Facebook's ‘oversight board’ is proof that it wants to be regulated by itself
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.
Propaganda is right. Call me a cynic (because I am), but a significant portion of "effective" self-regulation is a self-interest spin on manipulating perception of efficacy.
As long as you can spin your self-regulation to a point the outside mostly believes you, you can make compromises between what you should be doing and what you can get away with in the framework of profit seeking motives. Perhaps this is still more effective than external regulation? I'm skeptical.
I don't mean to dump on Facebook, this is just one of those rare cases where it came out into the sunlight.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/facebook-employee-suicide-be...
None. I see too often the argument 'it's difficult for company X to follow the law, so how should countries change the law to fit the company needs?'.
I have worked for decades in regulated markets. It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports. But, we always follow the law, we do what local regulators ask us to do, we filter, or change the content to fit the local government decisions.
Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit.
If you work for Facebook, ask the company to look for experienced companies in regulated markets. And I do not mean just to hire lobbyists but to create a technical infrastructure that allows to follow the rule of law in all countries where it operates. To just lobby for more political power only makes Facebook mindset worse.
I don’t think this is their argument at all.
Facebook regulates and removes far more content than required by law.
Under the US 1st Amendment almost everything offensive, racist, bad, pornographic, etc is legal. Facebook still removes quite a lot of legal content from their posts and their content moderators get PTSD from having to look at content which may be legal.
I think Facebook’s real issue is that they know they and their user base want them to be stricter than the law requires, but where should those standards fall?
Is giving anyone the opportunity to stream to thousands of users unchecked a responsible thing to do? We've already seen the downsides to that, how Facebook failed to remove the stream when it was in progress and their numerous failings to curb the spread of the video in the weeks that followed.
I'm a big Facebook detractor generally but this illustrates why their problems are hard. In the case of the US, most of the calls to "respect society's standards" seem to mean "listen to me and mine as the sole arbiters of what society wants" instead of anything to do with actual objective standards, turning public policy from a matter of established process of law into a circus where loudness wins. If you want speech banned, campaign to change actual law rather than trying to use platforms like FB as an end-run around legal protections.
Honestly, the whole mess is why having massive centralized platforms at all is a mistake. Moderation is so hilariously fractal that comminutes placed close to the sources of local standards, who do not attempt to be accountable to nobody and everybody at once, and content-agnostic protocols, which defer the hard decisions around moderation to those nodes, are better-placed to deal with the complexities of reality.
I’m not a fan personally that Facebook has extended their anti-spam infrastructure to block some sharing of other disfavored links in PMs (e.g. the open-source gun building website was blocked). But I’m sure there are plenty of anti-gun facebook users who cheered that move.
I wouldn't trust Facebook any further than I could throw my smartphone, but many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". All the censorship laws out there, lese majeste in Thailand, "don't allow insults to our religious feelings" in other jurisdictions... Then there's all the various forms of protectionism.
"Society's needs" is not a phrase that can effectively advance our understanding of Facebook, and if we're going to talk about the goodness and badness of the mindset, we should be critical on both ends. Which needs are we talking about? Why does this society's rulers think it needs them, and not the society next door? And are these so-called needs really about entrenched powers oppressing someone?
Philosophical question: what is a better approach to advancing society's needs' than government and its regulations? If a given corporation, ala Friedman, best serves its owners by maximizing profit, it seems corporations are not in a position to serve any interests but their own.
I guess by that standard, the US under Trump is a model society.
Counter question: Why would Facebook (or any other tech company of your choosing) know any better what a society needs than the society itself?
Tech companies love to paint themselves as the brave protectors of the powerless against the oppressive regimes of the world.
This may be true in certain cases - however, this still doesn't seem to keep them from doing business with the exact same regimes - and it doesn't seem to motivate them to adhere to regulations any better if they are passed by functioning democracies.
This is a strange question. (1) Society isn't a singular being that has perfect information about what it wants. (2) Society has a terrible track record for what it wants. There's a rather large slice of society that believes it's ok to enact vigilante justice on minorities and a president who has routinely parroted conspiracy theories. I'm not convinced "society" knows that it needs either and I'd rather see Facebook destroyed than it's power handed over to "society".
(n.b. there are real meaningful answers to this question which respect individual agency instead of simply collectivizing all decisions about who is allowed to send bits to whom; it's just much more work to nail them down.)
The problem is that regulations really don't exist and are not formulated properly in a meaningful way in most places.
I don't suspect most nations are prepared to implement and follow through on well-reasoned policy. Maybe a Scandinavian country.
(Edit: I should ad it's not that I think Scandi countries are better, it's just that they are small and well enough organized you see a lot of decent ideas get implemented quickly. Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, a lot of neat things happening)
2) Apparently societal needs include _more_ Facebook, given they continue to grow their active user base even though they're already in the multiple billions.
> It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports.
I am becoming familiar with this pain. I wonder (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/) whether there is a way to simplify, or at least manage, compliance with multiple partially overlapping regulations, e.g. by having one database with reports generated per-regulation. I am curious about learning what experienced people in this space know. Any pointers?
