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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

As much as I loathe the "facebook is a private company that can do whatever they want" argument, I have to admit it applies here. If I owned a store, and some guy kept coming and showing customers how to not spend any money in my store, I'd kick that guy out of my store.

I very strongly dislike facebook and can't wait to watch it die, so I know comparing it to a store is a poor comparison. But at the end of the day, fb is a business, and if someone is using fb to try and hurt their business, they have the right to terminate that guy's accounts.

EDIT

My point here is not that we shouldn't point out bad things facebook does simply because it's "just business". I agree that the "they're a business" argument is just a deflection that derails the conversation into some weird business practice discussion, instead of all the bad things fb does.

My point is more that we should try to frame these things so that the headline isn't "facebook banned me". They ban people all the time and not that many people seem to care, and in this case, of course they banned this guy.

View on HN

Facebook certainly has the right to ban this extension, but then we can't take their leadership seriously when they claim that they care about their users' health and well-being over profits.

I.e. the point is the hypocrisy.

Oh yeah I agree 100%. I guess I should have also included that I have 0 faith in anything fb says, and that I believe any and all of their claims of "we care and we're working on it" are outright lies.

i.e. I'm so used to the hypocrisy that I don't really think about it, because everything they do is bad.

I agree, the whole "facebook has the right to do this" is a deflection that quickly derails the discussion.

It's not the point. The point is: Sure Facebook can do that, but the fact that they do shows us how dishonest the people working there are with all the claims they make.

Facebook has the right to do this, we have the right to call them out on it just the same.

> Facebook certainly has the right to ban this extension

Why? It's a Chrome extension. They can ban the user and the extension will rot. That seems like more than enough power.

Surely, the extension uses a public API. The extension acts on behalf of the end user. So, I think facebook can ban a particular API key (tied to a packaged extension), but they would have to ban all chrome extensions to get around someone taking the extension source and building their own.

So I think facebook can by disabling the API, but won't do that since there are extension that it does like.

Whether FB has legal grounds to go after users using such an extension would depend on the user terms, which I don't really know. It would be fairly egregious and risky for FB to do so.

But I think if someone were to open source such an extension, this someone probably does not him/herself expose to a legal risk (speaking as a non-lawyer, and not giving legal advice)

hypocrisy (along with taboos I guess) seem to be a necessary part of a functioning society.

Well, obviously.

People can wax poetic about freedom of speech, the right to bear arms etc.

But if there is a large separatist group that has historically wanted to destroy your country the first chance it gets, and members regularly commit violent acts to do it, would you really fight for the right to arm them all to the teeth, and then let them organize larger and larger rallies and shows of strength?

Freedom ain’t free, and sometimes the cost can be a little too high:

https://xkcd.com/1499/

and in a more costly, less forgiving environment, there is not enough abudnance of wealth so society becomes less free.

Neo-fascist autocracies here we go! (they're just cheaper)

Why do they have that right? Here's a car analogy - If I buy a Ford pick what right do they have to stop me doing donuts in it? Or maybe fitting a swimming pool in the back. Maybe I want to drive it around my ranch on fire. If an individual wants to use this software on their Facebook feed I really can't see what legal right FB have to prevent them. OTOH - something was probably "signed" in a EULA to prevent this.

Are you being obtuse on purpose?

Putting a swimming pool in your truck bed doesn't stop people from buying Fords.

Don’t worry, when cars will download more self-driving software, you can bet your butts it will restrict you from driving some places or in some manner.

Drone manufacturers already do so, you can’t fly drones within 50km of an airport or whatever, can’t fly them above 30 meters depending on where you are, and the software enforces this.

Books on Kindle and Movies on iTunes can be yanked away as you read or watch them.

Now, when it comes to software that isn’t even hosted on your computer, what do you expect?

I can't wait. Sadly I agree with you. This level of control is irresistible.

I think your argument is begging the question as it depends on a prior belief that Facebook is actually harmful. Replace Facebook with a gym membership, or a charity, or some other thing that one does not presume is harmful as the premise of their argument.

Would the leadership of a gym be compromised and hypocrites if they banned someone who used their gym to tell others that working out is harmful and they should stop exercising at the gym? Would banning that member indicate that the owners of the gym don't care about the health of their users and instead put profits over well being?

Your argument only works and sounds credible because most people on this site believe Facebook is harmful. If people don't share that belief, then it doesn't follow that Facebook is being hypocritical because they are banning someone who is using their product to defeat the product.

Lets say that a poorly designed gym wants to promote social interaction - so they build a cool down room with a small cafe that has a machine you need to swipe a card through every ten reps to continue using the exercise equipment. Some enterprising fellow builds a portable machine that will simulate the card swipe action but can be done at the actual exercise equipment.

This seems like a fairer analogy to me since this extension is dealing with a component facebook put in to drive "engagement" that is viewed by a lot of people as an anti-feature - some people like it: Miles, who hangs around the gym for the conversation, really likes the fact that he bumps into people more often in the cool-down room... but most people wish that feature had never been added.

Add all of that to the fact that Facebook is the only tool Facebook allows on Facebook (so there are no competing gyms) and the tool becomes even more justifiable. Is it still quite legal for Facebook to C&D this guy - absolutely - but they're definitely not acting in their user's best interest.

