Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break It Up | Hacker News Reader

Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break It Up

nytimes.com

202 pointstysone93 comments

The double standard that most of the press shows with regards to Facebook and Google is inexplicable to me. My personal (probably biased) perception is that Google is far more of a monopoly, yet the press seems to be mostly OK with it (I mostly tend to read US-based news sites when it comes to this topic). I am not based in the USA so maybe there is something that I'm missing, could anyone explain? Is it because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Or is it because Facebook and Google are perceived as having different political affiliations?

Edit: not only the press, but also organisations like e.g. the Mozilla Foundation (where is the official Google Container that people have been asking for)?

Its mostly the sheer influence that FB has. Google has a ton of sway itself, but outside of Youtube, most people mostly spend their time on the internet with Facebook. As seen with Cambridge Analytica, a lot of info on people's beliefs and party affiliations is known by facebook, so FB can actually influence a persons votes. Google has that power as well, but to a much lesser extent.

> outside of Youtube, most people mostly spend their time on the internet with Facebook

I suppose this (the fact that people are using Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp more than the various Google products) is atypical in my "personal bubble" (my family, close friends etc.), so that's probably where my perception is skewed.

You are ignoring google news, where they effectively run their own editing by selecting the articles at the top, and also what comes back as the first page of result when you type “joe biden thinks” for instance. I’d say they have at least the same political influence.

Particularly given that never mind what their reported engagement numbers say, I only know people who stopped using facebook around me. I just don’t believe their numbers.

Google News is completely irrelevant, comparing to Facebook. Particularly for news.

Google News is not a proper competitor to FB though. No one I know uses it at all

Doesn't seem to be the opinion of news websites when they were cut out by google

A lot of Americans blame Facebook for Trump's election.

The same thing happened to Wikileaks. Everything that might remotely have helped Trump getting elected is now subject to witch hunt.

Yes I thought that may be the case, I also thought that the links between Thiel and Fb may contribute to reinforce this perception in the eyes of many progressives. When it comes to American politics I'm just an external observer so I may be wrong though.

The Google guys are (self proclaimed) world improver types and therefore liked and celebrated by statists (which includes a lot of techies - “progress through government-approved AI”).

The FB guys are primarily business people, which in the eyes of the former group is a big minus.

This guy is against FB because he knows more about it than about Google so it makes more sense to fight them than Google or Tencent. I believe other factors (which I mentioned above) are also in play.

I think Google is as dangerous as Facebook, Amazon, etc... All of these companies are in the business of capital centralization. They make a profit by restricting options for consumers; they funnel all the consumers to the highest bidders. They increase the winner-takes-all factor. They're turning our capitalist free market economy into a pseudo-communist economy whereby consumers have fewer and fewer options within any given product category (they do this by driving producers out of business by saturating media channels with their chosen winner for each category); it's just like in the USSR when they were producing only one kind of each item and ran propaganda campaigns to control consumer behaviour; that's where it's heading. They are profiting from the erosion of the free market, democracy and capitalism.

I think it's a matter of PR/optics, no matter how bad a situation may be Google are able to stay on message without coming across as untrustworthy idiots, whereas Facebook seem to only know how to make a bad PR situation worse. One recent example of this was how both companies handled the Apple enterprise certificate fiasco. Both companies admitted to using them for sketchy means (and both were knowingly taking the piss here) yet Facebook seemed to suggest that there was no issue with what they were doing whereas Google basically admitted fault right off the bat.

Many smart people have looked into that, danah boyd being the most insightful.

It has little to do with the information or sway that companies actual have, or how much they mishandle it — no one cares about Experian or even darker data traders, few people worry about Amazon’s ability to dump and rake up prices, etc. Facebook resonates, no matter how faintly the actual issue relates to something the company does.

What makes Facebook unique is that you interact with other people in your close environment: family, school, often colleagues, all together. Twitter doesn’t have that: you are not following everyone you know, just people you share an interest with.

That is a recipe for constant context collapse. When I was working there, my cousin told me that she hated Facebook. I asked why: there were some obvious issues with several boys she was interested in, who noticed each other and acted like jealous teenagers. She glazed over that but somehow chose to point out that her mother wasn’t the best at staying away from the situation. Nothing new, but with Facebook, my cousin had lost her ability to have the mating dances away from her family. Another thing she hated was that I was posting status updates in English. I don’t talk to her in English, so she felt this was me acting “fake”. It’s not our native language but I have legitimate reasons to be legible by most of my friends.

