I have a controversial view, correct me if I am wrong. I think democracy has a major flaw, because, most people are selfish/unfair and most likely vote for populist leaders. But, it has been so far saved by media because of the elitist journalists who want the world to be a fair place and were able to convince people to reject populist leaders.
With social media, these journalists are bypassed and the populist leaders are able to appeal to the people's selfish tendencies directly. This is an irreversible change and I expect the world to go backwards by several decades.
It all has to do with education. Educated people are naturally more skeptical of their media and what the sources are.
Before social media, it was admitted a lot harder for unreliable sources to get an audience, so that skepticism was less critical.
But I think it will come back. Education is the antidote to social media news. Deity willing, the next government will see that and push for better education.
> Educated people are naturally more skeptical of their media and what the sources are.
I have not found that to be the case and I think you should scrutinize that assumption very carefully.
Perhaps a majority of intellectuals in the West thought the Soviet Union was a step forward - again and again it's the 'smart' people who get the big things wrong.
No. It was obvious at the time that the USSR was bad news. George Orwell was writing about the dystopian nature of Soviet society in 1948.
It had become obvious decades earlier that the Russian revolution had gone horribly wrong, after western powers realised that Soviet lumber exports were coming from forced labour camps.
And the fact that a Russian revolution would go wrong in this way was obvious even at the turn of the century. Lenin was put on a train in Switzerland and sent back to Russia specifically to cause chaos.
Going even further back, it was a constant frustration of Marx that the working classes in the UK (where he lived) stubbornly refused to rise in violent revolution. His ideology was well discussed in his own time but somehow actual working people were too smart to believe in it. Only intellectuals far removed from the real lower classes thought his theories were good.
tl;dr it's widely known that academics and other intellectuals couldn't accept the disastrous nature of communism long after supposedly more "stupid" people had fully understood the nature of Marxist ideology.
Even shorter tl;dr - education often seems to make people dumber in important ways, not smarter.
At the same time education is encouraging people to not trust the mainstream. There's a lot of reasons for that, thanks to tabloids and seemingly credible papers going bananas once in a while. So educated people do their own research. Which sometimes goes wrong.
For example, a lot of conspiracy theorists are educated people. Their research just took an interesting turn at one point or another.
@bachbach's example of pro-Soviet intellectuals is a good one as well. There was a similar downtown on the other side of the wall too. Quite a few anti-soviet dissidents turned into conspiracy theorists later on. In both cases, people were happy to rebel and look for alternatives and their education did help them. But eventually their curiosity took them too far.
Truly effective education involves teaching people how to do their research in a way that stresses objectivity and apply a high degree of scrutiny to any argument. It gives people a toolkit for critical thinking, and how to assess the quality of one argument against another. We don't just need education, we education that places a renewed emphasis on critical thinking skills.
Yup. But some people think that education would make people flock back to mainstream media and listening to talking heads. Which is not going to happen. And that's good.
Once you start evaluating arguments and doing your own research, a lot of difference opinions emerge. Which sometimes are labeled as fake news, even though they're not truly fake. If everyone did assess all news, most crazy fake news would be gone. Which is awesome. But many of non-mainstream opinions that technically are not fake would survive. Which is good too in my books, but some people wouldn't agree.
The tech platform companies are all competing for mindshare in the education market as well. In fact, a FB apologist once went so far as to suggest that the best antidote to FB is readily available FB in classrooms; this way students will learn to be less distracted by it. The problem with this is that even the mere availability of the resource is a source of distraction.
The mechanism you're describing also made the non-populist politicians complacent, they forgot (if they ever learned) how to articulate why their way is actually better. See for an example the completely anemic campaigns fought by Hillary Clinton and the remain side in the brexit referendum. Those should not have been hard battles to fight.
Oh those battles were won hands down. It's just that if the other side will switch to outright dishonesty that it gets a lot harder to get the voters to know what's going on.
I would say that your assumption about the nature of humans is a construct of the society you have grown up in and the institutions which have shaped the behavior of your fellow-citizens.
Democracy's flaws have been studied for thousands of years. You can find a very detailed critique from Plato for example. All of his arguments are still true today. The problem is that there really isn't a better alternative when it comes to letting people self-govern on a big scale. Plato's solution was a government of the ones who had the complete truth, but he himself was doubtful whether such an administration would be realistic and flawless.
