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Comment by tqi | Hacker News Reader

How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?

For starters, it would create a more level playing field to allow alternative products by companies with different values to flourish, rather than having them acquired before having a chance to become competitive.

Look at WhatsApp, founded by an idealistic person whose product was shaped by his experience living under an oppressive government and who succeeded wildly under those values. But no one is going to turn down 14 billion dollars, so it gets absorbed and starts to slowly adopt the same scummy values of Facebook. That purchase clearly shouldn’t have been approved.

I don't think our government cares about any of that. They've turned a blind eye to app-store extortion for the better part of a decade, and they've made it clear that persecuting a domestic company like that is the last thing they want to do: and of course it is. Our government has nothing to lose from Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon leading the pack. If anything, it makes their job a whole lot easier with relation to surveillance and regulation.

I'm not even American and don't live in the US, but I can't see why any government would undermine it's own national companies when they are big players in the international markets, especially when facing competition from (potentially) state-backed competitors. Breaking up utilities? Sure, they operate only domestically, there's little to lose in terms of power projection.

But TikTok is already absolutely enormous and would sweep up everything in the same way fb does. Breaking up Facebook also does nothing to change misinformation spread through Twitter and YouTube. The natural breakup points for Facebook also leave Facebook and Instagram in tact.

You can do that by mass censorship. We already have massive squads of minimum wage people combing through every post on the web in order to delete things, so just pull that into a regulatory agency instead of letting social networks regulate themselves. We could call it the Department of Truth. If you want to scrub the internet, it's actually pretty easy. Put literal cops on every message board, make every board record ips and block VPNs, watch every tor node, root every phone.

The only hard part is getting a majority of people to think that's a good idea, or at least to stay silent about it. If you look at history, though, it's actually not so hard. It'll probably happen eventually, although depending on your belief system, you might be upset at the administration that ends up with those abilities.

This isn't about that, it's about allowing more room for competitors in the market. If there's any relation, it would be that facebook wouldn't be able to by itself dictate acceptable speech (against its will, of course; if facebook had its way, it would only censor posts about facebook.)

What if we just want to break up Facebook for our enjoyment? It's legal to do so and we can do it. I can't remember where I heard that argument. I think it was some tech CEO (or maybe all of them).

> How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?

I think that attitude is the root of our current political morass. The primary motivation is the desire to hurt those that we dislike/view as The Other, and we'll happily bend any logic or principles it takes to justify it.

I think your attitude allows Facebooks

> How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?

It reduces the influence that a monolithic Facebook can bring to bear against its critics in Congress.

It also puts existential risk on the table. Fining Facebook out of existence is, presently, political suicide. Not only does it hit a massive slice of the electorate, it leaves them with no alternative.

Shutting down one of several social media platforms, on the other hand, where user data is given a chance to migrate prior to the servers being turned off (but after shareholders have been wiped out), isn't out of the question.

The problem has never, ever been that the legislature faces too much criticism. The "influnce" they have complained about for decades against them is red-faced anger that the scale dares to call them fat, that the mirror makes them look ugly.

Yes good point. If FB were less politically powerful, then they wouldn't be able to stop the good people in congress from regulating what people say on the internet. That would clearly solve the problem! The government has never been involved in spreading misinformation, so I don't see how this could go wrong.

> if FB were less politically powerful, then they wouldn't be able to stop the good people in congress from regulating what people say on the internet

Would encourage anyone thinking like this to pause and consider if this reaction is coming from a place of reason or a sense that they are coming for our team.

If Mark Zuckerberg is the person you trust to protect your rights over our elected government, you've traded freedom for security and will likely get neither. Congress would love to pass laws restricting what people say on Facebook. Unfortunately, it can't because of the First Amendment. Facebook, on the other hand, is legally unconstrained.

More pointedly, Facebook is fine if Congress tries to regulate speech on its platform. It can point to D.C. and take the blame off its back. What Facebook is not fine with is Congress regulating all the other parts of its organization that it would rather remain hidden. In case it needs to be said, those parts aren't working in your interest.

Perhaps those aren't the problems this aims to solve

What are the problems then?

> What are the problems then?

As stated in the review, and presumably in the book: that "the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government."

The problem that trust-busting is meant to solve is the bigness, and its impact on the government, innovation, and consumer markets.

That seems tautological. How does bigness harm consumers in this case?

> How does bigness harm consumers in this case?

It's up to the book to make that case. My point is that the issues you describe (misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content) are not mentioned among the problems that trust-busting is meant to solve. Other problems are mentioned.

my guess would be that it will allows other companies that offer competing services to compete against facebook's comparable service while not having to compete against all of facebook's services. Then the market can decide which features it prefers in each service, presumably not the ones listed in the op.

I agree. The only thing that will come after breaking up (destroying) Facebook is that everyone will move to Chinese/Russian platforms.

Generation Z is almost entirely on TikTok so Facebook/Instagram doesn't have a monopoly on them.

It makes misinformation less legible to the press by splitting it up across silos.

"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?"

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