Why did we think this was a good idea again? Ask China their opinion on the value of being the one to decide what is true.
Even if we go with consensus, it's such a difficult problem to solve in this age of internet where new content is created at such a rapid pace.
They need to stop braying about turning into China and admit that this a new ball game. That needs new rules.
This is the kinda thing corps get fined billions of dollars for.
They won't be any kind of "arbiter of truth" if they just decide to refuse to carry all political ads, like Twitter has decided to do.
I think that it's quite possible that a total laissez faire attitude towards quantity of paid speech may be incompatible with democracy, in the context of disinformation campaigns and massive wealth inequality, etc. Free speech without democracy is pointless. These issues may require some adjustment to our social contracts.
I clearly said no such thing. I merely pointed out that 1) Facebook can respond to these problems without doing any (private) viewpoint censorship and 2) we as a society may need to adjust the parameters around paid speech to protect democracy. Most things aren't black and white, and the choice isn't a binary one between extremes like laissez faire and total bans.
However, political ads aren’t usually just any kind of ad; They are almost always using scare tactics, or sometimes, just flat out lying. Stuff that would be illegal for a regular ad to do can sometimes be done simply because it’s a political ad.
Besides, who’s going to enforce the accuracy of the ads? We’ve seen many times that the government cannot hold itself accountable, so why would they do it for political ads.
1) people notice someone has gotten power
2) people notice the person is being shitty about it
3) people insist that responsibility and power go hand in hand
4) person does not rise to the challenge
5) people take the power away
Making them accountable is the warning shot. Next step is divestiture.
The question is will they percolate to the top of the priority list? Small time offenders often get away with it.
[edit:] if you ask me, which you kinda did, I think we're using a self-organizing system, where people self-select into active positions in society and then we cull the worst actors - if we can - before they get too powerful. We get enough pleasant surprises out of this arrangement that we tolerate the bad ones. Trying to plan this stuff out ahead of time? You get a boring dystopia or a scary dystopia.
Regulating and/or breaking up Facebook is hardly "demanding they become the final arbiter of truth." The goal here is reducing Mark Zuckerberg to the point where his personal judgement is irrelevant.
That's not even remotely the same.
[0]: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...