And now the best proxy for 'the complete truth' seems to be the entrepreneur who built the largest AI enabled platform with the most engaged users. As long as that person is benevolent, we are all OK?
The Greek historian Polybius (ca. 200 BCE) observed characteristic weaknesses of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. He theorized that the Roman mixed constitution in which powers were separated was a key factor in the success and stability of Rome. His thought influenced the American founders both directly and indirectly.
It's interesting to observe how the institutional and technological changes since the American founding, and the systemic problems we easily note, align with his discussion. He theorized that each of the unmixed systems had weaknesses that led them to eventually be supplanted by another form, initially well-administered, which too would in time succumb to its inherent weaknesses. The mixed form resisted this cycle. So to the extent that the polity "un-mixes" the arrangement of powers, e.g. making the Senate directly elected instead of chosen by state legislatures without making a corresponding anti-democratic change, the system becomes more exposed to the cyclic risks associated with the unmixed state that was favored.
In ancient athens it seems people were quite aware and wary of this. Aristotle considered elections a non-meritocratic, an oligarchic process. In Athens, most of the offices were appointed by lot, and only some of the highest offices were elected. Worth noting that the word democracy had the meaning of "power to the many", which is different from its modern definition as "majoritocracy"
In ancient Athens only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military duties were able to vote, roughly 20% of the population. This seems pretty oligarchic today but it was a massive improvement in the council of elders that used to rule before that.
The framers of the US Constitution were well aware of this problem, which is one reason why they introduced features like separation of powers. (I.e., to create power centers that would compete with each other.)
What about the Obama elections? Both of them were hailed for their pioneering use of SM to motivate and influence the electorate. I get i that the Trump win has shaken everyone but it's possible that social media could do little to stop it.
What did I deduce from today’s hearing:
1. The weird question/answer format was probably a negotiated condition of Zuckerberg appearing.
2. This underlines the power of Zuckerberg: setting conditions for the EU Parliament is quite a show of force.
3. This condition was probably set because Zuckerberg is a very poor spokesperson. The end of the session was quite frankly bizarre when Zuckerberg refused to take questions.
4. There is quite clearly a mood for heavy regulation and anti-trust action to break-up the monopoly. Zuckerberg’s odd behavior will result in the sharpening of EU swords, not their scabbarding.
5. I have no idea what this type of activity will mean for EU/US relations. The US will be keen to protect homegrown global monopolies. The EU must break them before they break Europe.
5.
That’s a really good question. I guess one of the options would be to require social media companies to obtain a licence, subject to their non-monopolistic activities.
My guess is that there will be a FB sell-off today. Other countries will see the opportunity to raise a high tax rate on a natural monopoly, and FB returns will be tax-adjusted.
There are no sovereign companies. For instance, the NY financial regulations matter so much across the world because a large portion of the financial world’s business is headquartered there. But more so, governments set legal standards. If those standards are not met then products/services are outlawed. I’m pretty sure the EU could simply ban browsing to IPs associated with FB, as an example. I think the largest companies of the world want to believe they operate in some atmosphere above any individual government. But that’s not the case. They operate under the jurisdiction of at least all of the worlds largest governments, contemporaneously.
So they declare ownership over all FB assets in their nation and the data of their citizens.
Really though, I think maybe the act of combining data to form contiguous blocks of PII tied to online personas may need to be made illegal outside of some official, state database. Ie the government gives you a citizen entry and only they may produce such information. So you simply may not have access to certain PII.
They can't. They can attempt to block access to the EU market in a situation where they require a break-up of Facebook and Facebook refuses to comply. It would require the EU to implement a draconian Chinese firewall to bring into full effect.
The EU is 250m of Facebook's 2.2 billion users. They could easily drop all EU business if they needed to (the business operations within the EU is the easiest aspect for the EU regulators to target). Their profitability would drop from ~$23 billion for 2018 to $19 billion or so at worst. That'd be made-up for with one year of growth. Once Facebook's business operations in the EU are shut down, Facebook could continue to operate the user accounts and leave it to the EU to attempt to censor what their population is allowed to access online.
Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.
If userbase was their only concern, Facebook would likely not have responded to the EU Parliament's request for interview.
Facebook is still registered in Ireland, since 2010, which is still in the EU, making Facebook an entity subject to them. (Ireland has also expressed a desire to rejoin the EU, post-Brexit).
