I don't understand which of these accusations are actually breaking the law. They all imply that Facebook isn't being a Good Samaritan, but that isn't actually illegal.
This is why hearings like this are important.
You misunderstand: this isn't so much about enforcing existing laws, rather it's about advocating for new ones.
For example.- from what is being discussed - "Requiring Facebook to publicly disclose its internal research". -- either make all companies disclose internal research or none of them. You can't just pick and choose.
Now you aren't targeting Facebook, you're targeting all wealthy corporations.
Maybe $1B is too high. Maybe $1M is too low. Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot.
1. (formally "a near monopoly" instead of "a company" - edited for clarity)
Facebook is a near monopoly? In what? Ads? They're not even the biggest advertising company, Google is bigger.
"Social media"? There's Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Tiktok, Tumblr, Youtube and dozens of others.
Can you clarify what you mean by "near-monopoly" in this context?
I'll remove the mention of it being a near monopoly since that's really unnecessary for the main statement.
Thoroughly agree all social media should show more transparency on the kinds of things FB is alleged to be doing.
Now, you can go too far. You don't want to make every tech company disclose their research on, say, improved silicon layout algorithms. But if it involves harm to customers or the public, yes, they should have to disclose it.
Why not?
And it's certainly been done in the past, see the history of Standard Oil.
Actually we can just pick and choose. Targeting the largest actor has the most effect.
Our court system uses subpoenas all the time to get access to important information.
And right now, it seems that facebook has some important information that our lawmakers should know.
Misleading investors is a crime from what I understand, so if found guilty on that account, they did break the law. Now, if they will be found guilty is another matter. Personally I don't think they will even be prosecuted for it.
"Doing everything we can" is at least somewhat objective. If a contractor says he's painting your house as well as he can, when he's actually on vacation in Hawaii, that statement is clearly false.
The only way they could claim they are doing everything possible would be by not having a platform or by reviewing every post prior to people seeing it.
The alternative is we go the banhammer route, and as we learned with prohibition era, that had unintended/undesirable consequences.
Prohibition never banned a specific delivery mechanism but not the actual drug, so it's never been tried.
Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the USA (even moreso in countries where smoking is far more accepted widespread) so I don't believe this to be even remotely true.
What do you think FB's role is in that? Do you think the "algorithms" are to blame?
Seems to me that unmoderated online discussion will always be toxic. Take a look at the chan forums for an extreme, anonymous version of social media where there are no algorithms to blame.
When you bring the general public online and give them a platform to voice their insane ideas they never discussed before, you get the internet in 2021.
Combine that with the fact that until recently, people on the opposite sides of the political spectrum rarely interacted. The division was there, but it was masked by the inability to directly attack each other. Now, I can go on Twitter and argue all day with the other side in a thread below a Senator's tweet.
Unless you are suggesting Facebook begin heavily moderating what people say, there will be no other outcome until we as a society collectively learn to 1. Have empathy for others when conversing online, 2. Stop participating in discussions that make you feel terrible, and the classic, 3. Don't believe everything you read online.
It's fair enough to say that Facebook is only responsible for a significant part of this, as there's also Twitter, YouTube, Instagram (pre-acquisition), Snapchat, TikTok and so on, and there would be others if these did not exist. The root cause is smartphones, the Internet and cheap bandwidth & servers.
But in the context of regulation, finding out how to deal with this new weapon of communication, starting with a case study of the biggest seems like an excellent beginning.
I honestly think unregulated social media has the potential to do more damage than unregulated tobacco sales, if by regulation we mean "government-enforced rules". But I don't mean to frame it as a context; it seems obvious that both are a good idea.
Years of social media and misinformation resulted in an attempted coup and insurrection earlier this year, the major contributing factors of which are still ongoing. I don't think phillip-morris ever got that far.
Frankly, the Jan 6 episode is not all that different from the BLM riots last year, in that their causes are analogous and the sense of powerlessness led to rioting.
The point I was raising is that "Facebook = riot" is too simplistic an explanation. Moreover the contributing factors are not isolated to one event or political persuasion.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/historic-church-nea...
Middle-class and rich white people from politically-advantaged parts of the country, that famously powerless group.
This is relevant to the current discussion inasmuch as FB (and social media generally) may have contributed to, stoked and fomented said feelings of powerlessness for the sake of engagement / eyeballs / ad clicks.
Assuming general equivalency in manipulation of public opinion to hide their malfeasance,
the impact of that malfeasance is orders of magnitude worse for our society, democracy, and world culture.
If you have any doubt about this, you haven't looked at any of the reporting, not just from this latest data dump, but from any of the other whistle-blowing, leaks, third party investigations, etc.
It's not just that they bury and spin any internal findings which may compromise their ability to pursue "engagement," it's so so much worse.
Look at the documents. This whistleblower brought the receipts.
Their continued operations as a monolith represents an acute and active threat. They should be broken up and subjected to transparency requirements.
That's what you get when you pursue profit and power at the expense of social cohesion, functioning government, and in the case of many in harsh realities outside the US, assistance in brutal political suppression and worse.
Work for them? Quit. Do business with them? Don't. Think access to clients and relationships with them depend on participating in this ecosystem? It doesn't.
Break the monopoly.
As far as actual impact on thousands of lives, it's probably a tossup since Facebook has many means of ruining lives (psychological manipulation, distrust in government, pandemic misinformation, political misinformation). But I'd wager that Facebook has probably already caused way more harm than tobacco. It's hard to measure though.
Tendency is that the parent comment is correct and the proposed solutions are practically bretty bad.
HN is at its worse when fuming over Facebook, and comparing the tragedy caused by smoking companies with social media is a good example of how uninformed the site can get.
Was social media the cause for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda too?
Facebook had many internal whisteblowers that the platform was used to shape the public opinion and facilitate the genocide and choose to do nothing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
If a law was broken, it's be a judicial branch / trial. The topic of discussion here is what future laws should be.
Also Facebook reps lied to congress which is criminal. The studies show they clearly knew a lot more than they were admitting to about the impact they had and lied under oath.
Here, FB, if you listen to some of the commentary, is not doing 'enough' to combat 'hate' and 'disinformation'. In short, FB does not do enough about wrongthink to use 1984 terms.
Now, there are arguments to use against FB for the impact on society, but the fact that everyone appears to be surprised that company, gasp, chooses profit over society, is beyond hilarious. No fucking shit.
Facebook has applied some of the most heavy-handed and widespread politically motivated censorship that the west has ever seen. If anything, increasing this censorship is likely to increase cronyism and division more than anything.
And their censorship has often not been correct in the past, when being wrong caused real damage. E.g. the now mainstream lab leak hypothesis was censored in a way that may have delayed a more effective response.
They might be doing some things which are questionable ethically. But stopping that would require new laws. And that's very hard because you can't really make a case to target FB in particular (and not also a bunch of other harmful media). But other harmful media (eg Fox "news") is protected by the 1st amendment. And likely so is Facebook for that matter.
But pointing at unethical behaviour and pretending you're outraged is very in vogue. Doubly so in big tech.