Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
reuters.com
reuters.com
Letting facebook be part telco and part newspaper would make it the greatest propaganda machine in human history - one that is controlled by one person. Hopefully countries will start banning facebook outright soon.
The difference with Zuckerberg is that he is so brazen about the conflict of interest. Goes to show that our antitrust laws are a joke and not taken seriously by anyone in the industry.
Like a telco, Facebook allows people to communicate with one another without going through another intermediary. However, it's not one-to-one like your phone, it's one-to-many.
Like a newspaper the messages are broadcast out to everyone that's subscribed to receive them. However, there's limited editorial control by Facebook (except for content breaching their policies).
If we thought of Facebook as a glorified listserv with a pretty UI (and a bunch of tracking cookies and injected ads) would it still seem like it should be treated as a publisher?
The questions that matter are:
1. How is Facebook harming people?
2. How can we stop Facebook from harming people?
not gonna happen in the u.s. the u.s. government has 99% removed themselves from anti-trust deliberations. i suspect the government is deeply benefiting from facebook's data. in other words, they care about keeping it around.
and in many countries, facebook is the internet, consisting of both user facing applications and the backbone.
After living long time in a country where “ban it” is the answer to all the problems (drugs, child abuse, election interference, terrorism, name it) (USSR, and then recent Putin’s Russia) I’m deeply worried about western voters seriously consider banning the solution to all the problems.
If you don’t like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, just make another one, better, safer, fairer.
Split it if you consider it a monopoly. (I’d personally prefer Apple to stop advertising their streaming service using their devices).
Don’t open the door of government censorship. Once opened that door is very hard to close.
Suggesting they're a near necessary part of life, like a utility, is laughable. But since he brought it up, replacing them with a proper newspaper would be much more useful.
dont like it but its much more useful than the local news website
Previously stuff like this would have been organized through a mailing list or maybe a BBS. Facebook taking this over means that you have to allow them spying on you to take part in basic social activities.
Reddit has some of the most toxic communities on the internet bar none e.g. /r/gamersriseup, /r/kotakuinaction.
And not sure how FB/IG would push that content to you unless you were friends with people posting that sort of content.
You’ve fallen for exactly Zuckerbergs real goal: make his printing press the only one that matters.
But then his invention isn’t as unique as a physical printing press would have been to a community even just a generation ago.
It’s not as hard to duplicate.
This is where we ended up with forums like this one jacking itself off at how novel it’s Todo app, and IM clone are. So ubiquitous it’s banal, a single example is barely worth the extreme value placed upon it.
This site spent years being mesmerized by the values placed in these companies. It was market manipulation: keep attention on a select few. Government let them become a monopoly of information because they could see the value in distributing their message. Powers that be are always at the cutting edge of information distribution. Not cause they care about tech but propagandizing the public.
And the people cheered it on.
And since you’re so worried about the local value: imagine the local value to tech workers who are hired to deal with local tech needs instead of it being outsourced to FAANGs which can restrict hiring and manipulate wages as they have.
Your post is pure propaganda, mate. You’re regurgitating exactly the talking point they want. Please continue to carry water for the rich man, since he’s so concerned about the local value you highlight... while bailing on taxes that would directly help locals that prop his wealth up by continuing to go to work.
Give me a fucking break.
Where I disagree, or at least am uncertain, is that the right regulatory framework for social media lies on some kind of straight line between the two others mentioned. In particular, those are both pretty heavyweight, and I don't want any real obstacles for new competitors or people just running a phpBB.
Social media walks a strange line where it seems that its proponents both want to be treated as legitimate news, but not held to the same standards of veracity and validation of the claims that traditional news sources purport to follow*. Such scrutiny of Facebook isn't a concern for a start up unless they're already engaging in bad-faith practices and/or problematic practices per stringent Privacy Law (i.e., EU law).
Simply put, Facebook can see that their ability to expand past the US strongly (more than it already has) is gated by the public perception of what Facebook is/does. I'm no in the EU proper but close enough and get various Warnings/messages about Facebook from facebook itself...and for me it's empty.
But make no mistake, Facebook really is trying to muddy the waters by pretending that existing legislation targets or directly affects persons who are not engaged in the non-sense which was required before.
The case of treating FB as a telco is obvious: no accountability. I think we're agreed that this is no good.
A news outlet (a) explicitly has their credibility on the line with regard to their output and (b) is very selective in what they publish (for better or worse). Neither of these is really the case for Facebook. For a given link, only the poster's and linkee's credibility is on the line. Facebook defaults to allowing posts, and is only somewhat selective in what it allows and promotes. If this means Facebook is legally equivalent to the New York Times, then so are HN, reddit, Pinterest, etc. Treating FB as a new agency requires all of these sites to take responsibility for the opinions of all of their users. This will discourage medium-sized sites where hand-moderation (doable for small forums) is just becoming infeasible, and more importantly have a chilling effect on people's online activity, because you'll never quite know when the admins of the site you're posting on, or their robotic minions, will panic about your controversial link. Better for them to delete your post just in case they get in trouble with the law, and maybe better for you to not bother and stay silent. This is also no good.
Of course that's just one scenario. Details may differ across the multiverse. But one thing that doesn't change is that basing policy on something other than reality always finds a way to go wrong.
Argued to the extreme, there could be infinite variations of content that you could route users to, and the routing algorithm is so good that it effectively 'controls the content' by selecting which exact content to route to, even though technically speaking they are not controlling the content.
This kind of hairsplitting is basically the 'have cake, eat it too' situation.