Sure if the gym is poorly designed and causing actual harm, then you can attack the gym on the basis of being poorly designed and causing harm.

Attacking the gym on the basis that its owners do not want patrons who are using the very gym as a means of compromising it is not a valid argument as to why the gym's owners are hypocrites, causing harm, and putting profits above the well being of their customers.

In my scenario the gym isn't causing actual harm - it's just forcing users to use it in a manner that they consider inefficient - this is the same as the actual extension we're talking about. You can manually unfollow everyone through facebook's UI - but it is cumbersome and difficult.

I think there are some really strong reasons why facebook actually does cause actual harm and I'm not certain why you're being so defensive over that point - but my argument doesn't even involve facebook "causing harm" - it's just involves them having a terrible UX.

>Your argument only works and sounds credible because most people on this site believe Facebook is harmful. If people don't share that belief, then it doesn't follow that Facebook is being hypocritical because they are banning someone who is using their product to defeat the product.

I've been seeing this idea a lot on HN, that we're just in this echo chamber and the general public doesn't have the same opinion. This notion isn't supported by the data[1]:

> 57% believe Facebook is “primarily a harm to society” and 71% believe the company “prioritizes profits, even if it might cause societal harm.”

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/07/23/mark-zu...

This smells funny: I feel like those numbers don't jive with the portion of the population who use Facebook.

Looking at the poll, there were only a thousand "registered voters" that were meant to be a representative population of the America, which I'm gonna give a hard pass.

It tracks pretty well with my personal experience. I have plenty of non-tech friends who generally aren't following Facebook's every move, but there is a strong across-the-board sentiment that FB is a malevolent entity.

But not all for the same reason. Part of them think FB is evil because they only care about engagement and profits regardless of the outcome to society. And the other part thinks FB is biased and is censoring conservatives and pushing too liberal of an agenda.

Also there are liberals convinced that FB got Trump elected.

1,000 is more than enough people to make a measurement if they are selected sufficiently randomly. You only need to poll ~400 people to have a 5% margin of error for a binomial variable across all of the US (with 95% confidence). 1100 makes that margin 3%.

Sure, but I would argue that 1,000 registered voters is going to make that a lot harder, not to mention it's actually "1000 registered voters who self selected to go through a 20 minute poll about facebook," which is why they said "no estimates of sampling error can be calculated."

https://accountabletech.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Accou...

your rebuttal depends on the premise that people don't view facebook as harmful, but you yourself have not yet presented any data to that effect -- criticizing the study saying that people view it as harmful isn't the same as providing your own study saying they don't

tl;dr his evidence, even if we assume the issues you bring up are significant, outweighs your lack of any, so I am leaning in his favor

Speaking from a survey design point of view, he's more correct here. Especially with topics like this, the self selection effect and subsequent sampling bias can be very strong.

The evidence here is sufficiently poor to provide minimal value. Poorly collected data can often be worse than no data, as it can mislead you.

> your rebuttal depends on the premise that people don't view facebook as harmful.

No it doesn't. It depends on the fact that I don't know the opinions of other people at all. But I can infer that the selection biases of "registered voters" (which I think is a far bigger confounding factor than anyone is giving it credit for), and self-selection make it too difficult to extrapolate to the population of US citizens.

I also don't know. So I have to look to the evidence.

On the no-harm side, I see nothing.

On the harm side, I see a study about which someone has raised some concerns.

I understand you have concerns about the study design, but I'm not confident that they affect the outcome in such a way that the study provided zero evidence for Facebook being viewed as harmful.

Is there a study which doesn't run into the same concerns which says the opposite of this one?

I think it's important to note that the study is not about whether or not Facebook was harmful, but whether the average person thinks Facebook is harmful (or rather if the average registered voter who would volunteer to spend 20 minutes on a survey on Facebook thinks Facebook is harmful). It was just a survey of public opinion.

I personally also think Facebook is harmful.

It is possible to think a product is terrible and harms society and still use it. A lot of commenters on HN make that argument: Yea, I know their products are bad, but I simply can't stop using them because of [not so great] Reasons.

How do those favorability numbers compare to other large companies? Do people see Facebook as better or worse than, let's say, ExxonMobil or Bank of America?

>I think your argument is begging the question as it depends on a prior belief that Facebook is actually harmful.

Considering that genocide has been organized on it? Yes. It's absolutely harmful.

Knives have been used to murder people. They are absolutely harmful.

Your grossly reductionist argument doesn't really add much to the discussion.

You are very quick to dismiss a completely valid point, people are careful with sharp knives, and for example, generally don't let children use them, they aren't allowed on airplanes etc.

How many people have a similar view of facebook as dangerous?

It's the type of use that makes a knife dangerous. Everyday people use knives to prepare and eat food but don't think what they are doing is dangerous.

Everyone respects how dangerous knives at at least - you know not to play around with them and you know how sharp their edges are. People don't (I really really hope) realize how many lives they're endangering by passing on misinformation. America is one of the most individualistic and tech literate countries in the world and it's suffering terribly during this pandemic from absolutely atrocious vaccination numbers.

All the knives in the world aren't under the real-time control of a single entity.

Should we ban all telecoms too? I mean people used phones on networks to commit genocide as well. While we're at it, we should ban iPhones as well because they used them to communicate. What a stupid argument.