Facebook is one of many global companies trying to abide by (or cheat) national laws and regulations. If they want to abide by the law, it can be very expensive and burdensome. If they want to cheat the law, they can play nation-states against each other.
Global governance should better match global companies. Right now, many of the global laws and regulations seem more like suggestions than enforceable laws.
I wonder if Facebook and other global companies want stronger global governance or prefer the status quo. In other words, would these companies want more standardization across regions or prefer to play the regions against each other?
designed to "move slowly and keep things intact."
Facebook is a website. That is all. It does not even produce content, let alone run a business in the real world (e.g., Amazon).
It is a remarkable phenomenon, no doubt, but it is just a website, with billions of template pages each filled in with data from users.
They do not do anything else at Facebook except maintain a website and conduct surveillance. That's it.
If someone tomorrow started a website and offered to give out free web pages (i.e., not a paid blogging patform, not Wix, etc.) without any surveillance or ads/promotions, would you sign up?
There will always be naysayers whenever we share thoughts of the possibilities.
Surely, if someone told you in 2003 that he/she was going to start a website that would sign up billions of users who would submit photos of themselves and personal information to be published, most of you would dismiss the idea as impossible. There was no such thing as a single public website with _billions_ of pages of personal information voluntarily submitted.
The same goes for Wikipedia. What if someone told you in 2001 they were going to start a website and grow it to 53 million pages? No doubt, naysaysers would have asked "How do you make money?"
It is a website. Anyone can start one. Of course, Facebook is not fond of this reality hence the notion of "platform". It is still a website.
The fact that anyone can start a website is the only democratic aspect of the www.
Beyond being a website, it's also a mobile app, marketplace, communication platform, hardware manufacturer, and cultural driver. (Not to mention that it's a research organization, crisis response tool, ally to law enforcement, etc.)
Would you similarly describe the US Constitution as a piece of paper? Such a simplistic reduction doesn't seem all that useful to me.
When you continue: "it's also ...", you are simply referring to properties of computers, software, the internet and the www. This has been debated on HN before. Facebook is a website.
If Facebook were implemented in distributed Rolodexes and analog photo albums I doubt you would be making such statements.
As for the implication that a website, e.g., Facebook, can be compared to the US Consitution, this is the sort of thinking that sets off journalists and yields rants like the OP. Whereas you refer to my comment as "simplistic reduction", the author of the OP might refer to yours as "delusional thinking".
The properties of the US Consitution that make it important do not come from the fact it is a piece of paper or the conveniences that paper allows. They come from what is written on the paper and the authors of the document. Facebook does not produce content. It manages a website full of content submitted by the public, then surveils and spams them to service advertisers and promoters, for a fee.
The topic of the article is in fact how they purport to manage filtering that content. Much of the content on Facebook is very low quality. A website with billions of pages that takes submissions from the public, which has heaps of low quality content. Surprising. This is precisely what the web was designed for.
If you want some sort of democratic method for deciding this stuff, you need to get governments to stop dumping the problems on companies.
I think FB is creepy af personally, but this article doesn't do a good job of reviewing the oversight board.
The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its "freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo of the like. (Fair enough.)
They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards. So, instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules.
The second problem is that they can't PR for shit.
Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand.
Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them. an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me about it that I realised what it was.
The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are 20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff (when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift through mountains of mindfulness crap.
In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.
...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content, just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.
Like the same one that pays the bills for theguardian.com?
(I just disabled my ad-block and saw scammy+nasty "feet" ads of some sort, pretty sure those would not be allowed on FB.com)
(edit: fixed The Guardian link)
Besides which, someone writing an opinion piece for the guardian has no control over the business model.
If it applies to FB.com, it can apply to any company or individual online.
I was referring to their ad-supported business model where they trade some of their customer's attention/data for money.
"just when we need it the most. The Guardian’s honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting has never mattered more. As we face the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, we’ll remain with you, so we can all better understand and combat the crisis. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an existential threat. With advertising revenues plummeting, we risk losing a major source of our funding. More than ever before, we need your support to help fill the gap."
According to The Guardian, The Guardian is honest, authoritative and fact-based.
Easy enough to not use the site if I don't like it. The same applies for FB. Apparently non-violent opt-out isn't enough for The Guardian though. The Guardian (honest, authoritative) proposes that the state should guard us all from FB and their "supreme leader" Zuckerberg.
At what point do the principles of private property and free speech no longer apply to the websites we create?
IMPRESS is the Leveson-compliant regulator, IPSO the continuation of the old PCC by another name. Most newspapers went with IPSO, The Guardian didn't.
In all seriousness though, Facebook get a lot of shit but they are at least trying to clean up their act. Legacy media has been vastly more corrupt and treacherous for decades and shows no sign of any reform.
Jokes aside, not only Facebook but a lot of companies do that so it seems they are proactive while they pretty much do nothing valuable and hope they don't get regulated.