Having a single context is problematic for many reasons: hegemony I think is the best angle — there’s an acceptable public face and not everyone likes it but employees over-index people who are comfortable. I see this as the main reason Groups and large Messenger chats have proven so successful: you can reclaim context.

Facebook is not the worst data-handler or has the most incriminating details, but it is the place where you have to deal with your racist uncle, so stories about Trump being elected there add up. It’s the place where your aunt discovered her son’s “roommate” was half-naked and covered in glitter during Pride, so arguments about “sharing private data, including your sexual orientation” resonate.

I’ve made that argument in HN before, I know many responders will argue “There are _really bad! What about _that_ scandal?” Yes, Facebook has made bad choices, reacted poorly to some, and yes they are patterns of dominant position and abuses thereof (which I argued in my PhD 15 years ago). Hell, I’ve made bad errors when I was working there. It’s a large platform so they are close to a lot of unsavoury things.

But the attention, the likelihood of an article being clicked on depending it the title reads “Tech companies, including Google, have exposed…” vs. “Tech companies, including Facebook have exposed…” isn’t commensurate to the reality of their bad decisions. I think everyone should be as outraged by all similar scandal, not less — but I think we should first try to understand why certain stories resonate and not others, and I strongly believe it’s proximity and relatability.

Thank you, your points about social context are spot on in my opinion, I have those problems in my own circle of friends and acquaintances as well. I feel that those mostly apply to Facebook itself and not to the other services that Facebook owns, like Whatsapp and Instagram. It is interesting that much of the negative press coverage also ignores IG and Whatsapp and instead focuses on "Facebook proper" so you may be onto something. I remember Danah Boyd from reading a paper about the social differences between Fb and Myspace users, that must have been a few years ago :-)

There’s a lot of criticism on WhatsApp and Instagram. The most interesting are:

- WhatsApp is used by conservative political parties (notably Mohdi in India) to promote non-representative, outrageous stories. Those spread in group chats, away from fact-checking. Reducing group maximum size should help slow down and allow media to counter-message before the message spreads too far.

- Instagram is promoting a superficial, edited, material lifestyle. There’s good pushback from the company like reducing the visibility of Likes.

I don’t think that either of those examples contradicts the general trend of issues with context collapse.

danah boyd on MySpace vs. Facebook users, there were two main ones in 2007 [1] and 2010 [2].

[1] http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html [2] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/07/21/myspace...

Thank you, yes I had heard both of those lines of criticism, I think that the solution of limiting group size on Whatsapp is going to be effective but I'm more sceptical about hiding the number of likes on IG.

Thanks for the Danah Boyd links, the one I remember is the one from 2007, it's still an interesting read in my opinion!

For Mozilla, that's likely a conflict on interest between their search deal (which AFAIK is their primary source of income) with Google and the hardline privacy/FOSS direction they're moving toward.

I'm shocked no one pointed out the why of news media though. It's not about statists liking Google and not FB, and it's not about headline clicks (well, it is but there's more to it than just company name in headline = more clicks).

Eighteen months ago[1] Facebook effectively depublished news/journalism sites. Almost overnight, major news media outlets started publishing anti-Facebook articles and it hasn't stopped since.

I'm not going to cry about disproportionate media attention unless this yellow journalism results in Facebook getting trust-busted but not the other monopolists.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/11/facebook-...

Yes I was wondering if it could be connected to the Facebook News Feed changes, and it is also worth pointing out that, conversely, many news sources use Google News actively and at least part of their traffic depends on it.

PS regarding Mozilla: as you correctly noted, their focus on privacy and their deal with Google are at odds. I guess the deal is good in terms of money but it doesn't look good in terms of PR and could be damaging in the long term, I think they should do something about it.

Huh. Wow. I remember being at a presentation Chris gave in Dubuque Iowa of all places back in 2007 or 2008 as he explained how the Obama campaign was using Facebook. It was one of the first high profile campaigns to do so. I thought it was brilliant back then for a presidential candidate to utilize social media... What an amazing idea! But now I hate everything. (Was it always this bad and we just didn't see it before?)

everything is ripe for abuse, the problem is we don't have a regulatory framework or the tools to reign in the abuse on Facebook and other digital media.

The question you need to ask yourself is "what kind of society do I want to live in" then you can answer what you want to be possible and not.

Campaigns effectively have no choice but to try to use Facebook better than their rivals, so it's something to be celebrated in isolation from the problems of the underlying platform.

Facebook was still 4 years from IPOing in 2008, so it was definitely a different time. The vast capital Zuckerberg personally has at his disposal thanks to owning the majority of voting shares is unprecedented. Zuckerberg can have Facebook easily buy any up and coming social networks at prices the startups can't refuse (eg Instagram). This behavior is good for Zuckerberg, good for Facebook, good for venture capitalists, and even good for the securities markets at large. This behavior is not good for consumers or competition which is exactly the point of antitrust actions.

