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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

It's legally tricky to be anti-Facebook for the sake of being anti-Facebook, but I don't think it's morally tricky.

The entire idea of anti-trust (and frankly, the premise of most western democracies) is to prevent the over-concentration of power.

Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now, far more powerful than most nation states. I'm not sure that we as a society have ever dealt with a non-state actor this powerful before.

Germany's response of essentially "yeah no, we're not letting Facebook make money here," seems prudent to me.

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Some people are questioning:

“Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now, far more powerful than most nation states”

Op did not clarify his reasoning. Though I have thought about this and here are mine.

If strip down a “nation state” to its bare essence, it is an idea. Lines drawn on a map, and symbols(flags, anthems etc). Add in the government directing education, and we end up with masses that can be influenced to behave in specific ways. i.e socialisation and sense of identity.

Now, we know that government plays a significant part in the country and in the world.

Now let’s consider FB. FB has by far the largest network of people that are connected in one massive network. I suspect Information (memes) could spread much faster on Fb, Whatsapp and insta than they could prior to these. Even email was never as fast. Since FB has control of the network without over sight on the algorithms and filtering, they wield significant power to shape global conversations. Shaping global conversations fundamentally can lead to over throwing of leaders with out ever a bullet being shot, it could lead to genocide, nationalism etc etc.

It’s no surprise that the EU is on high alert.

Edit: I think this requires more exploring. This is fundamentally a war against a new form of influence & control of masses of people.

See previous wars: religion vs state, state vs monarchy etc etc.

Has anyone considered this perspective before? Would appreciate any links

>I'm not sure that we as a society have ever dealt with a non-state actor this powerful before.

The east India trading company and the hudson's bay company as well as I'm sure some others were as large as or larger than some state actors of their time.

A fine point and two significant examples that illustrate the dangers of unfettered corporations.

Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now, far more powerful than most nation states.

This is hyperbole at best. Facebook does not have an army, weapons, or literally anyone that would be willing to die or even be physically put out to defend it.

I’m no Facebook fan, but let’s not let Facebook hysteria overrun these comments.

It is unrealistically limiting to think modern wars are fought only with armies. Most wars are quiet and fought with capital, thought, rhetoric, and policy. Armies only come into the picture if all else fails.

Can you point me to a 'modern war' without armies? I'm interested in what you actually think a war is?

Not op but will take a stab. The comment was in response to:

“This is hyperbole at best. Facebook does not have an army”

Op was pointing out that power != war with guns

“Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now”

The comment was how power could be achieved via other methods of warfare-including the ability to shape conversations.

Another word for this would be competition. He has a point.

Negative, Spock.

The ability to shape conversations or to compete is not the same as making war (or you are relying on an idiosyncratic definition of "war").

It seems we are splitting hairs here on the definition of "war" and missing the actual message. Since you brought it up again.

War (Noun) " - a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism

  - a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end 

  - a struggle to achieve a goal:

War (Verb): " - to be in active or vigorous conflict

- to carry on active hostility or contention

The point still stands. War is an isomorphism for competition, conflict and tension between parties. One could probably use something like category theory and prove it.

References:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/war

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/war

cyberwar springs to mind.

[edit/ downvote this all you like, pretending like warfare requires guns and armies when 2 different government elections have been attacked using social media, namely Facebook.]

https://www.thegreathack.com/

> Data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable asset. It’s being weaponized to wage cultural and political warfare. People everywhere are in a battle for control of our most intimate personal details. From award-winning filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, THE GREAT HACK uncovers the dark world of data exploitation with astounding access to the personal journeys of key players on different sides of the explosive Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal.

Yanks to the rescue: the secret story if how American advisers helped Yeltsin win

http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

Was that an act of war against democratic Russia?

Ask any country under crushing US sanctions.

One could argue they have a higher GDP and population than most countries right now (all depends how you measure “power”) but I’m with you: if it went down tomorrow, I’m not sure what the world would actually be losing, nobody would die, and the world would keep spinning.

Yeah they only know everything about 1B people and can swing elections but other than these they are just a regular company selling stuff.

There is zero evidence that any activity conducted on Facebook has ever actually swung a single election. As far as I can tell, that is hyperbole as well.

Absolutely. A $5 billion USD hyperbole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...