Quite a few countries in the EU have already ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, and the EU last year made it easier for ISPs to do so. So the capability is there, and there's precedent. TPB responded by decentralising but that isn't an option for Facebook, they wouldn't dare to anything to get round a continental ban: and even if they did it would have to be 100% effective, if 50% of people can't figure out how to change DNS settings to get around ISP blocks then the other 50% will likely migrate to another platform too.
I said to a friend a few weeks ago that I actually want to see FB get blocked in Europe. The shitshow would be glorious.
At which point does the shit show turn around and reflect bad on the EU though? I m no fan or user of facebook but it would be too serious a restriction that only dictators have taken so far. EU's problems with facebook so far are taxation and privacy. The second is presumably solved by GDPR. Even if the first one is solved somehow, i feel these MEPs were more concerned about political implications.
If facebook does not submit to the law, then the EU's options are to either block facebook and seize their assets or let everyone know that its a free for all and laws dont matter. If you want a solid rule of law, you cant just let people openly flaunt it
Would it? Facebook has 2.2 billion users out of 7 billion people total, and not all of those users are worth the same to Facebook. The US and the EU have more valuable users solely because those users can spend more money and are more valuable to advertisers. A lot of people on the planet who arent on facebook anymore cant even run facebook.
Its not like everyone has a new flagship phone every year, and its not like everyone on the planet has internet access. China is also not gonna be an easy target for them to crack since China pushes their own countries industries first.
I really dont believe that facebook could just grow to paper over their loss of the entire EU at this point
>Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.
I don't like China's censorship either, but if the other option is for foreign companies to come in and abuse your citizens, then blocking out those companies doesn't seem like a terrible idea
>"The US will be keen to protect homegrown global monopolies."
I don't believe the US will be "keen" to protect FB if that's in fact what you are stating here. There is just as much concern about FB in the US as there is in the EU, even if the political will to act might be blunted in the US by lobbyists and money.
I would argue that FB isn't a "US monopoly" per se but a global monopoly.
I doubt many US politicians or citizens are concerned enough about Facebook to take any meaningful action. A bill like the EU's GDPR would not even get a vote in the US congress.
And if you had actually looked at those user numbers you would have seen that Europe has far more FB users than the US. Europe has 370 million FB users compared to 239 million in the US:
Not OP but I'm also very skeptical something like GDPR would pass in the US. While people may be concerned about social media, polls show the majority of people are not in support of adding more regulation on the industry:
WSJ/NBC Poll respondents say social media platforms are…
regulated too much: 14%
have the right amount of regulation: 37%
not regulated enough: 37%
It's for a good reason too - consumers have noticed they have more choices and freedom than in industries that are highly regulated by the gov. Laws like GDPR would make large swaths of business models useless - such as free games or apps the rely on targeted advertising. Since under GDPR, you cannot ask someone to either allow ads to be personalized or pay for the app (it has to be without detriment), tons of tools people otherwise enjoy would suddenly become paid only or disappear. Not to mention the effect it would have on the startup economy - it would be a big deal. Can't see it happen here.
And if you actually read the WSJ article it states:
>"Some 37% of people in the new survey said social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not regulated enough, while the same share said the sites have the right amount of government regulation, and 14% said there was too much regulation."
So its actually pretty evenly split between the "not regulated enough" and "have the right amount of regulation."
I think its fair to say that the 14% that said "there was too much regulation" of social media when in fact there is virtually none are simply doctrinaire anti-regulation Republicans who don't support regulation of any kind anywhere. So the fact that they were specifically being asked specifically about social media is basically irrelevant.
Gerrymandering creates the impression US citizens don't care as much - in fact, they've been cut out of the loop. You're definitely right about the majority of U.S. politicians, their gerrymandered districts are safe; they need only worry about donors' interests.
The EU, by trying to impose their will on the rest of the world, will see their power slip through their hands. The EU as a political structure is tenuous at best, with too much control being wielded by a few members. All it will take to break up the EU is a better deal extended to a few weaker members. Trump may decide to do this just to watch Europe burn.
I think you make a good point. I think many people came to the same conclusion after he testified before the Senate in the US. I think it's it quite damaging to dissemble the way he does by moving his mouth without ever answering the question that was asked. And to do this for hour after hour an even in response to simple "yes" or "no" questions is nothing short of a farce.