> Was it always this bad and we just didn't see it before?

I definitely remember reading some pretty-accurate-in-hindsight scare pieces about Facebook's only way to monetize around the time they IPO'd.

That said, it's almost impossible to separate signal from noise with the earliest folks to cry wolf, and it doesn't help that some of them (looking at you, Peter Schiff) love to trot out their sky-was-falling predictions after the fact as proof of their clairvoyance.

While they all nailed it with Facebook, I don't remember a single piece about Google's similarities as they were rolling out Gmail/GChat/GDocs/GDrive for "free".

> Was it always this bad and we just didn't see it before?

After about two hours of using FB in 2007 I had this crazy feeling that someone having access to all those people's photos and activities won't necessary end well; left and never looked back.

> It was one of the first high profile campaigns to do so.

This isn't true. He might have claimed it I suppose, but that's not true.

To the extent they did anything unique on social media, it was in using their own social media network, MyBO (which was originally developed by Blue State Digital in partnership with the DNC, but the Obama campaign had their own version that Chris also played a role in tweaking for the campaign).

At the time of the 2004 election, Facebook was open to students at some US universities. So to the extent the Obama campaign used Facebook at all it was the first national campaign to do so.

Every major campaign was using Facebook in 2008. To give the Obama campaign credit for being the "first" when it was used THROUGHOUT that primary by both parties at the national level and also at the state/local level makes no sense.

That said, Facebook organizing in 2008 looked nothing like what it looks like today. It looked far more like what we were doing in the MySpace days as far as political organizing online (MySpace got about the same amount of traffic back then). I personally think their work with MyBO is more noteworthy and distinguished from what other campaigns were doing, even if it wasn't built by them.

"This bad" is a value judgment, and so the answer to the question necessarily depends on what your values are compared with the values employed in using the technology.

This applies to broadcast media as much as it does to social media. TV and Radio can be used to educate, or for thought-provoking news & commentary, or high art, or for pandering entertainment, advertising, or even propaganda.

I think social media was in a different place 10 years ago, essentially in its inception and somewhat less directed but essentially driven by the values of its early adopters and best ostensibly vision of its creators and boosters. I also see the values Obama was campaigning with as better than a lot of the values behind some social media now, but that's my own value judgment.

And as other interests came to understand it as medium that could amplify their message, and came into understanding of specific dynamics, and social media as an enterprise has therefore become legible to and influenceable by business and political interests, it's definitely suffered.

The problem with any new media is that wealthy interests quickly figure out how to use it to achieve their ends by manipulating public opinion. Happened with radio. With TV. Now with social media. It's a problem.

Back in 2008, Facebook didn't have nearly the algorithmic curation it has now. For instance, you were much more likely to see posts from friends sharing content you disagreed with. Now, Facebook's algorithms have gotten so good at their primary business objective (increasing engagement with the platform) that you're guaranteed to see almost entirely content that you agree with.

If I share a picture of my kids, Facebook makes sure all of my relatives will see it. If I share a political post, it will only be seen by my friends that agree with me.

Ad targeting was also much less sophisticated back then (did Facebook even have ads yet at that point?).

Really? The only time I see differing political opinions from people I know is on Facebook, because it’s typically weak ties rather than close ties who sit on the other side of the aisle, and Facebook is the main way I keep up with weak ties.

The notion that a cofounder has some secret sauce that gives the government the authority and power to do something like this is a great way to drive clicks. But it ain't gonna break up facebook.

he definitely has context about how things work and help craft a better proposal.

He left in 2007 ... the company has changed a lot since then.

not on its own, but it could help move along anti-trust or whatever litigation: recall that an intel VP was brought in to testify against microsoft in that ordeal, so imagine what effects an insider with (presumably) evidence and an agenda could have.

Seems to me it weakens any agrument as Hughes is not a neutral objective opinion.

Certainly the DoJ can make a solid case sans some outlier.

Well, also recall that nothing happened to M$.

There was no breakup because the courts laughed the government out of the room. In the end, they ended up having to negotiate with M$, and there was an agreement to allow other browsers on M$ operating systems. Basically it was laughable. But the law is the law.

And that would be why we need to change the law. Going after digital companies using laws set up to regulate non-digital companies, is just the height of foolishness. You would think the M$ experience would have taught people? But I guess not.

In your opinion, what would have been the positive effects of breaking up Microsoft? Other browsers would have beaten explorer more quickly than they did? Something else?