Facebook is harmful, but this is a bad argument for why. The knife analogy is a good counter example.

I disagree that it depends on such a prior belief -- the fact is that users seemed to have very positive feedback to the extension. As the extension has been taken down, it's not possible to see the reviews, but I've linked some other praises [1][2][3].

If Facebook was really acting in their users interests, a look at the extension's reviews would have immediately told them that this benefited at least some users. And even if the extension conflicted with the terms of service, the right thing to do would be to have some employee at Facebook work with the extension author to make the extension comply, or implement such a feature as a first party feature.

But what I assume could have happened is some department of Facebook trawls through app stores looking for unauthorized references to Facebook. There is no oversight as to whether an extension benefits users or not -- Facebook just sends a cease & desist all the same. That IMO is neglectful -- for every app takedown, there should be careful review as to whether it actually harms anyone. The fact that that review did not happen shows that FB does not care about the user.

The more cynical possibility is that someone at Facebook realized that this was hurting their revenue stream.

[1] https://browser-addons.com/unfollow-everything-for-facebook/

[2] https://twitter.com/gchaslot/status/1410843427164598275?lang...

[3] https://crxcavator.io/report/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenkliddajo... (4.3/5 rating)

It would beg the question if it were trying to show that Facebook is harmful. But it's not, it's trying to show that Facebook doesn't care that it is harmful when profits are at stake. The fact that it is harmful has already been demonstrated by Facebook (re: leaked studies).

As long as a computer decides where your time and energy is going as conduit for communication, it has become a moral arbiter. Facebook is harmful. Computers can't do this; they don't breathe.

Unfollowing everything restores a user's agency when using the service, which is where it should be.

The belief really doesn't matter in light of what we know now, which is that Facebook itself believed that there was harm and proceeded anyway.

A better analogy than those I've seen. Facebook is like a wildly popular hookah spot, probably partially due to the fact that this hookah spot is knowingly putting crack in the hookah (in a world where maybe not everyone knows how bad crack is.)

In comes a guy who, yes against all the "rules", hands out mouthpieces that filter out the crack. How bad is this guy now? How do we feel about him?

Would the gym threaten litigation to a former member who writes blog against fitness?

I'm fine with Facebook closing this developer's account, I'm not fine with the developer being forced to make his tool disappear, under the threat of litigation.

Too much working out at the gym is harmful. It’s only a problem for an insignificant number of people. In the author’s own words:

> But by unfollowing everything, you eliminate your News Feed. This leaves you free to use Facebook without the feed, or to more actively curate it by refollowing only those friends and groups whose posts you really want to see.

Cuts the crap and reduces the addiction, but still leaves Facebook in place. Like any addictive behavior, it’s not wrong on its own.

>we can't take their leadership seriously when they claim that they care about their users' health and well-being over profits.

Can we ever take a company that says this seriously? Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I never do.

Basically every Fortune 500 company is guilty of this. Most corporations loyalties go Shareholders, Employees, Government, Customers in that order. It is more shocking to me that anyone is surprised Facebook puts profit over people. I would be surprised if they *Didn't* do that.

Asking honestly, curious to know what would do you think is a good response from the company now? Considering, a few months ago, the company took down high profile accounts and content on its platform because it deemed something dangerous and lot of people were mad that company did that and it was censorship. Now the people are mad at the company because they didn't do enough moderation to ensure user health and well being. The company tried launching a version of the product with higher parental controls to let parents take more control, and people were mad and made the company stop those efforts. At this point in the company, what would you think is an acceptable response? Is there even a response that makes everyone happy?

You know most people want Facebook to go down. If they are on the right it's because of the censorship which prevents them from using misinformation to win votes. On the left it's the misinformation.

I am not confident that "make everyone happy", either equally, or even in varying amounts, should even be the primary objective here

a good response would be one that starts with respectable principles and values and proceeds according to those, even when it costs money

of course, that won't happen voluntarily, because money

In a company that operates worldwide, which country's or culture's principles and values should take precedence?

a good start would be for them to pick any that they can consistently apply and then seek feedback, but ideally it would explicitly describe what the trade-offs are between user safety and profits

at the moment, the only principles they consistently apply seem to be: protect zuckerberg first, company profits second, everything else third, but that's just my perception -- they should make clear what their principles are so we can judge whether or not they consistently stick to them, and whether or not we need legislation to nudge those priorities around for the good of society

> Facebook certainly has the right to ban this extension

Surely they can fight against it by changing how the platform works, or ban it if it was hosted somewhere on FB, or ban the author because he wrote something that hits their core business, but sending a cease and desist for an extension that is hosted elsewhere is like a tobacco company sending C&D letters to people selling anti smoking patches or telling publicly that smoking is bad for health. WTF!, this is bullying plain and simple; I already stay away from everything related to FB as much as I can (I knew about the recent FB outage by the evening news, didn't even turn on the tablet with Whatsapp that day), but I will try hard to turn that nearly 0.1% use to 0%.

> I.e. the point is the hypocrisy.

Exactly. At least Google removed the "Do no evil" part from their mission.

It's not entirely clear to me that FB would have any right to ban the extension. They could attempt to keep users from using it through policies or detection, but it's running by user choice on user computers in user browsers.

I suspect in the US this would have been handled differently but loser pays against a company that can afford to inflate costs by millions per week to make an example....

