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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints.

Nobody's going to sympathize too much with a company that brought its woes upon itself. If you can't handle moderating three billion people, don't put yourself in the position of trying to moderate three billion people.

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So what are you suggesting? For Facebook to decide to just turn off the lights one day? There is evidently market for a social network like Facebook so I’m sure another would step in before too long with the same problem.

There is plenty they could do. Just today it’s been reported that Facebook themselves “have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why [hate] speech flourish[es] on the platform”[0]

FB doesn’t need to shut down, they just need to give a fuck about the safety of their users and the societies in which they live.

It’s been evident to anyone who cares to look that this has not been the case.

[0] “Facebook admits site appears hardwired for misinformation, memo reveals” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/25/facebook-...

Federate. We went from walled gardens of the late 1980s and early 1990s to the federated Internet, but now we're back to walled gardens. It takes a diversity of approaches to solve the diversity of problems, and that's only really possible with separate organizations all competing to solve those problems for different niches.

How is that not what is happening right now? Would you recommend users take responsibility for being custodians of their own data? If so, how will the average user keep that data safe without resources and understanding of the threats their data face?

Facebook is a monolith with 3 billion users. Instead they could be a technology vendor helping communities of manageable sizes run their own private/public social networks with their own moderation and data privacy needs, along with other companies, federated across geographic, corporate, and community lines using standardized protocols, like the standardized international telephone system or email.

Isnt that Facebook Groups? Interoperability is part of upcoming regulations which will facilitate the standards you mention. FB is still a company, not a nationalised infrastructure.

Limit the amount of active users until they prove they can safely run a platform of a certain size. It's like how buildings have max occupancy levels in case of fires. If a club is super popular, they don't get to cram in as many people as they can then claim "it's really hard to safely run a club with this many people, so you can't hold us accountable" whenever people are trampled to death trying to get to the exits during an emergency.

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