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ThePadawan

> published September 21, 2020

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/facebook-denies-it-will-pu...

> "We of course won’t [shut down in Europe]"

They apparently immediately backed down again (on September 22nd).

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That’s way too bad. There needs to be more outrage toward the power FB is misusing.

People don't use Facebook against their will but many are forced to comply to GDRP even though they oppose it. Your outrage is misplaced. The press competes with Facebook, they have a direct incentive to paint them as a Goliath fighting against the journalist class' political allies. Step back for a second and it's obvious that the actual power lies with, well power.

Is “the media” stalking every person they can with an established history of misusing that information and selling it and access to those people to hostiles? No. The two are not the same.

Edit-We’re going through a period of media outlets and whole media segments going bankrupt and out of business. Meanwhile FB is the F in FAANG stocks-amongst the most valuable companies on the earth.

Are advertisement cookies now considered "stalking"? The news media does engage in _actual_ stalking for stories. And no, Facebook doesn't actually sell user data, no matter how much their competitors like to repeat it.

Facebook revenues are EUR 70 B / year, tax receipts in the European Union (EU-28) are around EUR 6,000 B / year. Facebook is a gnat, but the press somehow manages to convince people that the former is a larger threat than the latter because it's not elected.

The products are built to be addictive. How is that free-will and choice when you’re building something to pray on the weaknesses of human natural instincts? “Going viral” by promoting outrage and social destabilization, but rebranding it as superior to the spirit of privacy protection measures like GDPR. That behavior is very dangerous to social progress and stability, of which there’s no care or accounting for in quarterly earnings that drive the incentives for this rhetoric.

There is no sense in which Facebook is inherently bound by the values and interests of its customers (either as individuals or in groups).

Given their power in mediating human-human communications at every scale, It would be an act of colossal self-harm to allow them to act opaquely and without constraint.

The exact nature of oversight and constraint is an evolving question, but I'm very confident the right answer isn't “none”.

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