I'm not sure there is hypocrisy. They can and should care about both. Without users there is no profit.

The article tries to downplay what I think is the core issue: He added some functionality to the plug-in that sent statistics back to a server he controlled. He claims the data collection was minimal for most users but those who opted in had a lot more information collected. It appears everyone who used the plug-in had some amount of data collected by the author.

He’s trying to spin this as Facebook trying to bury an anti-addiction tool, but I think it’s a simple case of someone getting caught writing a plugging that automates API requests and collects data from Facebook users to a 3rd-party server.

I don’t think he’d be in trouble if he simply wrote an adblocker-style plugin that simply hid the feed. It was the automated spamming of the API and the 3rd-party data collection that likely got him in trouble.

I don't mean to shock you but as someone who worked on a game that interacted with facebook data - everyone in the world is harvesting some information from facebook when they're making calls to their API. Sometimes it's as "innocent" as spamming your friends with requests to play (or enabling the user to do that for in-game rewards!) and sometimes it's cambridge analytica. No application in the world just wants to altruistically be helpful by having a facebook integration - I can't even imagine what that'd look like it'd probably, honestly, be just not having a facebook integration at all.

There are many applications that only request logged in user’s name and email address to be populated in the registration form. I myself implemented this many times without “harvesting” anything else.

You mean for SSO functionality? Is that log in optional and a method for users to potentially preserve their progress across multiple devices?

> had some amount of data collected

Ratio of followed people to total connections.

I think it makes no sense to ban an extension for that, and I don't think that's why they banned it. Instead, it could have threatened their bottom line, that's the problem.

It's reasonable important to get some tiny insight in if one's extension works or not.

They could have communicated with him and the University about what data to gather, for those who opted in.

It's a red herring. Here's what Facebook actually wrote as the reason for the ban[1]:

> Facebook has gathered evidence that your Chrome extension "Unfollow Everything for Facebook" facilitates unauthorized functionality on Facebook. Specifically, your extension automates action on Facebook, including mass following and unfollowing of Friends, Pages, and Groups. Your extension also impermissibly makes use of Facebook's trademarks. These activities violate Facebook's terms.

[1]https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

I suspect he did not use the API and rather emulated actions in browser. Action was performed on behalf of the user and data scope he collected was limited to one user using extension, which theoretically equivalent to a user’s execution of a custom script in js console.

If what you claim is true:

Users send THEIR FB data to him. That's their choice...FB sent data to the Users, they forwarded it to him. He's not hacking Facebook's data.

What they imply is not true at all.

The app author was banned specifically for the functionality of the app, and not any data collection[`].

[1]https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

>The article tries to downplay what I think is the core issue

Because that's just what you think is the core issue (without having any basis to do so), and not what Facebook thinks is the core issue.

How do I know? Well, here's what the actual cease-and-desist letter[1] says right at the top:

> Facebook has gathered evidence that your Chrome extension "Unfollow Everything for Facebook" facilitates unauthorized functionality on Facebook. Specifically, your extension automates action on Facebook, including mass following and unfollowing of Friends, Pages, and Groups. Your extension also impermissibly makes use of Facebook's trademarks. These activities violate Facebook's terms.

So, please, let's stop with pulling things out of thin air to make Facebook look better. They wrote in no unclear terms that they perma-banned the author for the functionality of this app.

[1]https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

> I think it’s a simple case of someone getting caught writing a plugging that automates API requests and collects data from Facebook users

>It was the automated spamming of the API and the 3rd-party data collection that likely got him in trouble

Hmm, I wonder why you'd think that, versus believing that author's "spin" that Facebook is "trying to" bury an anti-addiction tool. Let's see what the cease-and-desist letter[1] says:

Oh.

It turns out, Facebook specifically buried an anti-addiction tool for being an anti-addiction tool; and the comment that you made was an unsubstantiated and needless attack on the author.

Comments like that don't belong here.

[1]https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

I'm not totally grokking the "FB is a store" premise.

Mainly because if FB was a store, it'd be a store where the patrons are not buying stuff from the store, but are themselves the product.

i.e. FB offers a messaging/contact service for "free" - with the caveat being that FB gets to glean startling - and valuable - amounts of information about its patrons.

Replace “store” with “mall”, “club”, or “bar” and you have the same result.

Facebook is hosting on their servers that they own and/or lease which gives them a right to exclude, much like a store, bar, club or mall owner.

Does it? It isn’t obvious. Especially if talking about legislation around the world.

Sorry but I flatly don’t respect legal systems that don’t respect property rights. In the Anglo-American tradition and countries which are also Anglo-descended or Anglo-influenced and some other entirely separate legal systems as well, property rights are a big deal.

And a core fundamental principle of property rights is the right to exclude.

The UK legal system, at least, recognises property rights, but offers varying degrees of exclusion.

For example, the right to exclude certain classes of people is different renting a room of your house vs. renting a whole apartment.

The ability to exclude is again different for service providers. It sometimes also depends on their size. e.g. larger banks are obliged to provide a free basic bank account.

If social media monopolies are seen as excluding people without good reason, their monopoly status might attract attention for regulation in the same manner.

You’ll find it similar in America but that doesn’t prevent for-cause exclusion if the tenant or account holder damages the property owner or his property.

