too heavily into the narrative that FB swung the election. My guess is that you don't actually know very many people who voted for Trump. I do. Most of my family, in-laws, and a minority percentage of my friends did. While there a few are active on social media they would have voted the way they did regardless.

The only time I've been interested in what Nick Clegg had to say recently has been when the writers of HIGNFY were writing what was on the autocue.

Honest question: would we be having this argument if 2016 had gone the other way in the US, and if we had not seen the other illiberal trends we've seen in democracies in Europe? I'm getting the sense that a lot of the peal clutching here has to do with this idea that Facebook is "responsible" in some way for Trump, Brexit, AfD, extremists winning elections in Austria, Italy, Hungary etc. But which way does causation flow here? Was this inevitable, and it just manifests on the Facebook platform in the form of lots of memes or do people really think that, without Facebook, Trump and Brexit never would have happened?

If Facebook is regulated now, those politicians will be the ones writing the regulations.

I won’t pretend to speak for everyone, but my personal problems with Facebook are their wont to perform social experiments on unknowing users, hoarding of user data, especially from sites that aren’t Facebook; and overreach in multiple markets (to name just a few things).

I’m also bothered by their “free internet” programs in developing countries. I appreciate the sentiment behind it, but the way they only have a few sites that users can access rubs me the wrong way. I’m aware that Facebook is one of a handful of companies involved in that project, but Zuckerberg founded the project.

Whatever sway Facebook could have had on the 2016 election is at least tertiary to everything else, IMO. Especially since (from what I’ve read) it seems that that event was an example of outside actors using/gaming Facebook to push their agenda. That could have happened anywhere, including offline.

I take just as much issue with most other social networks, but Facebook happens to be the largest and most egregious offender of them all. I also think that Mark Zuckerberg seems to be incredibly disingenuous.

I will accept vaporizing it in one piece.

I think this sentence from Nick Clegg's own biography on the Liberal Democrat's website illustrates both the hollowness and absurdity of this piece:

>"He was also the Trade and Industry Spokesman for the Liberal group of MEPs and piloted a radical new law breaking up telecoms monopolies." [1]

[1] https://www.libdems.org.uk/nick_clegg

Written by Nick Cleg, who now works for Facebook - the Lib Dem party leader in the UK who destroyed the party for ten years by making a deal with the conservative government to enable them to implement an unpopular adgenda while acheiving nothing he promised to his voters.

For anyone from the UK, using Nick Clegg as a representative to help improve FBs reputation seems laughable.

The united states is the only nation in the world that attacks and breaks up its own private sector to make itself less competitive in global markets. This is why people make fun of americans.

With elections around the corner. And everyone dependent on FB I am finding it hard to believe anything is going to happen until after 2020.

Who expects a politician, to take a stand on this when their views, clicks and likes might take a hit? I fully expect Trump to milk the threat of breakup to keep his views, clicks and likes growing.

these are not the droids your looking for

Individual personal responsibility is a problem, lack thereof. Facebook isn't the problem - the individual is - as a collective. They feed the beast.

The idea, that Facebook has to be split up, is imho delusion of perceived grandeur, and in that respect is not unlike what fb managers seemingly think of the company.

An export button in profile will do.

On the fence.

I've been doing talks on ethics and dark patterns. And although most of my research for the talks are things I knew about as they happened, it feels different when you see it all together. Just scroll through the Wikipedia on FB criticism for a sense of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook (as an aside, criticism of Google ain't too shabby either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_google )

It's hard to look at this as something other than systematic, intentional trampling of decency. If no laws were broken, then we are missing some important laws.

I wouldn't cry any tears if they were broken up, that's for sure. But the argument? Here it is:

Facebook buys up any up and comer before they become a challenge. And if they don't sell like Instagram did and Snapchat didn't, they will crush them by copying them until the newcomer is completely crippled.

How's Snap doing by the way?

Apologies, I replied to the wrong post. Someone asked for the reasoning behind the breakup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com