The government doesn't need the authority and power, it already has it, Facebook could be turned off tomorrow if the government decided it wanted to do so. What it needs is a plan and motivation to do so.

He can provide both in spades.

If Facebook was turned off tomorrow, they'd be at the steps of the Supreme Court faster than you can say "due process." The FTC could barely enforce baseline info security reqs without the Third Circuit knocking that agency on its backside. With a pro-business SCOTUS and the type of leverage this company has on every Senate and House race in America, I really don't think you're using the word "power" the same way I was if you believe the government has enough to make this happen.

For what it's worth

- The supreme court is part of the government

- The government is empowered to change the constitution, including disbanding the supreme court.

- The vast majority of the time Congress passing an explicit law instead of an agency making some rules would satisfy the existing supreme court with the existing constitution anyways.

> gives the government the authority

Not authority, the article just claims that Hughes is giving them information to use when building their case.

Wikipedia tells me Hughes hasn't been involved with Facebook for 12 years, since he left in 2007. A lot can change in that period. It's hard to imagine Hughes providing a "smoking gun".

Note: As I understand it, anti-trust litigation isn't based on stuff a company did long ago to get into a commanding position, it is based a company having and abusing a commanding position. What does someone who left long ago know about this?

>A lot can change in that period. It's hard to imagine Hughes providing a "smoking gun".

I see it the opposite way: any forensic examination of the business lines in an IT-only operation can benefit greatly from institutional memory such as Hughes can provide and few if any other cooperators could. The "why" of business processes are often quickly obscured/lost by successive operations and if the company is a candidate for breakup, old decisions often speak to demarcations where business lines can be reasonably separated. Of course, the company's counsel would never admit to any reasonable theory of separation, so old execs are kind of essential to the examination.

>Note: As I understand it, anti-trust litigation isn't based on stuff a company did long ago, it is based a company having and abusing a commanding position. What does someone who left long ago know about this?

They know the why and all of the how and the when, which allows anyone interested in breaking up the company to put their fingers on the hidden fault lines buried by successive layers of years of "new normal" at the company.

I read this in a similar way as the Mueller hearing: there wasn’t anything added by having a senior civil servant be read his own findings in open court, and confirm that he did write that. Little of what Hugues can say, which is essentially his latest OpEds, gains being formally processed by the administration.

But it gives press attention to an interesting effort, and Hugues can repeat what I think is his key point: Mark is a genuinely well-intended, value-driven and well-informed person; however, that doesn’t matter, monopolies are dangerous, even in the hands of Mr Rogers. And Hugues understand social media better than most regulators and can recommend better principles, like inter-operability, and give context, notably on abuse control.

After Chris Hughes destroyed The New Republic [1][2], it would be hard to believe he has no strong financial interest in taking apart Facebook.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8705410

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8743425

What is the financial interest he has in breaking facebook? How's it related to his failure at The New Republic?

Some of Facebook's primary competitors are traditional news media outlets. Chris Hughes still owns Facebook stock (I think). If Hughes can take down a newspaper, that's one less competitor for Facebook, and his stock goes up.

http://whoownsfacebook.com/#Hughes

I honestly initially read the "it" in this headline to imply "the Government", figuring Facebook finally had enough and was going to try and break down its regulators.

This is a valid way to read 'it'. The title is written poorly; I've found that, in order to reduce ambiguity in referential language, 'it' should generally refer to the most recent noun(or a most recent noun with 'the' in front). Otherwise the legibility of the writing is lost, such as this title. Admittedly, there's not much way to keep this from reading awkwardly.

I've never heard of that rule. Ambiguous pronouns like this are pretty common in English. In fact, figuring out what the ambiguous pronoun refers to is the basis for the Winograd Schema, a challenge for AI especially relevant to translation tasks [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_schema

It's not a rule, sorry. Let me change my language to be less authoritative.

Totally read it the same way. Was let down a bit

Yupp. Genders would help here.

In languages where the gender for government and the one for company differs it would be possible to by succinct and clear.

In Russian e.g., the "it" could be neuter if refering to breaking up the government, or feminine for the company. In Russian it's common to insert the word like company which has an obvious gender, so they would write: a founder of company (fem.) "Facebook", which allows you to then refer to it later using a feminine pronoun. Though if transliterated Facebook would be masculine. (его vs её, though this wouldn't work transliterated since the masculine and neuter accusative share the same pronouns)

French resists this as they don't normally give words like Facebook a gender.