The damages in this case are more abstract, but Facebook arguably has cause to exclude. That said I am much more open to debate the merits of this particular exclusion rather than whether Facebook can exclude at all.

I’m also going to go out in a limb and point out that Facebook does not in fact have a social media monopoly, certainly not in the United States which would be the jurisdiction here because in order for that to be true, everything from Twitter, TikTok and iMessage to WeChat and YouTube and Snapchat would simply have to not exist.

Social networks tend to have overlapping user bases, with people on both Facebook and Twitter, or Facebook and Snapchat, or some other combination. Nobody has yet convinced me where and how Facebook has any sort of monopoly because they’re too focused on the large user base and that in itself is just not a good argument. Feel free to take a stab at it though.

Until you become a monopoly, then it becomes more complex.

You have to make that case first, and as Facebook goes and as I’ve said repeatedly elsewhere in this thread, I’m not convinced they’re anything of the sort. Prove me wrong, and then go tell the FTC because they’re having a hard time taking Facebook to court over this very issue.

It kinda makes sense to me. Anyone is allowed into bars (21+ of course) without any expectation of making a purchase. The bar is still allowed to kick people out

These bricks-and-mortar analogies don’t work at all, because you can still stand outside the cigarette shop, protest Philip Morris, and hand out flyers.

Once deplatformed, there’s no equivalent line-of-sight.

I mean, you're seeing their article on Slate. It's not like they've been banned from the entire internet or all news media.

Actually, no, cigarette advertising has been banned in many countries.

I think the Mall analogy is downright perfect.

The mall is a beautiful, shiny, clean building where you go to hang out with your friends. The shops in the mall are there to lure you to go buy stuff. You aren't paying the mall, but by being there, you're likely to buy something at J. Crew or the food court.

If the mall had an anti-mall lunatic out front, they'd surely remove them too.

In some festering neo-Randite authoritarian’s wet dreams of corporate dystopia, sure.

When did so many people internalise the fiction of companies as their new feudal overlord?

Is this an AI generated comment?

No more so than "The mall is a beautiful, shiny, clean building where you go to hang out with your friends".

Except that FB is a monopoly platform that has become too important to ignore.

I have foregone quite a lot of social things because I refuse to use it. That much is fine by me but it is not fine for most people. “Most people,” by FB’s own numbers, are a captive audience. They do not get to decide if they go shopping in the mall.

This is why Cory Doctorow’s point on forcing FB to open up is the most useful one. It is the most straightforward way to turn FB into a utility.

Turning Facebook into a utility effectively turns it into something it isn’t: a government approved monopoly with special rights and privileges. Perversely Facebook then becomes another tool for people with actual power to abuse in their lawmaking capacity in ways they simply couldn’t now. If your goal is to defang Facebook, that’s probably not what you want.

You have a temporary problem socializing in some circumstances without Facebook, which is entirely solvable by you alone. Facebook is nowhere near a monopoly on its core functions, but certain groups, scenes or networks of people may choose to use it exclusively. You are being screwed over by their choices and blaming Facebook for it.

Also I don’t read Doctorow. No reason in particular, but if you want to cite him, cite him properly and bring his words here into the discussion.

> Perversely Facebook then becomes another tool for people with actual power to abuse in their lawmaking capacity in ways they simply couldn’t now.

This needs explanation.

If Facebook were forced to open their API, then it would be possible to not use their news feed. "Unfollow everyone" would then be the default. That in turn allows people to build on their "platform" without entertaining any of the "viral" stuff. In particular, everyone who uses FB because it's easy to organize "events" on it won't have to get snagged in all the toxic things that are going on. That is effectively defanging the danger that it currently poses to society.

At the end of the day, organizers are trying to organize. It is hard to ignore FB's reach in this manner. You cannot blame organizers for having to use FB. They are subject to market competition and may not have much of a choice in the platforms they use.

So if I’m understanding you correctly, you want to strip mine the valuable parts of Facebook’s business with government force?

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not backing you on this. That’s neither a just nor good use of government power.

> This needs explanation.

An information platform as a utility citizens are assumed or expected to have under the thumb of bureaucrats is a valuable propaganda tool in the hands of any government.

> Except that FB is a monopoly platform that has become too important to ignore.

I haven't had a facebook since 2012 and there are exactly 0 things I've noticed missing out on because of it. This includes all 4 years of college and moving states multiple times during this timeframe.

LinkedIn feels far more essential to me unfortunately.

This is a TERRIBLE idea. Turning Facebook into a government entity, (or even making an org to regulate it), is as anti-American as it is unconstitutional. Take away 230 protection status and if the company survives great, otherwise another one will take its place.

I don't care what you say, any person CAN live without Facebook. Yes it might be painful for some, but in a free market society, some company (most likely many disparate companies), will cover those needs.

How is Facebook a monopoly platform? Competitors like Twitter, Clubhouse and Signal have flourished under their incompetence. If our basis for a monopoly was "a captive audience" then Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft need to get dragged into this discussion, since they've been engaging in that kind of unfair business for decades longer than Facebook has.

So it's such a powerful monopoly that you don't use it? Imagine if some gas station was a monopoly, it would be much harder to stop that. I don't use facebook either but i simply message people or they message me if they want to do something.