It's just that companies like Facebook, Twitter etc don't want to attract negative PR attention by being the first to move. Once one of them does move it's far less risky to follow.
It is not unlike a mob. While it is comprised of autonomous individuals, there is a feedback loop of their own making that results in an emergent behavior. Translated into moonman talk: something something social contract, something... collective will.
The National Enquirer is a newspaper too, and probably the closer analogy to Facebook in reality than more reputable news organizations.
Imagine if William Randolph Heart and Ma Bell had a love child.
shall I burn it or wipe my arse with it.
One of the key principles in telco regulation is ensuring any-to-any connectivity. It is now established in most jurisdictions that telcos have a monopoly over connecting to their end-customers (i.e. the only was to call a T-mobile customer is for T-mobile to accept the call into their network). Hence regulators not only mandate interconnection, but require it to be done on fair terms and conditions, including a fair wholesale price, which is often set by the regulator.
This takes the biggest anti-competitive aspect of facebook out, the network and walled garden effect they have due to their sheer size.
It will mean that companies like Signal have much greater chance to compete with whatsapp, it will reward whoever provides the best service to their users, and it is relatively light and uncomplicated regulation.
>I do think that there should be regulation on harmful content ... there’s a question about which framework you use for this.
>Right now there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries - there’s like newspapers and existing media, and then there’s the telco-type model, which is ‘the data just flows through you’, but you’re not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line.
>I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between.
Here is a charitable interpretation: he's considering how it should be regulated, not what the company exactly is or should be. And I think his statement there is correct. In practice, many people do treat Facebook like a sort of newspaper. I definitely think they shouldn't, but it's a fact.
He seems to be saying that, as a result, some kind of regulation similar to newspaper-targeted regulation is necessary. But, at the same time, it's certainly not exactly like a newspaper, where content is produced and published exclusively by the source. Facebook doesn't even explicitly curate content (or so they claim), let alone create it; they try to let curation occur automatically through algorithms.
This absolutely may be a duplicitous attempt at humility on his part, but, regardless of the underlying intent, I think his public message is that Facebook is in a unique position where it can influence a lot of people to believe certain claims and ostensible facts like a newspaper would, and yet is not an author of content in the way a newspaper is. I think he's trying to allude to the additional responsibility they have and the risk they pose which telcos don't share, and that there's a need to regulate them more strictly than telcos as a result. He's saying they're a telco that should be treated with some of the regulatory gravity of a newspaper, rather than that they're a newspaper that should be treated like a telco.
So I think people are kind of interpreting it in reverse. He's trying to sound humble and accountable - perhaps to misleadingly deflect from his probable true personal belief that they should have as minimal regulation as humanly possible - rather than arrogantly proclaiming they should be immune from regulation. (One can't rule out the possibility that he's being sincere, but of course that's not exactly his reputation.)
tl;dr I think he's likely being sneaky rather than shameless.
BUT
By your own logic, hackernews should be treated as a publisher, and not a platform.
Hackenews is a forum where the moderators restrict discussion to specific topics to keep discussion high quality. But I consider them a platform and not a publisher.
Or for example a car discussion forum, bans anyone who wants to discuss airplanes. Again, I would still consider them a platform and not a publisher.
How about next time the policeman stops a drunk driver we ask the drunk driver what BAC would be reasonable for him to be driving with?
Imagine with the tech landscape and how many fewer companies there will be if it is regulated like telcos.
Governments and regulators will have a bigger say in picking winners and losers.
And finally, technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. Why should governments do the hard work of fixing and expanding California’s mass transit system when Musk says we could zip people across the state at 760 miles per hour in a “hyperloop”? Is trying to colonize Mars, at a cost in the billions of dollars, actually the right direction for future space exploration and scientific research? We should be able to determine long-term technology priorities without giving excessive weight to the particular visions of a few tech celebrities.
Rather than placing tech leaders on a pedestal, we should put their successes in context, acknowledging the role of government not only as a supporter of basic science but as a partner for new ventures. Otherwise, it is all too easy to denigrate public-sector investment, eroding support for government agencies and training programs and ultimately putting future innovation at risk. As Mazzucato puts it, “It’s precisely because we admire Musk and think his contributions are important that we need to get real about where his success actually comes from.”"
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...
The building's walls have boards everywhere, some of them move upwards in a continuous loop on a conveyor so you can stare at them, then stop them once you see something interesting, open the ducket contained. They make money by gluing sponsored ads in-between, that you must pay for.
You can see a copy of any other person's board in a small envelope next to each person's name.
There are also rooms called "groups" you can go into but some of them are private and you must answer 3 questions to get in.
Would make an interesting art exhibit recreating Facebook into a physical form, well.. er. The closest thing i can think of is a library..
Its a bit dystopian when you think about the first line i wrote, about the cameras watching everyone. But, its needed to stop horrible things getting posted.
It would certainly be nice for them if they can claim editorial discretion, without editorial responsibility or transparency. The perfect legal shield. Power without responsibility.
It would be insane to grant them this. This might well be the most important legal question this century.
Hold them accountable like News of the World.
Give them the highest scrutiny afforded both platforms. Not the greatest freedoms.
In reality it's an entirely new category and applying regulations from the 20th century isn't going to work as well as coming up with entirely new ones to address entirely new problems.
Stop worrying about trying to please the PC police and just run the most addictive and profitable BBS you can. Promote whatever you want and shadow ban whatever.
The Europeons may object, but ultimately in the US the political will doesn’t exist to make you do more. A few politicians like Hawley on the right and AOC on the left may have an issue that works for them, but the American majority is going to look pretty skeptically at any significant regulation.