Shut down social media platforms, ex-Facebook adviser urges
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1. I had the opportunity to hear him speak at Stanford in April and I asked him straight up why he isn't calling for Zuckerberg to resign given all his critiques of the company's policies and leadership. His answer was, "he's my friend". I don't know, that seems like a weak response from someone making regular headlines while building a personal brand as an anti-Facebook crusader.
2. He also still holds Facebook shares, which he acknowledges makes him "not the best messenger" [direct quote] for his FB morality play. His justification for holding on to his shares is [paraphrasing his words] "if I sold my shares I would be profiting immensely from Facebook while I criticize them, which would be weird." This is just such a bad argument. If he was really concerned about Facebook money being "dirty" he could simply donate it to any number of charities. Problem solved.
My problem is that he seems to be profiting from playing both sides of the Facebook game simultaneously. Just pick a side already.
Which is fundamentally why he gave the "he's my friend" answer. He disagrees with what's being done, but he himself won't do anything to negate what his friend is doing.
I believe the parent commenter is speaking to our “higher nature” for lack of a better term. It’s a bit cynical to assume that this doesn’t exist, and possibly a tad inappropriate to assume that the commenter shares your cynicism and is coming from the same place.
Your ascribed motivations to my outlook on this matter are not appreciated.
It is plenty sufficient to look at his actions and statement together. He plainly told you in no uncertain terms that he's not going to do anything about it, when asked about what he is doing, because he is Mark's friend. This is pretty standard human behavior, and it's why we have a whole host of laws and ethics regulations attempting to correct for it in both private and public organizations. That's not cynical, that's looking at known human behaviors and being practical about it.
Try to avoid shaming platitudes in what otherwise was a pretty vanilla rehash on what the guy directly said.
> You would love it because you know it in practice doesn't do anything.
Seems fair to assume that this is in response to the parent comment "I would love if my harshest critic was my friend."
> This is pretty standard human behavior, and it's why we have a whole host of laws and ethics regulations attempting to correct for it in both private and public organizations. That's not cynical, that's looking at known human behaviors and being practical about it.
Close down FB. Why? Because they provide a platform to all ideas, noble, vile and in between. But we want to democratize the internet and give people a voice (but only those voices we at the moment approve of). But big media wants preeminence and don’t want to be usurped by diffused news sources. Who’ll establish lockstep narratives?
FB should become a platform. I don’t see it working as an impartial moderator of what’s right. I don’t see it working ala Wikipedia federation. The only way I see it working is devolving moderation to groups similar to Reddit or Flickr. Also have basic enforcement of local national laws (depending where the group is from) so if you’re from Russia but venture into s US group, don’t complain and vice versa.
Because they violated a lawful summons. Sovereign Parliaments in multiple countries issued summons to Facebook for Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Multiple times, they pulled a bait and switch. In the United States, this would be like blowing off Congress and then one’s contempt hearing in court.
> FB should become a platform
What does this mean? And what does a democracy do when Facebook refuses to show up to provide critical information for that discussion?
Blocking Facebook is extreme. Large financial penalties, and possibly criminal proceedings against Zuckerberg and Sanders for wilfully evading summons, are more apt. But the need for something to be done in reaction to such brazen lawlessness seems necessary. And keeping all lawful options on the table when considering a response is prudent.
If nothing more is done than shut them down then yes, the market's incentives wouldn't change. If those incentives are changed, however, lasting effects can be produced.
If Facebook were pursued under antitrust laws, as some are suggesting [1], it would set an precedent. Similarly, laws like GDPR (one among many options) could change the incentives around hoarding data and using it to target users with exploitative ads.
There are solutions. But they require debate. That requires Facebook's senior leadership show up to summons.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust...
Yes, another filter bubble might replace it, but certainly not overnight. Society and policymakers would then have some breathing room to decide how best these tools should be regulated, so the impact of misinformation campaigns can be minimized.
To be sure, targeted advertising definitely supports filter bubbles, but I contend that even without any targeted advertising, if you give people a choice about what information they consume and a sufficient variety of sources from which to choose, they will end up effectively creating their own filter bubbles.
It is, however, what advertisers want. Because "enragement", "stickiness", etc.
It is merely what consumers fall for.
Not that I'm saying it's right, but that's the way it is.
But you could make exactly the same point about Facebook (and Youtube, and Twitter). They want the protection from liability that comes from being a common carrier, like the phone company or the post office, but they also want to take positions on current affairs, like a newspaper or a TV station. They must be made to choose which one they want to be.
The CA stuff was overblown and had very little impact. The bad thing behind the CA fiasco was sharing people's data the way they did (though that was neither new, nor hidden, that’s their stock in trade).
There is a huge difference between "freedom of speech" and "freedom to others attention". The core rot in facebook is not that it allows people to say whatever they want, its that facebook promotes and amplifies what people says algorithmically in ways that are harmful. There are plenty of restrictions on "free speech" as implemented in the US, adding restrictions around algorithmic ranking based on engagement metrics should be an easy pill for the legal system to swallow.
