Facebook Faces a Public Relations Crisis. What About a Legal One?

This is a gross distortion of the problem. Facebook has been caught actively promoting conspiracy theories and societal discord because it increases engagement (in my case it drove me from the site but the plural of anecdote is not data). Most recently it was reported that “angry” reactions were weighted five times more than “likes”.

This is not just backseat driving concerns, Facebook’s also is a major driver of our culture and societal values whether we like it or not. Nor is it Monday-morning quarterbacking, these concerns were raised by Facebook’s own employees. To let them abuse our social harmony for ad revenue is short sighted.

It's a very different story for Facebook. Since their content is user-submitted and they aren't the government, they're actually able to legally censor content if they want to. Additionally, their users are largely not the press and not even Americans, so they don't have the same constitutional rights anyway.

So there may or may not be some sort of moral equivalence here, but there are very obvious reasons they don't get the same treatment legally and from Congress.

Finally, Facebook lied in Congressional hearings. As far as I know, neither Fox nor CNN has done that. This is the Al Capone tax evasion they always get people on. It's why Michael Flynn went to prison and why Bill Clinton got impeached. You can get away with all manner of outrageous and immoral but not necessarily illegal behavior if you just tell the truth about it under oath.

It is about making FB responsible for the consequences of the content they promote.

FB has long ago gone far past the point of being any kind of neutral carrier, yet they cling to the carrier exemption like stink on a dead rat.

FB actively curates every shred of content by their criteria, and promotes or silences it accordingly; this is done on a scale orders of magnitude larger than any news organization.

The fact that FB's editorial criteria is entirely focused on their perceived path to profits, and not on any kind of moral compass or value to the society from which they extract value is also relevant.

FB's business model is to poison the common well for their own profit, and they literally DGAF if people get killed along they way, as they already have in Myanmar and other countries due to fanned hatred and ethnic cleansing, or in the US and EU from fomenting anti-vax conspiracy dezinformatsiya mania.

It is long past time to hold FB accountable for the consequences of their editorial decisions, just as any other publisher is responsible for their content. Just because the editing/curating is done algorithmically is no reason to evade responsibility.

If someone on Facebook says something blatantly slanderous / libelous, you can't sue anybody. Ditto with Youtube, etc. etc. So if you're going to say disinformation, its best to do it on Facebook.

EDIT: Downvotes? I'm sure everyone has heard the story of "Liars on Facebook / Amazon reviews / Yelp are killing my business". You literally can't win vs the liars on these platforms. FoxNews / CNN are legally not allowed to make libelous / slanderous claims. But go to Facebook / Amazon Reviews / Yelp (etc. etc.), and suddenly you see slander / libel / lies all over the place.

Because our laws are ineffective at policing that behavior on the internet.

No need, everything CNN puts out is the same for everyone and can be viewed by anyone.

Now we have the facebook `whistleblower` in Britain this week with her scripted performance calling for more state control over online speech. The ruling class want the power of free speech contained and the dominance of the traditional bourgeois fully restored.

The book `Revolt of the Public` goes into this in detail and it explains much of the upheaval we're seeing. I highly recommend it.

Alex Jones whistleblower: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/magazine/alex-jones-infow...

The worst of it is that there's a toxic cycle between the social media companies and the old media companies, especially talk radio. The old media companies produce outrage articles which circulate on social media to stir the culture war, producing fodder for more outrage articles.

There's no solution to the hate speech and incitement to violence problem that doesn't involve banning some conservative pundits, so this goes round and round.

(Have a look at which traditional media sources have been cited in mass shooter manifestoes, for example)

From what I've read in various places the concern isn't people leaving, but certain groups (mostly young demographics) not bothering to join. This means that user numbers are relatively stagnant and that active user numbers will be falling as will average engagement (or whatever marketers measure these days).

I've seen some evidence of this: younger members of my hobby groups are not on there, or are just because the group is and they don't use it for anything else but receiving group updates.

I've seen a few people point out that the MSM is actually mad because FB really has the same business model, they are just far more effective and profitable at implementing it. MSM has been pushing controversial stories for decades to boost their ratings, FB just used algorithms to do it rather than humans.

At its core this is about the traditional media's profit margins and cultural power being eaten up by FB and tech in general

There's a PR effort to manufacture a PR crisis... But by and large, it has seemed rather ineffective outside the filter bubble.

It seems like the news is trying to prescribe a reality, instead of describing it.

Nothing's going to change in any sort of official sense. Facebook will naturally decay while the rest of the company plans to leave it behind like a hermit crab crawling out of its shell to find a bigger one, as we are already witnessing with "Metaverse".

There's also the question of what "moving away from Facebook" means. Does it mean deleting your account? What if you check your messages once a month, are you still a Facebook user? Only Facebook really knows what impact this has had on their user base and they have every incentive to pick and choose metrics that paint them in the best light.

Then again FB could end up in the “thing bad --> ban it!” corner, but I doubt it.

but zuckerberg holds most of the voting shares?

So what you are proposing is going to be happening approximately never.

Equating "harm" to crime makes anything someone doesn't like at a given moment criminal.