I have to wonder what his employees back in Menlo Park think when they watch their CEO shoveling such obvious bullshit.
He would have to make a quantum leap in his development. If he keeps running scripts to address real people he'll fare at best as good as Hillary Clinton.
Yeah he made no effort to appease the audience or answer any pointed question. He rushed to leave, while during his US hearings he offered to stay longer a number of times. I think he was agitated by the questions in the end, even though he knows he ll probably face more regulation in europe.
It might be the case that he has already discounted that possibility and simply doesn't care if EU wants to ban facebook anymore.
"Guy Verhofstadt, who leads the Liberal ALDE group, says the activity of fictional social media company the Circle in a 2014 novel seems "very near to the reality" of Facebook's role today."
"German Christian democrat MEP Manfred Weber, who leads the centre-right EPP group, ... asks Mark Zuckerberg why the company has not stopped access to user data to all developers, not just Cambridge Analytica.
He says he would be interested in his arguments as to why, given Facebook's power, its algorithms should not be made public.
He also asks Mr Zuckerberg to name a competitor it has in Europe, and asks him to "convince him" with arguments as to why his company is not a monopoly that should be broken up."
On issues raised relating to competition, [Zuckerberg] says that communication is a "competitive space" where people have "many choices".
"It feels like there are new competitors coming up every day," he notes.
I liked how Guy Verhofstadt called him out on that, that he has apologised 15 or 16 times in the past years. I’m annoyed that I cannot vote for the guy for EP elections because he lives in another country, one of the many weird things about EU politics, but this man deserves a medal.
If you read (and believe) Yanis Varoufakis' book "Adults in the Room", he's a part of the group of assholes who was determined to bend Greece to their will, mainly that "austerity will work!", never mind the economic squeeze means hungry, homeless people and the rise of suicides.
Currently I love how the EU is making the British Brexit team look like a bunch of clowns, but the EU is no saintly organization, the way they couldn't let go of austerity politics made a lot of people suffer, and has indeed lead to the rise of populism as well (the right wing in France, Germany, and populism in Italy).
I was very surprised and suddenly pulled back into a feeling of tangible hope when around the end of the plenary session a French / Belgian member of the parliament went mad about unanswered questions.
He said: " ... There are a number of questions that have been put by other colleagues that I want an answer to. That said, I'm anxious about this brave new world that Mr. Zuckerberg has presented us -- a brave new world what tens and tens and tens of thousands of private people are scrutinizing us and are saying “what is fake news” and “what is not fake news”, “what is hate speech” and “what is not hate speech”. Don't you think that this is a public task?"
He very subtly mentioned that the anti-trust bodies could mobilized to look into this if questions wouldn't be answered [1] -- https://youtu.be/bVoE_rb5g5k?t=5285.
[1] "... And competition for example: an anti-trust thing, that's important! Do we need -- I think we're gonna push our anti trust agency to go into this if there is no good answer to!"
That's Verhofstadt, the head of the EU Parliament.
I don't know what gave you hope about that. It's mafia tactics and confirms the worst suspicions people have had about EU anti-trust enforcement.
What does privacy rules have to do with monopoly or anti-trust? As far as I can tell, nothing. But the EU appears dangerously close to taking an official policy that anti-trust fines are based on whether Guy Verhofstadt and his friends personally like your answers at unrelated hearings. Make Guy happy or you'll be inconveniently re-classified as a monopoly. Never mind the existence of LinkedIn or Google+ or other competing networks.
The EU Parliament President is Antonio Tajani. Verhofstadt is just a regular MEP, though he is also chair of an European party that commands 7-8% of the MEPs.
Things have always worked like that. Why do you think Google or FB are escaping antitrust despite a behaviour much more egregious than Microsoft ever was ?
Don't fool yourself ; the normal state of affair would have been for them to be torn appart, and the current state is corrupt.
They definitely won't because EU competition law doesn't care about whether there was harm to consumers or not. It's based on different principles to American law, arguably worse ones (harm to competitors, which is sort of the point of competition to begin with).
You may build a faster car engine than your competitor's so that your team can visit and close more prospects per day. You may not blow up the tires of your competitor's car so the other team cannot visit anyone.
Blowing up tires is physical damage and does not require any specific anti-trust laws.