No, because they're monetarily incentivized to be harmful to individuals and societies.
We can democratize discourse without having facebook in the loop who has the exact same incentives that big media has to monetize and curate what we say. Big Tech is no more democratic or acting in our interest than big media just because they've got a juicero machine in the office and a ping pong table in the lobby.
The thing about the anti-Facebook sentiment is it seems split between those angry about the things Facebook hasn't stopped and those angry about the things Facebook has stopped. I don't think the later group understands that approach strong enough to shut down Facebook would quickly set it's sights on shutting down or controlling other broad platforms.
Facebook, despite its many flaws, is genuinely useful to many people, and governments can't simply shut down useful things, no matter how much they'd like to control communications. So governments even in semi-democratic countries have to carefully construct their lies, before they try to shut down a widely used site.
> [Social medial platforms] are the products of an American business culture with few rules, where misbehaviour seldom results in punishment. Smart people take what they can get and tell themselves they earned it. They feel entitled. Consequences are someone else's problem.
At the end of the day, though, the most effective path to reform would be to shut down the platforms at least temporarily. ... Any country can go first. The platforms have left you no choice. The time has come to call their bluff.
Companies with responsible business models will emerge overnight to fill the void.
Facebook itself can go die in a dumpster fire as far as I care but it should be a natrual death - not one pushed by demagogues and old media interests transparently interested in forcing control to consolidate their power.
Can't wait to see his standard applied to, say, a newspaper, which also are products of that American business culture. Somehow, I get the feeling it would go down a lot differently.
I'm still not sure what is meant by 'shut down' here - are we actually talking forbidding ISPs to route traffic to them? DNS blacklisting? Or just something like preventing them from having any physical presence (data centers, offices) until they start complying with summons? Because in the former case, I can't see how he possibly can think that's viable.
Fining an automotive company that makes unsafe cars is not attacking personal freedom of movement. Fining hospitals that are unsanitary is not attacking your reproductive rights. Shutting down a bank that commits fraud is not an attack on free enterprise.
Facebook isn't a pillar of democracy; it's a for-profit business that inserts itself as a middle-man in human communication.
I don't actually like Facebook. I don't work for them. I don't use them. But if a government is going to ban something they should have a compelling reason. It's not a freedom of speech thing it's a freedom to do what you want with your time and money as an adult thing. I don't care if the thing is drugs, porn or Facebook, it shouldn't be banned. Banning Facebook because it's inconvenient to the establishment is the path towards becoming China. That was my point. We will wake up very soon to a world of banned sites and vpns all in the name of our protection.
That would be perfectly acceptable if there were more than one service provider of these services, but in the case of MO - there isn't. There's a single Planned Parenthood clinic for the entire state, and they are being forced to shut down.
There used to be plenty, but thanks to other onerous laws their legislature put in place with the aim of making abortion defacto unavailable, those other clinics all had to shut down, leaving the single provider.
And now it looks like they'll have none to provide those services, which was their goal all along. How anyone can argue that isn't an attack on reproductive rights is beyond me.
If it were such that it was simple for another organization to come in and do what PP did, while abiding by all of those extra laws, it would have happened already.
The fact that it didn't, and the fact that PP couldn't do it themselves (it hasn't helped that their federal funding has been basically slashed to nothing for grandstanding reasons that were false to begin with), shows that those laws are working as intended, to make those seeking such care second-class citizens. It essentially makes it impossible for women and men to get proper low-cost reproductive health care in the state.
But they can still say "Well, it's all constitutional, so too bad!" as they thumb their nose to everyone else, especially their opposition.
Their citizens voted for this, though - I hope they enjoy their face without a nose; it's only going to get worse from here on out for them. All on the backs of disadvantaged women, of course.
Certainly it's convenient for Facebook. Does that prove it's not true?
Fining an automotive company that makes unsafe cars is not attacking personal freedom of movement.
Uh, you know publishers, even crappy publishers, have been protected historically in a different fashion than other sorts of industries. Historically, the concept of freedom of expression has generally been for the protection of what some people might consider "unsafe books". The production of an unsafe automobile isn't considered an example of "protected expression" but the production of an essay, book or other "container idea" is considered protected (with specific exceptions, of course).
Facebook isn't a pillar of democracy.
Free speech is seldom about protecting the expression ideas everyone likes - those usually don't need protection. Free speech is about prevent the state, in particular, from suppressing "bad", "wrong", "unpatriotic" etc ideas, because those are the targets of suppression.
And the pillars of democracy are those lawyers and judges that defend free speech, not the completely random assortment of people, some terrible, who practice freedom speech.
...it's a for-profit business that inserts itself as a middle-man in human communication.