Except in some countries, Facebook is basically the only store in town. It's a monopoly. It's like the monopoly happened on its own. Facebook spent so much money making sure they are the only store in town.

So a couple of questions immediately spring to mind.

1. Which countries are these?

2. If we were to take that as a given, do these countries see that as a problem?

3. What would be their remedy, in your eyes, if an American corporation is found to have a monopoly in their jurisdiction but not in the United States?

I don't know about others, but in Vietnam this is the case. It was the universal go-to tool for everything, used by anyone, both countryside and in the city.

So is this a problem and what is their remedy?

When answering, mind that the Rule of Law is not particularly high in Vietnam to begin with.

I don't disagree with you at all, but just to play devil's advocate, I suppose the argument could be made that Facebook has basically created a near-monopoly in the social media space, and if that's the case maybe they should be viewed as a "utility" than a regular unregulated business. For example, I don't think Con Edison [1] could kick me off my electricity (assuming I was paying my bill), even if I handed out pamphlets saying how to use less power, since Con Edison is a regulated utility.

Obviously this isn't a great comparison, you could make a much stronger argument for a "necessity" of electricity than a platform to share photos with friends, but that argument could be made that because of the ubiquity of Facebook (and subsidiaries), maybe they should be a free speech zone.

[1] NYC's biggest power company.

Let's turn Google search into a utility first. I think most people use it more often than FB.

If Facebook bans me, I can still use Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn/TikTok/YouTube/WordPress/my own website. If Con Edison bans me, there are literally zero legal ways for me to make electricity come out of my wall sockets.

That's fair, Con Edison has an actual monopoly (more or less, it's weird and you can license third-party power), while Facebook just has a plurality of social media attention. Hell, I didn't even have a Facebook until last week when I bought my Oculus Quest (though I used a fake name and a burner email address), so clearly it's not vital.

As I said before, i agree with the OP, I was just trying to entertain a different point of view.

In what way on Earth is Facebook a near-monopoly?

TikTok and YouTube are also huge social networks.

"facebook is a private company that can do whatever they want" – as much as i like the argument, i don't think it applies here. In the US being banned by one or few bug tech companies is almost similar to being banned by USPS, or by a store chains like safeway, walgreens or cvs. This should not be taken lightly and there should be legal protection against bans like this.

His activity of developing the tool was outside of facebook use as a user. Its ok if they ban his dev account, or the app(if it was a fb app) or try to block it.

Ideally, such cases should be tested in court, but there is such a huge imbalance between opponents, that it seems UK system is inadequate in equalizing it.

The author, as I see it based entirely on this one article, likely wasn't trying to "hurt their business," unless (lol) their business is unhealthy addiction. Building on your example, imagine your store was of the liquor variety, and someone placed a flier for the local AA meeting on the bulletin board. I doubt you would remove it.

I can still find adblockers in Google search. Google blocking those sites would rightly cause a lot of people to get angry over censorship and look for alternative search engines. I see no reason to not get angry when big corporations do things you don't agree with, it is what ultimately causes them to fall and give us alternatives.

Being angry about it isn't the same thing as arguing that we should make it illegal.

A lot of what FB is doing here, if the story is as described, is clearly illegal. The problem is that FB is too huge for the individual to get into a legal battle with.

It is not illegal to ban someone from using your product, (assuming they are not being discriminated against as a protected class).

Facebook is essentially a utility as governments use it as one of the primary ways to communicate with their citizens. Banning someone from Facebook, in the US, is unconstitutional.

First of all, Facebook is not a utility. No matter what you think, it is literally not classified a utility at this time.

Second, just because governments, companies, or people choose to use it to communicate, does not mean it is a utility. There is a choice and many, many alternatives to Facebook. Utility status is reserved for things like power water and gas, (even internet in many places), as there are physical barriers to choice.

Third, it is not unconstitutional for utilities to ban customers in the United States.

If it represents the sole method of communication by some government entity, I can see a case being made that every citizen has a right to a "read only" (maybe even read only, read once?) minimized level of access, at some explicit cost to the government entity using the platform (offloading liability from the company and onboarding accountability with the backing of law. )

Facebook is obviously not a utility, in the US at least. It's also not "just" a private entity. It's a novel thing for which we don't have an existing legal framework in which to capture all the nuanced uses, rights, responsibilities, and liabilities.

Facebook has taken on the role of managing the distribution of information to billions of people. It handles communications between groups and individuals. Given how critical those activities are to a healthy, liberal, free society, we should take steps to protect the rights and duties of individual users and platforms. Maybe we'll coalesce into a roughly cooperative country sometime in the future an accomplish that.

>Facebook has taken on the role of managing the distribution of information to billions of people. It handles communications between groups and individuals. Given how critical those activities are to a healthy, liberal, free society, we should take steps to protect the rights and duties of individual users and platforms. Maybe we'll coalesce into a roughly cooperative country sometime in the future an accomplish that.

Facebook has specifically designated itself as a platform, not a content provider. IF what you are saying is true, we need to remove Section 230 protection and force Facebook to be accountable for all of its content.

Personally I think there are countless alternatives to Facebook and trying to nationalize into a utility, or regulate it with an agency will only serve to foment authoritarianism.

I don't think they should be responsible for the content, except in how they distribute the content. The timelines, labeling, presentation, promotion, and suppression of user generated content are the tools they use to maximize engagement and advertisement value.