That's the problem with metaphors - sometimes they obscure the reality of things. Anti-trust covers much vaguer and more debatable 'crimes'. For instance Microsoft was rapped over bundling Internet Explorer although every OS comes with a web browser these days and nobody considers it controversial anymore. The main crime was giving exclusivity discounts to customers, but that isn't specifically forbidden as far as I know. It's just an interpretation.
At any rate, the EU doesn't require even the slightest analogue to 'blowing up tires'. They went after Google Shopping although Google was providing search referral and advertising to their own competitors - actually helping them, not hindering them. The existence of other big product search engines like Amazon didn't help, the EU fined them anyway. I didn't believe before that EU anti-trust enforcement was based on the rule of law, and Verhofstadt appears to have confirmed it today.
> For instance Microsoft was rapped over bundling Internet Explorer
...And Google uses all of their products to tell you it's better to use Chrome, frequently destroy businesses by offering their own services in cards at the top of searches, which represent billions in free advertising, force Google store with their android OEMs, etc.
If Microsoft has been condemned for leveraging their dominant position in a market to get advantage in another market, Google should have been condemned years ago, for the same reason.
>What does privacy rules have to do with monopoly or anti-trust?
They are becoming related.
Monopoly laws traditionally apply to commercial transactions.
Facebook's customers are not experiencing a monopoly, they can easily switch to other ad-space vendors.
Many of Facebook's "crop" however happen to be voters who feel new laws are required to deal with Facebook's "network monopoly" especially as it is entirely arbitrary, harmful and very profitable.
Privacy aka legal ownership and control of data is one way to erode that "network monopoly".
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadBefore social media, it was admitted a lot harder for unreliable sources to get an audience, so that skepticism was less critical.
But I think it will come back. Education is the antidote to social media news. Deity willing, the next government will see that and push for better education.
I have not found that to be the case and I think you should scrutinize that assumption very carefully.
Perhaps a majority of intellectuals in the West thought the Soviet Union was a step forward - again and again it's the 'smart' people who get the big things wrong.
I wasn't there at the time, so I have no way of knowing, but this smells like hindsight bias.
It had become obvious decades earlier that the Russian revolution had gone horribly wrong, after western powers realised that Soviet lumber exports were coming from forced labour camps.
And the fact that a Russian revolution would go wrong in this way was obvious even at the turn of the century. Lenin was put on a train in Switzerland and sent back to Russia specifically to cause chaos.
Going even further back, it was a constant frustration of Marx that the working classes in the UK (where he lived) stubbornly refused to rise in violent revolution. His ideology was well discussed in his own time but somehow actual working people were too smart to believe in it. Only intellectuals far removed from the real lower classes thought his theories were good.
tl;dr it's widely known that academics and other intellectuals couldn't accept the disastrous nature of communism long after supposedly more "stupid" people had fully understood the nature of Marxist ideology.
Even shorter tl;dr - education often seems to make people dumber in important ways, not smarter.
For example, a lot of conspiracy theorists are educated people. Their research just took an interesting turn at one point or another.
@bachbach's example of pro-Soviet intellectuals is a good one as well. There was a similar downtown on the other side of the wall too. Quite a few anti-soviet dissidents turned into conspiracy theorists later on. In both cases, people were happy to rebel and look for alternatives and their education did help them. But eventually their curiosity took them too far.
This is an interesting article on this topic:
http://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/ptn/2017/05/fake-news.aspx
Once you start evaluating arguments and doing your own research, a lot of difference opinions emerge. Which sometimes are labeled as fake news, even though they're not truly fake. If everyone did assess all news, most crazy fake news would be gone. Which is awesome. But many of non-mainstream opinions that technically are not fake would survive. Which is good too in my books, but some people wouldn't agree.
Unless you're in the world where facts and truth don't actually matter.
It's interesting to observe how the institutional and technological changes since the American founding, and the systemic problems we easily note, align with his discussion. He theorized that each of the unmixed systems had weaknesses that led them to eventually be supplanted by another form, initially well-administered, which too would in time succumb to its inherent weaknesses. The mixed form resisted this cycle. So to the extent that the polity "un-mixes" the arrangement of powers, e.g. making the Senate directly elected instead of chosen by state legislatures without making a corresponding anti-democratic change, the system becomes more exposed to the cyclic risks associated with the unmixed state that was favored.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJBzhcSWTk
Historia civilis has a great video on the constitution of ancient Athens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIgMTsQXg3Q
This is quite the hypothetical syllogism.
