I am curious, given the international nature of Facebook which makes it hard to rely on country authorities to settle content moderation disputes: what would be a better alternative? (Disclaimer: I work at FB)
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?