If someone posts a pirated copy of a movie, Facebook is obviously not responsible for piracy. That's on the individual. If Facebook promoted the post, did something so that a million people saw it instead of a few hundred then that amplification is something they should be held responsible for. The vocabulary of legal and ethical models of previous xcommunication technology doesn't fully apply to social media.

We need laws to specifically call out the misuses of social media algorithms and control systems. We already have a good framework for the content of speech, so allowing "whatever is federally legal" seems to me to be a reasonable constraint on platforms, with a reasonably defined minimum level of user distribution control (you can post to people that subscribe to your feed, but the platform doesn't have to index or make your content discoverable, maybe. ) Curation and manipulation of content beyond what the user is responsible for seems a reasonable line for liability, to me.

The societal problem is the amplified negative interactions, creating feedback loops of doom and dissension.

Then again, decentralization and federation kicks a lot of these issues to the curb, so maybe the next generation of social platforms will get rid of the issues for us.

If governments want to do that then it's their choice. They could also make a website, use tv, use twitter, etc

What specifically is illegal?

> As much as I loathe the "facebook is a private company that can do whatever they want" argument, I have to admit it applies here. If I owned a store, and some guy kept coming and showing customers how to not spend any money in my store, I'd kick that guy out of my store.

Saying he "came and showed" implies he was doing this on Facebook, but he was publishing a Chrome extension. This is more like McDonalds blacklisting you because, in your job as a nutritionist, you gave people strategies for reducing their fast food intake.

It's a browser extension, not Facebook itself. They banned him for showing other people how to do something on their own computers.

The tool doesn't stop people from using facebook, it just makes their usage more productive. Like RES for reddit or other third party tooling that makes life easier for users, especially power users. Personally I probably wouldn't have stopped using facebook if I knew about this approach to cleaning out the junk. Plus the tool isn't even going as far as something like RES. the tool doesnt' add or remove any utility that isn't already there, it just automates an otherwise manual and painstaking process.

Fact is the argument works both ways. A person can't stay logically consistent while saying "it's a private company they can do what they want" in the case of politics but then denouncing that same company when it takes an adverse action purely out of its own interest.

I, for one, don't hate Facebook. Facebook, Instagram, and all of it is a reflection of society. Naturally we're pretty slow to react to any problem, so it's taken this long for a larger fragment of society to accept that social media is a problem. The next step is for all of us to admit that Zuck & co. aren't the real bad guys; while they profiteer off the psychological warfare (profiteers will always exist), we spent years falling for their tactics over and over. Fool us dozens of times, shame on us.

Facebook is a merely the logical consequence of late-stage capitalism—its evil nature is a feature not a bug.

they're being criticized for their hypocrisy, not for doing anything they're legally disallowed from doing

thus, they can do whatever they want, including banning racists and hiding secret internal research showing they're amplifying racists, but only the second one is hypocritical given their claimed (almost satirically so, at this point) values of safety-before-profit

But that's not what happened. Someone standing in front of a shop telling people how to avoid buying more than they really want. The company would obviously have the right to ban the person from their store. Instead they threatened the person to sue (with huge financial implications) demand that he never talks about the shop again and never comes close. That is not something a normal shop can and should be able to do.

First being outside the store isn't the stores property and anyway i don't know how that would translate to the internet.

Second, companies sue individuals for defamation all the time. They can also get restraining order, claim harassment, etc

> The company would obviously have the right to ban the person from their store.

Really? I don't think this would be legal, at least in the United States.

If they were causing a disturbance inside the store, sure.

Who is claiming Facebook doesn’t have a right to remove users? Why do you feel the need to argue a point that nobody is making?

We all know what Facebook is allowed to do. Here we are discussing what Facebook SHOULD be doing, and how they can avoid being loathsome hypocrites.

I get your metaphor but a store doesn't follow you 24/7 and keeps nagging you to check it. Unless it's Amazon.

At least with Amazon you're spending tangible things: money + time (browsing) so you can feel the dent in your wallet/credit card eventually, which signals you to take it easy.

With Facebook most people spend countless hours and there's no party telling you to chill out. Everything is enforcing you to stay on the platform. Even Netflix has some a screen popping up after 2-3 hours of binging to make sure you're still watching, giving some friction to the consumer.

There's no noticable friction built into Facebook.

This reminded me on how nice Netflix was when it started and how obnoxious it has become. Just like Amazon and Facebook. Small starts, nice things. Then it starts being mildly annoying, then it just intrudes everywhere in your life (like your other browsing tabs and what not).

Netflix was nice because there were no ads. At the same time can I binge on a series without being irked every x minutes if I'm still there or not? Maybe I am, maybe I am not, maybe I am chilling with my SO, it's none of their damn business and at the same time it doesn't do anything helpful except nag you.

Do you view Apple as correct when it prevented companies from notifying customers about the 30% cut on digital services for purchases and subscriptions made through the App Store? If not where do you draw the line?

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/8/28/21405140/app...

Sure, they have the right to terminate his account.

But to demand removal of the tool, demand he never makes another tool, and to threaten ruinous litigation if he doesn't comply, even though they know it's illegal to do so?

That goes well beyond shopkeepers rights.