My guess is that there will be a FB sell-off today. Other countries will see the opportunity to raise a high tax rate on a natural monopoly, and FB returns will be tax-adjusted.
Really though, I think maybe the act of combining data to form contiguous blocks of PII tied to online personas may need to be made illegal outside of some official, state database. Ie the government gives you a citizen entry and only they may produce such information. So you simply may not have access to certain PII.
thats a tad dystopian don't you think?
The EU is 250m of Facebook's 2.2 billion users. They could easily drop all EU business if they needed to (the business operations within the EU is the easiest aspect for the EU regulators to target). Their profitability would drop from ~$23 billion for 2018 to $19 billion or so at worst. That'd be made-up for with one year of growth. Once Facebook's business operations in the EU are shut down, Facebook could continue to operate the user accounts and leave it to the EU to attempt to censor what their population is allowed to access online.
Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.
Facebook is still registered in Ireland, since 2010, which is still in the EU, making Facebook an entity subject to them. (Ireland has also expressed a desire to rejoin the EU, post-Brexit).
The sovereign state called "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is leaving the EU as part of Brexit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...
Quite a few countries in the EU have already ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, and the EU last year made it easier for ISPs to do so. So the capability is there, and there's precedent. TPB responded by decentralising but that isn't an option for Facebook, they wouldn't dare to anything to get round a continental ban: and even if they did it would have to be 100% effective, if 50% of people can't figure out how to change DNS settings to get around ISP blocks then the other 50% will likely migrate to another platform too.
I said to a friend a few weeks ago that I actually want to see FB get blocked in Europe. The shitshow would be glorious.
At which point does the shit show turn around and reflect bad on the EU though? I m no fan or user of facebook but it would be too serious a restriction that only dictators have taken so far. EU's problems with facebook so far are taxation and privacy. The second is presumably solved by GDPR. Even if the first one is solved somehow, i feel these MEPs were more concerned about political implications.
Would it? Facebook has 2.2 billion users out of 7 billion people total, and not all of those users are worth the same to Facebook. The US and the EU have more valuable users solely because those users can spend more money and are more valuable to advertisers. A lot of people on the planet who arent on facebook anymore cant even run facebook.
Its not like everyone has a new flagship phone every year, and its not like everyone on the planet has internet access. China is also not gonna be an easy target for them to crack since China pushes their own countries industries first.
I really dont believe that facebook could just grow to paper over their loss of the entire EU at this point
>Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.
I don't like China's censorship either, but if the other option is for foreign companies to come in and abuse your citizens, then blocking out those companies doesn't seem like a terrible idea
I don't believe the US will be "keen" to protect FB if that's in fact what you are stating here. There is just as much concern about FB in the US as there is in the EU, even if the political will to act might be blunted in the US by lobbyists and money.
I would argue that FB isn't a "US monopoly" per se but a global monopoly.
You might want to re-read my comment where I say there is no political will on account of lobbying and money.
US Citizens are just as concerned as EU citizens about FB. Especially given FB's role in the last US Presidential elections.
What is your justification for asserting that US citizens are not as concerned as EU citizens?
If a significant amount of them cared it would be reflected in the user numbers.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/
https://springboardccia.com/2018/04/17/icymi-wsj-nbc-poll-fi...
WSJ/NBC Poll respondents say social media platforms are… regulated too much: 14% have the right amount of regulation: 37% not regulated enough: 37%
It's for a good reason too - consumers have noticed they have more choices and freedom than in industries that are highly regulated by the gov. Laws like GDPR would make large swaths of business models useless - such as free games or apps the rely on targeted advertising. Since under GDPR, you cannot ask someone to either allow ads to be personalized or pay for the app (it has to be without detriment), tons of tools people otherwise enjoy would suddenly become paid only or disappear. Not to mention the effect it would have on the startup economy - it would be a big deal. Can't see it happen here.
>"Some 37% of people in the new survey said social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not regulated enough, while the same share said the sites have the right amount of government regulation, and 14% said there was too much regulation."
So its actually pretty evenly split between the "not regulated enough" and "have the right amount of regulation."
I think its fair to say that the 14% that said "there was too much regulation" of social media when in fact there is virtually none are simply doctrinaire anti-regulation Republicans who don't support regulation of any kind anywhere. So the fact that they were specifically being asked specifically about social media is basically irrelevant.
