EU antitrust official Vestager: We must act now against Facebook | Hacker News Reader

EU antitrust official Vestager: We must act now against Facebook

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- The EU parliament should first call Sophie Zhang to explain to the world how facebook is the dream platform for totalitarians around europe to control their own people

- Vestager should have acted on this a decade ago. But like most eurocrats they think that fines are going to solve the problem; they won't

The US understandably does not want to ruin the unbelievable unfair advantage that big tech has vs the old media, their legal immunity. Big tech is the US's golden goose , and with it they can control entire governments so what's not to love. But EU has no excuse for having allowed itself to become an intenrnet pariah

I disagree. I think any regulation would hit them the least compared to other internet platforms. This is confirmed by internal leaks as Facebook even wants regulatory capture. Mrs. Haugen and Mrs. Zhang probably don't have information relevant to the problem at all and basically suggested creating a ministry of truth. This is counter productive and backwards.

There is a trust crisis in media, but Facebook isn't the reason. Wrong information on the internet (oh no!) also isn't the reason. You would have been laughed at by 12 year olds if you suggested that 10 years ago. Worse, the 12 year olds would be correect...

The EU is an internet pariah because it would not allow for free platforms to be created. We have an encrusted media landscape that immediately destroys anything it doesn't really understand. I don't want that to continue and free information is a way to work against that. I have no interest on any EU body to dictate truth. That would only be sad.

What do russia, china korea have that Europe doesn't have? They have their own internet media

Aside from worse legal protection of platforms, I think part of it just has to do with convenience and in this case language specifically. In the beginning it was about the right place and time for a social network to be successful. There were more at first, but due to their nature people concentrated on a few big ones.

English has a low barrier for Europeans, it is significantly higher for Russians or Chinese. So many Europeans just used platforms of the Anglosphere. It made content even more interesting because there was more from different cultures. Of course I feel sorry for the Anglos that so many people can understand them now, but at least they have advantages for platforms like this.

I dont think so. the vast majority of people in my country and most european countries use facebook etc in their local language with their local friends. It's no different really with windows: They are also everywhere but russia doesnt have its own competitor.

for chrissake

* just fund some fediverse development as a public good

* make sure its user friendly and easy to setup

* force easy export of social graph

* use your mouthpiece to advertise that an alternative exists and is better for the health of digital life

* done

sometimes it is quite ok if the collective purpose (and purse) steps in and cuts runaway private enterprise to size. even the most red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists admit that corporate interests adapt to the legal and social sandbox they operate in.

stop talking. do

The EU loves wasting money on things like these. Obviously they never gain any traction (since this depends on millions of people moving to another platform that is worse), but since public money belongs to nobody...

An example of "wasting EU money" on fediverse development would be useful.

How can switching to social media that are less privacy invasive, less manipulative be "worse".

NB: It is obviously true that the public sector can waste money. Everybody has their favorite examples. This is not the time and topic to debate how to fix the public sector.

It wouldn't be useful because people wouldn't switch. It would be a lot of money spent on the development of a subpar software that nobody would use.

why don't you try, say mastodon, just for fun. its perfectly usable even though it has been built using many orders of magnitude less resources than these walled gardens

I don't see why I should try mastodon when twitter has way more users and the same moderation policies.

each mastodon instance has different moderation policies. you can setup you own instance and experiment.

you are free not change your mind about social media but please stop throwing around inaccuracies

I'm not entirely convinced that "the fediverse" is really the answer, but I do think that developing viable alternatives is. The same applies to Free Software and such in general; complaining about "Microsoft GitHub bad" is nice and all, but if all the Open Source alternatives are demonstrably worse then ... well ... (some of them are okay, but still lacking in various areas especially for more serious use, GitLab is a mess that barely works, and don't get me started about that atrocity of GNU Savannah).

Anyway, re: fediverse; I suspect that it will have the same problems as Facebook if it really takes off, if not worse. The reason there's no problems now is because basically, few people use or care about it, but once it takes off bad actors will start looking for ways to abuse/manipulate it and we'll be back where we started.

there are many issues around social media that are still unresolved and existing fediverse implementations are not necessarily more advanced in this respect.

but the transparency, evolvability, standards based architecture are all aspects that would much accelerate finding solutions

Perhaps; although I'm not so sure. Another story from yesterday which didn't take off much, but I thought was pretty good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010941

I don't really see federation improve on that all that much, but maybe I'm just lacking in imagination.

its a good read but remarkably it manages not to mention once the fediverse (and mastodon in particular) where alternate strategies are already facing empirical validation.

if they did do a more thorough research of how it is setup they would know that some very simple choices have huge calming effect: e.g., not showing the number of "likes" on the timeline and not allowing "comments" on reposts. and those are just tiny interventions in the scheme of things. having open source codebases that can be forked but still interoperate via activity pub means that a fragmentation, speciation, niche creation will happen organically which will further reduce the phenomenon of irrate digital mobs

its not like people don't have imagination, but a "system" that sucks in XX billions of profit per quarter acts as a black hole: any light-ray of hope is crushed back into its reality distortion field

How would you force the export of the social graph? There isn't an identifier that you can take elsewhere that isn't also private.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

Ironically, regulation would probably make the rise of any competitor unlikely. Forcing Facebook to sell or break up its entities would have an immediate net benefit, since the company couldn't share all the data across the entities without breaking some GDPR rules.

Why do people still believe that "competitors" will arise? After a sector becomes oligopoly, there's basically no way in for new players. It would require the invention of some new orthogonal technology, like what the internet did to TV, or like what battery cars (may) do.

There is tiktok for young people, probably even more relevant for the next generation because sharing social media with your parents might not be too desirable.

Something must be done, and this will be something, or not.

joke of the day

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