"The governments of India[30][31] and Brazil[32][33] demanded that Cambridge Analytica report how anyone used data from the breach in political campaigning, and various regional governments in the United States have lawsuits in their court systems from citizens affected by the data breach.[34] On April 25, 2018, Facebook released their first earnings report since the scandal was reported. Revenue fell since the last quarter, but this is usual as it followed the holiday season quote. The quarter revenue was the highest for a first quarter, and the second overall.[35] In early July 2018, the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office announced it intended to fine Facebook £500,000 ($663,000) over the data scandal, this being the maximum fine allowed at the time of the breach, saying Facebook "contravened the law by failing to safeguard people's information".[36] In March 2019, a court filing by the U.S. Attorney General for the District of Columbia alleged that Facebook knew of Cambridge Analytica's "improper data-gathering practices" months before they were first publicly reported in December 2015.[37] In July 2019, the Federal Trade Commission voted to approve fining Facebook around $5 billion to finally settle the investigation to the scandal, with a 3-2 vote.[38] Facebook established Social Science One as a response to the event."

Nothing you provided is evidence that any Facebook activity has ever swung any election. The very people that paid Cambridge Analytica for their services in 2016 said that the company’s strategies were ineffective at best, referring to it as “snake oil” [1]. You have provided evidence that people attempted to use Facebook to swing an election. Those two things are not the same.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/2...

They have tried to swing elections and broke electoral law in UK.

How could anyone besides them prove effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this campaign? I don't think it's possible. At the very least, the side they supported won (Brexit) and they should not be trusted.

You may believe Faceache broke electoral law in the UK; but they have neither been charged nor convicted. So your belief would be false.

Leave.UK was accused of violating electoral law. I believe the Electoral Commission has now dropped its investigation.

Incidentally, to break UK law, you usually have to perform the violating act in the UK (we have a few laws that involve extraterritoriality, but they are far and few).

Faceache barely does anything in the UK. They apparently make no money here; they don't sell stuff (not even advertising - that would be the Republic of Ireland). CA collected data on US citizens; that's legal here (and would have been of very little interest to Brexit campaigners). As far as I know, nothing CA did violated UK or EU law.

You say "the side they supported won (Brexit)". Do you mean that Faceache supported Brexit? I don't think they had a dog in the race at all. Or do you mean CA? It's been argued that CA took money to provide services to Leave.UK, but that's not the same as saying they supported Brexit.

Trying to "swing elections" is legal in the UK. In fact it is encouraged; people who successfully swing elections often get appointed to important positions such as Prime Minister. It's completely legal to hire polling companies to help you better understand the voters. It's completely legal to hire advertising companies to promote the electoral outcome you want promoted.

Now you are speaking of trust; of course, I trust neither CA (now defunct) nor Faceache. But Faceache did not drag my country into wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Faceache did not have that much power. The UK joined those wars largely because of diplomatic pressure from the USA - a much more powerful entity than this rather tedious online advertising company.

From what I have read, and despite their bragging, CA wasn't even helpful to the Leave.UK campaign. Their data wasn't relevant, and anyway Leave.UK didn't have the organisational capacity to make use of whatever data they could offer.

Leave.EU was found guilty, and fined at least once:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/11/leaveeu-fin...

> You may believe Faceache broke electoral law in the UK; but they have neither been charged nor convicted. So your belief would be false.

You are correct that they haven't (been charged with having) broken electoral law in the UK, but they have broken data protection laws in relation to the information which was then used by Cambridge Analytica:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/11/facebook-...

Whether that information was then used by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Brexit campaign is open to more questions.

What you are asking is impossible. How do you want me provide evidence? Fly back in time and stop facebook interfering? I can flip the question, why would politicians use this setup if it was not working?

The point is that Facebook ads, regardless of how precisely targeted they may (or may not) have been, did not sway the 2016 election, and I am not aware of any other election Facebook is even thought to have had any effect on. The whole “it’s Facebook’s fault” narrative was shaped by a liberal media desperate to explain why they were unsuccessful in influencing it themselves. Rather than accept the fact that they had simply a run a fatally flawed candidate, and had alienated large swaths of the country by calling them stupid for not agreeing with every one of their views, liberals found a scapegoat: it was Facebook’s fault.

Facebook is an echo chamber. People don’t go there to be informed; they go there to validate their already held beliefs. Given the large ideological chasm between the two candidates in the 2016 election, it defies logic that even a single voter was swayed or chose not to vote at all based on ads they saw on Facebook.

Having lost the popular vote, but winning the presidency with a margin of 77,744 votes in specific locations, it is not hard to imagine that Trump's success could have been thanks to carefully targeted political ads.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-elect...

Of course it's impossible to say whether Trump would have won even if he hadn't spent any money on Facebook ads, but we're talking about a campaign that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in total. If this amount of money doesn't include enough to influence 78k people to go out and vote for a specific candidate, then we might as well give up on the very concept of advertising.

Yet, western democracies have been centralizing more and more power every year. It's more that a premise is that western democracies want to increase the power of the government and no one else.

Well, on the bright side most democracies are not explicitly about profit-making and/or cost-cutting as their first priority, even if it's the first priority of individual politicians.