I have to wonder what his employees back in Menlo Park think when they watch their CEO shoveling such obvious bullshit.
It might be the case that he has already discounted that possibility and simply doesn't care if EU wants to ban facebook anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(2017_film)
"German Christian democrat MEP Manfred Weber, who leads the centre-right EPP group, ... asks Mark Zuckerberg why the company has not stopped access to user data to all developers, not just Cambridge Analytica.
He says he would be interested in his arguments as to why, given Facebook's power, its algorithms should not be made public.
He also asks Mr Zuckerberg to name a competitor it has in Europe, and asks him to "convince him" with arguments as to why his company is not a monopoly that should be broken up."
On issues raised relating to competition, [Zuckerberg] says that communication is a "competitive space" where people have "many choices".
"It feels like there are new competitors coming up every day," he notes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-parliaments-44210...
Such as Instagram and WhatsApp? It's not competition if you just buy them up as soon as they start to compete...
(For reference: https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...)
Currently I love how the EU is making the British Brexit team look like a bunch of clowns, but the EU is no saintly organization, the way they couldn't let go of austerity politics made a lot of people suffer, and has indeed lead to the rise of populism as well (the right wing in France, Germany, and populism in Italy).
Mr Zuckerberg's own private jet is a Gulfstream V which unlike the XLS is transatlantic capable.
He said: " ... There are a number of questions that have been put by other colleagues that I want an answer to. That said, I'm anxious about this brave new world that Mr. Zuckerberg has presented us -- a brave new world what tens and tens and tens of thousands of private people are scrutinizing us and are saying “what is fake news” and “what is not fake news”, “what is hate speech” and “what is not hate speech”. Don't you think that this is a public task?"
He very subtly mentioned that the anti-trust bodies could mobilized to look into this if questions wouldn't be answered [1] -- https://youtu.be/bVoE_rb5g5k?t=5285.
[1] "... And competition for example: an anti-trust thing, that's important! Do we need -- I think we're gonna push our anti trust agency to go into this if there is no good answer to!"
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Here's an interview with Guy Verhofstadt (thanks, repolfx! I wasn't aware of who he is): https://www.channel4.com/news/guy-verhofstadt-mep-on-mark-zu...
I don't know what gave you hope about that. It's mafia tactics and confirms the worst suspicions people have had about EU anti-trust enforcement.
What does privacy rules have to do with monopoly or anti-trust? As far as I can tell, nothing. But the EU appears dangerously close to taking an official policy that anti-trust fines are based on whether Guy Verhofstadt and his friends personally like your answers at unrelated hearings. Make Guy happy or you'll be inconveniently re-classified as a monopoly. Never mind the existence of LinkedIn or Google+ or other competing networks.
Don't fool yourself ; the normal state of affair would have been for them to be torn appart, and the current state is corrupt.
In America they've escaped anti-trust attention because it's hard to prove any consumers have been harmed by their activities.
That's the problem with metaphors - sometimes they obscure the reality of things. Anti-trust covers much vaguer and more debatable 'crimes'. For instance Microsoft was rapped over bundling Internet Explorer although every OS comes with a web browser these days and nobody considers it controversial anymore. The main crime was giving exclusivity discounts to customers, but that isn't specifically forbidden as far as I know. It's just an interpretation.
At any rate, the EU doesn't require even the slightest analogue to 'blowing up tires'. They went after Google Shopping although Google was providing search referral and advertising to their own competitors - actually helping them, not hindering them. The existence of other big product search engines like Amazon didn't help, the EU fined them anyway. I didn't believe before that EU anti-trust enforcement was based on the rule of law, and Verhofstadt appears to have confirmed it today.
...And Google uses all of their products to tell you it's better to use Chrome, frequently destroy businesses by offering their own services in cards at the top of searches, which represent billions in free advertising, force Google store with their android OEMs, etc.
If Microsoft has been condemned for leveraging their dominant position in a market to get advantage in another market, Google should have been condemned years ago, for the same reason.
They are becoming related.
Monopoly laws traditionally apply to commercial transactions. Facebook's customers are not experiencing a monopoly, they can easily switch to other ad-space vendors.
Many of Facebook's "crop" however happen to be voters who feel new laws are required to deal with Facebook's "network monopoly" especially as it is entirely arbitrary, harmful and very profitable.
Privacy aka legal ownership and control of data is one way to erode that "network monopoly".