I can tell people how to avoid sending mail, but the post still has to ship my letters. At some point some infrastructure becomes a utility and has to be treated as such. A universal login for other services and messaging at some point of concentration reaches that point. But it is a tough field to regulate, as we most likely haven't reached a peak of technological development in that space and regulation in developing fields is hard.

No. It's more like someone who advises people on responsible liquor consumption, and then gets barred from the liquor store. And also FB threatened legal action against the creator to remove the app, which is outrageous. Using the liquor store analogy, it's like the Liquor store then seeks to coerce the advocate to stop publishing advice on responsible drinking, because the owner of the store wants its customers to get sloshed 24 hours a day. It's simply not right.

While Facebook has a right to bar someone for inappropriate use of its service, Facebook has no right to bar someone due to advocacy work being done outside of it (and the Unfollow app just helps people do what Facebook itself allows its users to do, that being to unfollow friends and groups without unfriending them -- it's not encouraging anything illegal).

Facebook is a monopoly. It should be better regulated. Its actions are completely irresponsible.

The calculus here is moral, not one of contract minutiae.

You're right. The root of this problem isn't Facebook. It's the fact that private media companies are in control of what should be a peer to peer conversation between people.

There is no way to fix social media. If we moderate it too much, it's "censorship." If we don't then the engagement algorithms will drive mass indoctrination into crazy ideologies that have high virality. If we do try to eliminate disinformation, who decides what is and is not correct? There's no solution to these problems because media -- mediation -- is the problem.

there are solutions more complex than "moderate a lot" and "moderate a little"

facebook could, for example, remove racist stuff a lot, and anti-racist stuff less, and then ignore the racists who complain, because they're racists

I prefer to argue the same thing by saying that we recognize this is a rational expected behavior of any entity developed enough that it looks after itself.

Similarly to other lines of reasoning critizizing specifically facebook for "knowing they can be harmful but choosing to believe they can also be positive-good (useful)". This behavior is not exclusive to Facebook; all corporations are the same, and some have done humanity far worse, yet they're still around (why?). It's unreasonable to single-out facebook in this regard.

And the answer is "Facebook should NOT have the right to do it".

Facebook has made itself a public utility. And public utilities should be nationalized.

We'll. I wouldn't want to compare Facebook to a store, If anything Facebook is an equivalent of a drug store and drugs should always be restricted due to the negative effects they bring about on their consumers. Facebook by-law must display a banner written "Facebook is harmful for your mental health" and children should require parental supervision at all time.

I honestly wonder about this exact scenario with the likes of business reviews on Google/Yelp.

It’s like letting somebody hang their words on the front door of your business and as a business owner you have no power at all to do anything about it.

One company had to spent 6 months trying to get a review taken down that accused one of its female executives of having an affair.

The problem isn't that they can do whatever they want, it's that governments side with them more often than not. It's the existence of laws that protect them instead of protecting their users. Without this government support, their threats wouldn't have any teeth, and so adversarial interoperability would flourish.

IMO the thesis of the "Facebook is a private company" argument is that moderating or banning people isn't violating some fundamental right to freedom of speech. It's not to say that they should be immune from criticism for doing so.

I think the problem with this argument is that Facebook isn't "just" a store. For many people, it can't be avoided. Businesses rely on facebook for advertisement, creating business pages, running promotions, offering support, and engaging with customers/users.

People rely on facebook for access to sometimes critical resources (think about how many emergency relief efforts require you to use facebook). Marketplace, etc. Identity management.

Being banned from facebook isn't like being banned from any one store, it's increasingly becoming more like losing access to your identification, payment information, bank card, or passport.

For companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google which are becoming so completely integrated with the fabric of society, governments should regulate how and when they can restrict access.

Agree, on both loathing FB and that they are within their rights to kick this guy off their product.

That said, congress should have him testify about his experiences, and the relationship to FB's income stream.

After they kicked the guy out of the store, they told him that for the rest of his life he can't help anyone else use the store less, because he was once in the store

If I owned a telephone company and people complained about telephones I would do... nothing. Because it is none of my fucking business I guess.

Apparently you weren't there when FB had APIs, Farmville et al, and got rich on people developing things on their "plarform".

That depends on whether you see Facebook more as a small store or as a telephony company.

Yeah it’s a bit like your a big tobacco company and someone is selling nicotine patches.

Yeah, as long as they get literally no money through contracting with the government

Facebook is closer to a government or empire than a shop

The problem is these social media platforms are so big, they represent our only practical public space for societal discourse. These are ubiquitous and fundamental services in the modern era. They need to be treated as utilities and common carriers. We can’t just let unfair discrimination and censorship hide behind claims of private ownership for this kind of platform with that kind of reach.

When you have literally billions of users, calling yourself a private company is disingenuous.

That's a horrible analogy.

This is like being banned from a store because someone publishes a blog that publicizes store discounts and then also having that store threaten sue you so you can't even write about their discounts.

There is no reason to defend Facebook hete. People should have a right to modify their web browsers and help other people modify their web browsers.

This is a false equivalence. Facebook is a monopoly.

If you owned the only store in the country (or the store that had 70% or more of the market), it would be outrageous to assert a right to toss people out for their opinions.

Monopolists must not be allowed the same leeway as ordinary businesses. This is a lesson we already learned the hard way many times.

Monopolies must be held to a much higher standard, which they must meet or be broken up.

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