For German it could work. Though I don't often say "the Facebook", if I considered it neuter (the ending being book -> das Buch), I would think my thought process would be obvious to the listener, and therefore you could make this succinct and clear in German too. (sie vs es)

For English I'd include a noun describing what I'm refering to, so: Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break Up the Company (though maybe slightly stilted?)

When I read about these things I always suspect there are some hidden personal motivations behind the scenes that go beyond an altruistic duty to society. Probably some personal vendetta against Zuck or desire to have your legacy disassociated from helping create Facebook.

Not that it makes the publicly stated motivatins or arguments invalid

What's interesting here I think is how often these other founders of FB or companies FB gobbled up react when they get in contact with Mark Zuckerberg..

It seems like an awful lot of people he was deeply involved with have turned against him and FB.

This all seems like an elaborate effort by Hughes to get back into the good graces of the blue-check-mark crowd after they soured on him for what he did to The New Republic.

Who are the “blue-check-mark crowd”?

Twitter users with blue check marks. The way the commenter used it probably is meant to imply "the corporate media journalists"

Perhaps the big difference between building these DOJ antitrust cases and the ones against IBM and later Microsoft is that today more members of the public can see how a company like Facebook can be harmful in conducting its "business".

There are many more people using computers and computer networks today and these companies play a more visible and arguably more significant role in more people's lives. It is plausible that more people are likely to care, even those with no stake in the industry or the litigation.

Chris Hughes left Facebook in 2007, but I think his inputs could possibly be valuable. While a lot has changed on the product front in 12 years, the most important question is whether the thinking at the top has changed much in this period. Have Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg demonstrated that their thinking on many matters, including privacy, has changed drastically? I would argue that it hasn't changed much.

It's in the thinking patterns, the decision making patterns (what they would trade off for what) and general strategies where Chris Hughes could possibly provide deeper insight. That in turn would help connect some dots (or where to look for dots) and also find patterns where none seem to exist with raw data available right now. Such repeated patterns would be quite useful and forceful in building a case that these people and the company cannot be trusted to be a good steward by themselves and that external actions are required.

It would be great if they could somehow get the WhatsApp and Instagram founders to provide more information, though I'd presume that these would be prohibited, to some extent, by their contracts and exit agreements.

Facebook cannot be broken up. It needs to be torn down (with a few weeks of notice so users can download their own data).

At this point, arrangements for them to retrieve content from the myriad parties it's already been "shared" with should suffice.

If I remember correctly, this is the same guy that wanted to get involved in politics. Great way to get some recognition, while accomplishing very little.

I'm sure he also diversified his stock before his campaign.

Since when is government good at anything?

It's simple: if you don't like Facebook, don't use it's products. It's not the proper role of government to interfere in private business.

Since when is the government good at anything, says somebody using government created computer network.

You seem to imagine that peoples' concerns about Facebook are in the context of a bilateral relationship.

I'm not a customer of Facebook. The customers of Facebook do not feel any obligation towards me, and I would like the government to force them to operate under more constraints.

Government breaking up AT&T had pretty good outcomes, IMHO.

Really? You think AT&T and Verizon are the pinnacle of good corporate behavior?

In the ensuing 35+ years, a new anticompetitive situation has developed around different technology and different shared resources. Should we judge the solution to a problem by whether more problems of the same class arise independently for future generations?

Mods: it's "Hughes", not "Hughers".

Fixed now. Thanks!

Chris Hughes sure has turned being randomly assigned as Zuck's room mate into a lucrative career.

As if Zuck wasn't a right-place-right-time lottery winner.

Using hot button social issues for personal gain, what a guy!

> Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break It Up

I was really hoping "it" meant "the government".

My thoughts on Chris and his big idea, below. At least he's giving them names. But how many lies and utopian promises did he spin to the press during his time there?

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20190509/my-response-t...

I agree, more or less, with your outlook on Facebook. My only complaint is that I really wish that we could manage to mention "fraud" without going for the easy political jab at whoever happens to be President.

It feels like a cheap way to gain pathos / pseudo-pathos appeal, and I don't like it.

you sound bitter and jealous. Maybe because the "Harvard housing lottery winner, destroyer of magazines, failed investor, self-appointed philosopher, and Rich Man Who Can't Code" gets press and you don't? I stopped reading after your intro

Bravo to Chris. We need to see more of this.

Of all the FB lottery winners, the one who should be doing the most and avoids all negative press is Dustin Moskovitz. He votes his super voting shares whatever way Mark Zuckberberg wants, keeping Zuck’s power unchecked. The world needs to stop allowing him to pretend to be an accidentally successful founder of Asana and force him to own up to his responsibilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com