Employees pleaded with Facebook to stop letting politicians bend rules

John Lewis, a UK department store. It's not exactly a coop, but it's pretty close. The staff are referred to as "partners". They're in financial difficulties at the moment, I think, but that's not because workers participate in the company. They're one of the few UK department stores still standing. Waitrose (a John Lewis brand) is easily the classiest supermarket/grocery in the UK - people choose where to buy expensive homes based on how close the nearest Waitrose is.

It's easier to set up a private company than a joint-stock corporation, and it's easier to set up a joint-stock corporation than a cooperative. It should be easiest to set up a cooperative, rather than hardest.

Oh - and there's the Coop Bank. Wait - that went broke due to dreadful mismanagement, and was bought by a VC outfit. So how come they're still allowed to call themselves that?

There's still a number of local chains of fairly small grocers, operating as autonomous members of the Cooperative Wholesale Society (the bank was originally part of the CWS). These are decent shops, well-run at a local level, but I'm not impressed by their head-office management. If you take their discount card, then you get to participate in board elections and so on. It's a "customer coop".

Obviously in this context we shouldn’t assume that a co-op would ever get to FB size. Forgoing some profit for the sake of ethics is the reason why the idea was floated here. But I would expect co-ops to make it to say, Redhat levels at least.

Can’t help but think it’s the lack of capital and connections that going for-profit with VC backing would get a company with a more traditional corporate structure.

The issue is that Facebook has very effective strategies to deal with this, both in terms of money and social structure. We all know that they pay lucratively, but Facebook is also filled to the brim with people either working on non-core products that can think they’re doing no harm, and people who think they’re making a positive difference. I think the combination of these things is keeping Facebook ahead of their reputation problems with potential sources of labor, although I wouldn’t wager a guess how long it can last.

Facebook is a very different sort of devil. To the point where all of the other devils are afraid of them. Even I didn’t realize how insane these people were, and continue to be. They’d be toast by now, if they hadn’t been able to successfully hijack the governmental and political machines to keep themselves seen as “essential” and worthy of protection — there’s that Death Star at work.

I know, I need to write about this in more detail. It’s on my to-do list. I have spent a long time waiting to see if society would figure out what a giant scam these people were — I am pleasantly surprised. You’ve got to remember that, 10 years ago, people wanted to nominate those lunatics for the Nobel Peace Prize. Being an enemy of Facebook was equivalent to being an enemy of the state.

But you seem to have forgotten that there were also people within FB, including board members within Zuckerberg’s inner circle, who saw the internal data and used it to buy the political equivalent of out-of-the-money options on Trump winning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

There’s quite a history there:

https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/824/public-forum-do...

It’s pretty hard to argue Facebook wasn’t an intended public forum. Literally you have your public wall and your newsfeed, etc.

The good thing is that the algorithms optimize for a clear and transparent politically neutral goal: make money.

No that distinction doesn't make any sense because that isn't the goddamned law. What is with the nonsensical misinformation making up some emotionally charged meaningless bullshit standard and declaring it so?

It makes as much sense as demanding that I never reverse my car because I put maple syrup on my pancakes!

No one has content forced on them. You don't have to use Facebook. You don't have to read the news.

Do we complain about the front-page of the NYT? Or CNN?

> "give the megaphone to the people that enrage the most and silence the rest"

The silencing is coming from one direction. And the resistance to the silencing, is justifying the silencers.

I have zero faith in some faceless megacorp deciding for me what is and is not “dangerous misinformation”.

Your argument is essentially stating that people are cattle and require benevolent dictators filtering their media consumption for their own benefit.

You do realize YouTube promotes that content?

“Disinformation” is a Marxist / Soviet / Maoist term used to discredit the truth that hurts them. There may be legitimate “disinformation”, but who determines that?

That’s why we have free speech, the US entrusted people to decide. Generally, people can, what’s currently being censored are often not lies.

This made sense a few years ago when realistically government was the only historical large consumer and regulator of speech.

Now that we have another large entity, we need to have a think about what to do. This isn't an endorsement or rebuke of current rules, just a statement that we need to have a debate about this that incorporates what we've learned.

Facebook and other big techs do not have to support free speech. They can openly say: we don't support free speech and people who disagree with our employees should just shut up! Of course they don't want to do that. They choose to support the general idea of free speech and they can define their terms. People can criticize them. They can also declare they ban everyone who criticize them, but of course they don't want to do that too.

Why all those complexity? Because the American public support the general idea of free speech. Some Facebook employees' wishful thinking that they can control the speech on the largest social media platform won't work.

>People don't want freedom of speech, they want freedom from repercussions of speech.

To use a pointed example, I'm pretty sure Trump just wants to be able to tweet again with all the repercussions that brings.

Trust me, if the government mandated Facebook couldn’t censor, advisors would still advertise there. They have no other option to reach people, that’s actually the reason it should be considered the town square.

The idea of the paper is that they look for parts in one f the proteins of covid-19 that are not in other covirus they already know. Then they searched for these new parts in the proteins of other virus, and one of this parts "is" in HIV.

The first problem is that the fragment is too short. So there is a huge chance to find it somewhere just by luck. It's like if I edit may comment and add the word "revenge", and then someone claims I copied that word from a famous book that uses it.

The second problem, is that they didn't find exact matches, the examples they got are very short but have gasp in the middle. It's much easier to find a coincidence. It's like if I edit may comment and add the word "revenue", and then someone claims I copied that word from a famous book that uses "revenge" instead.