I would agree with your statement that most western governments are not explicitly motivated by cost cutting and profit seeking. It would seem evident when we look at the trajectory of the US national debt in the past 40 or so years. However, I do not know if this is a good or bad thing. Will the national debt ever be paid off? And if not, what will the consequences be?

A nation paying its debt would actually not be as beneficial as you think, considering today's society runs on debt, having it is actually beneficial to an extent for relations, trade, to avoid war etc.

Now whether things should be this way am not sure, but a nation simply paying its debt off without significant changes to the role debt plays is not the answer.

The U.S. being the major exception?

Is it only western democracies that you think have been centralizing power? What about countries like China, Iran and Russia?

Western democracies historically have been party to increasing the power of private companies through government protection from competition (corporate welfare). The first example that popped in my head was the provision of prison labor for U.S. Steel through convict leasing.

There are numerous examples though, link below from Mises (admittedly a source with a conservative bias, but theres still good info there).

https://mises.org/wire/government-created-monopolies-are-eve...

It would seem to me that governments provide preferential treatment to private companies when it is beneficial for the government and they provide roadblocks and difficulties to companies who would be detrimental to the government. This is of course a generalization and not a hard-and-fast rule that explains every instance of government behavior when viewed in respect to a private company.

It was in response to the comment above - of course autocracies are constantly trying to increase their power.

>Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now

No it isn't, not even close. At most it's the third most powerful tech company, after Alphabet and Amazon.

Amazon is surely big and rich, but do they really exert the same psychological/social power on you? You don't read your news on Amazon, you don't send messages to your closest friends on amazon, you don't go down reading rabbit holes from following links on Amazon (not really, anyway).

Certainly purchase data is very powerful (ask supermarkets!), but I think it pales in comparison to the breadth of data Facebook and Google collect.

I guess Amazon is maybe not as powerful as Facebook, yes. I was thinking about it also in terms of AWS and such, but I guess that Amazon can't really convert that into an evil master plan in any way.

I might also be biased towards underestimating Facebook since nobody in my social circle actually uses Facebook or Instagram. I guess Facebook is more powerful than I gave it credit for, though it still pales in comparison to Alphabet.

While I agree that Google is more powerful, remember that even if you or your friends don't use Facebook, many of the sites you visit do - so unless you've got pimped out tracking protection (which as a HN user you probably do, but maybe your friends don't!), Facebook still have a good idea where you're moving throughout cyberspace

Why is Facebook more powerful than Google/Alphabet?

> I'm not sure that we as a society have ever dealt with a non-state actor this powerful before.

Amazon and Google being of somewhat similar or greater power at least tempers down that statement. And unlike Facebook they have really good reputations outside specific parts of circles like the tech circle.

Facebook has way more control over the social fabric and distribution of information than Google does. We've seen violence-inciting disinformation campaigns spread through Facebook and rack up a literal death count to the point that governments have angrily demanded intervention from FB with the result of FB shrugging their shoulders and going 'our bad, we didn't hire enough moderators'.

I still remember back in the late-noughties when the DOD was inviting arabs to come to the U.S. and attend workshops teaching how to use facebook to organize insurgencies. That stuff is out of fashion now, but we were oddly okay with it back during the Arab Spring.

> We've seen violence-inciting disinformation campaigns spread through Facebook and rack up a literal death count

To me that signals they have less 'control' of the distribution of information on their own platform. It's debatable who could wield more social influence, Google or Facebook. On me, it'd certainly be Google, since I use about a dozen google products (Chrome, Gmail, Search, Mesh, Calendar, Analytics, Voice, Android, Scholar, Cloud, Maps, etc.), and zero Facebook products.

Not really though. Apple and Alphabet effectively could cripple Facebook. We are already seeing some of this take place with Apple banning Facebook's VPN apps, options on data shared with apps and by rolling out its new app sign in with Apple feature.

There are benefits and drawbacks to social media/everyone has a voice. On a benign level, the NYTimes released a story misinforming its readership that Apple was proactively promoting its own apps. This was cleared up on Twitter by @drbarnard whose view was promoted via Stratechary.

I realize there is a lot more complexity to nation-states creating false narratives around China or Hong Kong protests, but on a basic level, I believe social media allows a quicker iteration cycle to correct misinformed views with the drawback of initial misinformation traveling at a greater velocity.

In many ways, you can get a more informed and accurate view of the situation in Hong Kong today if you have the propensity to avoid overreacting to the first piece of information and developing a skillset for finding the right person to listen to.

I think you’re underestimating the impact of YouTube. Its driven to prominence extremist ideologies, especially on the far right, that would have had difficulty finding purchase via traditional media outlets. And especially among young, alienated men, who are historically more prone to violence. Just look at the case of the New Zealand shooter and the subsequent violence he has inspired.

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