> After all, they're not in business to influence politics.
Dude, I personally know people who work in Facebook's own lobbying department. I would be very surprised if Twitter didn't have the same thing.
Dude, I personally know people who work in Facebook's own lobbying department. I would be very surprised if Twitter didn't have the same thing.
First, I think "benign commercial interests" are not. At least not at that scale. Lobbying proves the point. Tech/media is not even the big example. Military industry, banking, mining and healthcare are all far more intertwined with government. Their most important activity is lobbying. That said, tech lobbying still pretty big and the combination of lobbying and controlling a media powerhouse is worse than just lobbying.
More importantly, Facebook (etc), being a massive media channel has lots of power and influence just by being facebook. Again, commercial interests aren't necessarily benign.
FB might tweak the feed to make sure covid-19 rumour mills or deliberate misinformation campaigns don't get out of hand. That might be a good decision (or not), but it isn't a benign decision. It demonstrates that commercial interests, feeds and such are not neutral. They are deliberate, opinionated and that opinion affects reality.
There are two questions that the tiktok case brings up: "how much power?" and "who's power." Zuck isn't as scary as Xi, hence the different response to tiktok. OTOH, Facebook have the same sort of power as tiktok, just a lot more of it.
EDIT: Mark Zuckerberg had to appear before Congress in 2018 specifically to address Facebook disseminating propaganda!
Exactly. Whereas with TikTok the government is pushing the propaganda.
"The chinese government use tiktok for propaganda" is an effective call to action. Once you form an opinion on tiktok, the FB equivalents will start to to stand out.
The CCP use tiktok for propaganda. Lobbying firms & individual candidates use FB for campaign. In terms of transparency, manipulativeness, political impact, morals and such... not that different.
Tiktok made sure to suppress HK protests, because they're directly controlled by the ccp. Many US firms (eg NBA) were also influenced by the CCPs desire to suppress support of the HK protest. Tiktok hired and greased many Democratic & Republican "staffers" to lobby for them. They grease pockets. Don't all large companies do that? Tiktok shares your data with the ccp. Facebook sells your data, sometimes to political actors. Meanwhile, the NSA help themselves.
The differences between tiktok and FB may get a ball rolling. ITLT, the similarities will come into play.
It's really hard to tell that you meant, "the public perception of Facebook is..." (that it's not in the business of influencing politics).
Republican interests channelled through russian oligarch friends made TRUMP possible.
Let's see what happens on the coming elections...
Presumably the GP is implying that TikTok would be working even closer with groups like CA, to the point with partnering with them instead of kicking them off the platform as Facebook did.