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Comment by ramblerman | Hacker News Reader

> Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook?

Unless you have 22% of the worlds population passing through your living room this is a pretty poor analogy.

Maybe the town square is more apt.

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Everyone has more of a right to a public space (like a town square) than a private living room or a private website (hadn't occurred to me that being publicly traded may have implications actually).

As I've written in another recent comment, the problem is when Facebook or other networks become quasi-official sources for public communication. If the primary means that the government thinks I will find out about public health orders, mandatory business shutdowns, etc. becomes social media, I'm very concerned about the messy mix that "public space" and "private space" that Facebook will become.

I fear social media IS the primary place that a lot of people get their news. That is a huge problem because of all the propaganda, fake news, knee jerk reactions and everything else that is spread there.

Agreed - I think it's a distinct problem, though. Crowdsourcing news where the crowd is ignorant and uneducated is harder to fix than what I'm getting at, because the only ethical way to do it is to convince people en masse to be better about identifying credible sources and thinking critically.

But I'm actually more concerned about a state where overnight the government can ban normal day-to-day activities, and if you're on a 30 day ban from Facebook you don't know about it until they're arresting people for surfing. Or, in my town's case, where they've stopped notifying residents of construction-related closures with written notice to each house days ahead of time, and have just started putting it on NextDoor.

I feel your point here is important. Facebook has a lot of power. To the point where I feel they owe the public more than they would if they were a small entity with a narrow reach.

There are two principles here: 1) it's a problem if you have enough power to force the weak to cover the expenses of your failures and 2) if you have a lot of power you also have the ability to defend yourself from assholes and malicious actors.

So, for point 1, if facebook decides that they want to dump trash into residential areas, they could silence everyone on facebook who complains. They could also call up their friends at twitter et al and convince them to do the same in exchange for whatever massive corporations like these days. Because of this possibility, I want facebook's freedom to curtail freedom of speech on their private platform to be extremely limited.

For point 2, if facebook becomes inundated with assholes or (heaven forbid) malicious trolls who make relentless fun of the font that facebook uses for posts and every post that everyone sees is just complaints about fonts, then facebook has the capability to create a special asshole facebook website and marketing campaign to convince the assholes to go somewhere else. They have the ability to switch out the font. They can fund research into powerful AI techniques that can group all the font complaints together so that only people who want to see that crap will see that and everyone else can have a good experience. Because of facebook's ability to deal with malicious (or social incompetence that is indistinguishable from) behavior, I want facebook's freedom to curtail freedom of speech on their private platform to be extremely limited.

On the other hand, if we're talking about an individual (or otherwise small and powerless organization) running a personal blog (or your living room), they have extremely limited ability to force other people to deal with their platform. And they also have extremely limited ability to deal with malicious behavior if they didn't otherwise have the right to curtail freedom of speech. In these cases, I want them to have greater rights because the likelihood of them being able to use these rights to oppress others is minimal AND their necessity of them needing them to defend themselves is greater.

The correct analogy would be if someone is standing in the Walmart parking lot. And last I checked U.S. law permits Walmart to tell them to leave.

Are there any other non-corporate "parking lots" with anywhere close to the same network effects?

Not a parking lot, but a lot of suburban communities are built around large shopping malls, operated by companies like Westfield. It’s not exactly conducive to protests, as the malls are private property and there’s no significant pedestrian traffic anywhere else.

Such arrangements are not conducive to the political process, and that should worry everyone. If something can be used against someone it can also be used against you.

by putting "parking lots" in quotations, I was meaning to ask for the alternative digital equivalent to major platforms like FB and Twitter.

If we're continuing the parking lot analogy, it's like there's an almost unending grid of parking lot after parking lot, and you can travel to any of them instantaneously and for free. Some parking lots have a lot of people, so you'd rather go there if you want to be heard, but nothing is stopping you from setting up shop in an empty lot, and nothing is stopping people from visiting your lot.

Now, given that major social network advertise pretty much everywhere, this might not be an entirely fair analogy. Some parking lots have ads for them posted in every other parking lot. But it's a point worth making that access is relatively egalitarian on the internet.

Thanks for the clarification. You're right, access to the internet at large is more or less egalitarian; having your voice heard (and not hidden), is not though, and therein lies the problem.

If a tree falls on the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it even make a noise?

Also relevant is this very interesting research experiment conducted ~5 years ago on social media manipulation, in which they dubbed the term "Censorship 2.0"

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...

That's true, we used to think of it in terms of access, but I suppose now that anyone can figuratively start their own news network, the issue is who gatekeeps the directories rather than the access.

The network effects are somewhat irrelevant and GP's comment is correct. If you do not use a retailer or service provider's business in a manner that they like, they are normally free to discontinue your service and ask you to leave. The same principle should apply to Facebook as they are a service provider like any other which has not (to my knowledge) explicitly been designated as having special status in legislation.

You can't decide Facebook is subject to a different set of laws or has fewer rights simply because people have arbitrarily decided to communicate on its platform more than another platform. Every private entity should be afforded the same rights to regulate their private property or services unless there is legislation specifically saying otherwise.

If you or any other person do not like the way Facebook is regulating usage of their platform, you are free to go start up your own social media platform with a different ToS (and many people do).

^This response is so blandly generic.

>You can't decide Facebook is subject to a different set of laws or has fewer rights

Oh but we can, that's what democracy and law makers are for, and if you've been keeping up with the news at all for the past few years, you'll know that's where we are increasingly likely to be heading.

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