Those publishers who've been sued and defend their right to publish various banned in the US (such as those of Henry Miller) were also for-profit businesses inserting themselves as middle-men in human communication. If we're living in a capitalist society, expression is going to require middle-men of one sort or another so suppressing these is going to be effectively suppressing free expression.
Only because of this naive bare-minimum protocol stack of HTTP/DNS, which discourages users from owning their own identities, pushing all traffic to centralizing servers. A decade old phone has enough computing power to serve the majority of users' personal communication needs.
Ultimately centralized "social media" can only turn out to be yet another populist dumpster fire, ending up in the same state as the nightly newses, nytimes, etc - overwhelming sources of straight up government propaganda . The revolution will not be televised, and this still applies even when the TV has become a javascript browser.
This entire issue is essentially just debating between supporting a rock or a hard place, wherein actually they both suck. We're in this position purely because we the people allowed the surveillance companies way too much trust, and the only way out is to move past them.
China is not a good example because China both had many reasons for blocking Facebook and already has it blocked, so it's not doing anything new.
Despite complaints, FB left up numerous pages run by the Myanmar military that spread hate and disinformation against the Rohingya people, of whom thousands have been murdered, and hundreds of thousands have been made refugees. Facebook "eventually" deleted these pages, but well after the damage was done.[0]
[0] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar-geno...
Yes! Now let's get all the other media companies onboard!
The Global Policy Director of FB, with the head of Canadian public policy in tow, actually made this statement. It insults the intelligence of everyone at that hearing.
At this point, one can only assume that these absurd excuses are fully intentional. They are counting on Western governments's fears of being branded "censors" being too great for them to take any action besides "well, we tried".
That's not to say it wouldn't suck for FB, but FB doesn't have to have an active presence in every country to still serve those countries. All things considered, FB itself would have a hard time preventing users from unserved countries from using it's platform.
I would however be keen to leave the messaging platforms open to avoid disrupting communication too severely. I also see some potential unintended consequences.
Perhaps Congress could vote to stop Facebook if they choose, especially since it involves national security, terrorism, acts of war, international threats, etc.
I don't think this counts as a new power. Remember Lavabit[1]? The executive branch forced Lavabit to provide a backdoor to read their customers' email, or pay a $5,000/day fine. They threatened to imprison Levison if he told anyone it was happening, even his lawyer.
Keep in mind, we're talking about the same government that declares concentration camps legal [2], assassinates American citizens without due process [3], wiretaps nearly the entire free world [4], can shut down the entire Internet [5], and recklessly declares a state of national emergency as part of a temper tantrum [6].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_kill_switch 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emergency_Concerning_...
Parliaments are sovereign. Facebook violated a lawful summons by pulling a bait and switch:
“McNamee's comments came as an international committee of MPs in Ottawa renewed their summons for Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg and company COO Sheryl Sandberg to appear and give evidence before them. Both ignored the first summons, choosing to send company representatives in their place.”
By your definition numerous media outlets could just be shut down entirely. Is that really a good thing? Do we trust the government to decide which information is and is not acceptible for us to consume? I certainly don't.
I personally don't think they should be shut down. (Fines and potentially criminal proceedings, under contempt laws, for Zuckerberg and Sandberg would make more sense.) But they should face some consequences. Keeping all lawful options on the table is a good negotiating strategy.
With respect to metastasisation, that is a concern. But fortunately there isn't a rich history of lawful companies blowing off multiple countries' Parliaments. The one-offness of the situation isn't in countries reacting, but in how complacent they've been with it all.
Loads of business around the world no longer maintain their own websites. The only place you will find their contact information is on their Facebook pages. Sometimes those businesses have added their contact info to Google Maps, or enthusiasts have added it to OpenStreetMap, but so often you have no way of communicating with an establishment without at least visiting its Facebook page.
The same can be said of many bands now. Facebook is how they get the world out about new releases and concert dates. Other sources can lag behind by weeks.
Dont get me wrong, FB is not much better, but at least it's much more open and direct then traditional media.
Russia had very little to do with DJTJ, EVERY country tries to influence election in other countries.
Whenever there is an election anywhere in the world. Traditional media in the US fill the airwave with opinion making - both domestically and in foreign press.
This is why so many countries are skeptical of allowing US media to operate freely within their borders.
Both FB and traditional media have big agendas, but FB's agenda of selling ads is much more benign then whatever the state department wants.
I disagree with this, actually. Facebook's agenda of selling ads is the very thing that makes them toxic -- not because selling ads is a terrible thing, but because Facebook is so insistent on using people's personal data to do it.
Even if you're right, and the State is way more evil than Facebook, how does that affect the fact that Facebook is still terrible?
If I were to say "Ted Bundy isn't that bad...look at how many people Stalin killed!", you would rightly say that that's a dumb argument. Similarly, just because you can find Entity A acting worse than Entity B, that doesn't imply that Entity B is good, and it doesn't imply that we shouldn't do something about Entity B, just because we can find something worse.