Facebook Can't Fix Itself

time.com

31 points·colinprince··5 comments

I like this analogy from the article: "Where industrial companies dumped toxic chemicals in fresh water, Internet platforms pollute society with toxic content." Indeed, but it's not quite so simple to identify toxic content, as one person's trash is another's treasure.

>it's not quite so simple to identify toxic content, as one person's trash is another's treasure.

The utility in the word "toxic" is it's vagueness and ambiguity. You can get so many people against toxicity because everyone can find someone they consider toxic.

Any adjective with more precision than "toxic" would start subdividing the category in a way that no longer hides all the mutual exclusive definitions of toxicity.

They would have to go private to ‘fix themselves’ it’s that simple as a starting position.

Zuckerberg is positioning Facebook's stance as a bet that Trump winning a second term is at least somewhat likely. Why?

Google bet the farm on a Clinton win (Schmidt was on the campaign), and now they're staring down the barrel of infinite anti-trust investigations.

Amazon bet the farm on a Clinton win, and now they lost a giant cloud computing contract.

I think your analysis is a little over-simplified but I generally agree. Facebook is clearly betting on American conservatives retaining power given their "light handed" approach on political advertising. Progressive and even moderate politicians are calling for regulation or even a break-up which makes it in the best interest for Facebook to support conservatives.

Regardless, if American conservatives lose some or most power in November, Facebook will simply move the dump truck full of cash to the other side and sadly things won't change.

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