>One only hopes there is some free room for small companies from regulation, so this helpful regulation doesnt end as a moat for FB and others.
This is what has me worried. If regulations go as far as requiring content filtering, it would effectively cement Facebook/YouTube/etc as the dominant internet platforms, because small competitors can't afford to build those systems just to get started.
The trouble is that he has lost integrity as someone who is putting the needs of people first because of what Facebook has done. At this point, he will have a lot of opponents no matter what he says.
Flack or slack? They don’t get much slack ‘round these parts and in fact get lots of flack.
I just checked the article. Proposal #1 is primarily there to limit Facebook’s liability. That said, it is incompatible with the First Amendment. A government or government sponsored regulatory body deciding what is socially harmful speech is precisely what the First Amendment guards against. You would have to go with a corporate governed body on a corporate volunteer basis for it to be a meaningful proposal. Essentially, Facebook can ban le Nazis, but the US Government can’t.
2 is arguably a good proposal, but it isn’t a new proposal. To the extent that the People in Power give a damn about protecting the integrity of elections, it is to protect their own seats. When election integrity is inconvenient, it gets pushed down as a non-issue. The real goal here is to force Facebook’s ad competitors to play on the same playing field as Facebook has been pressured into to stave off further regulation. This is regulation to protect their business, and if it happens to also protect what is left of the integrity of our elections, elections that the Russians didn’t make a considerable dent in the last time around despite their best efforts, great. There are however more effective measures to defend the integrity of our elections, if we care to.
3 and 4 are both items that Facebook could roll out globally if they cared, so I’m inclined to believe that on Facebook’s political calculus, they have determined that it is politically expedient for them to come out for GDPR-style rules globally, even if they could already provide their global user base the same tools, rights and privileges afforded their European users by GDPR. Data portability is a technical challenge that is relatively easily resolved. The primary politics involved in preventing this are corporate, not governmental, and back when Web 2.0 was hot stuff, open standards were both expected and the default. Facebook played an enormous role in data portability backsliding on the web.
If Facebook wants to bring out data privacy protections and data portability, then I’ll believe it when I see it. There aren’t any laws preventing this now.
> A government or government sponsored regulatory body deciding what is socially harmful speech is precisely what the First Amendment guards against. You would have to go with a corporate governed body on a corporate volunteer basis for it to be a meaningful proposal. Essentially, Facebook can ban le Nazis, but the US Government can’t.
There is no such thing as harmful content. There are only harmful consumers of content. Removal of any amount or type of content can not rehabilitate these harmful consumers. For as long as they lack the motive and personal integrity to practice critical thinking on a constant and ongoing basis, no content can ever be safe from them. They will be harmed by even the most direct, fact-based, and honest content. Their interpretation of it will be wrong, driven by their motives and desire for a particular thing to be true or false, and even that honest and direct content will be called for removal. This isn't a trite or insignificant observation, I think it is the whole heart of the issue. In one audience of people, there is a madman ranting on a corner about anti-Semitism and being ignored. In another, he is raised on their shoulders and made a leader. The difference is not the availability of the 'bad content.' The difference is the willingness (some might argue ability, but I think critical thinking is such a basic and simple skill that almost all, including children, are capable of it) of the audience to practice critical thinking. And without that willingness, nothing can be done.
How do you reconcile this opinion with the knowledge that copycat crime¹ occurs.
One would imagine that an adult with critical thinking skills ought be able to observe that some people are easily influenced at least some of the time. Elsewise we wouldn't be here having this conversation.
The problem with that is that if you set the standards to 'can cause someone to commit bad things' that can apply to literally everything.
Plenty of reactionary assholes have been triggered to violence by disparaged groups having the gall to think of themselves as equals or transgress their taboos against things like interracial marriages. Heck, under that standard we should ban irrational numbers because they caused Pythagorean to drown their discoverer!
I don't understand the leap from my comment to concluding that I'm suggesting people can't be easily influenced. I was specifically talking about people who can be easily influenced, and the impossibility of shielding those people from content which would influence them negatively. The way a bit of content influences a person is not tied to the content so much as it is tied to the person consuming it. This is supported by research on confirmation bias and similar work. The idea that there exists content which is, independent from the mindset of the audience, not possible to be interpreted in a negative manner is what I dispute.
Zuckerberg says that there should be a "comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the EU's GDPR", yet the first thing Facebook did was to move 1.5 billion accounts out of their data centre in Ireland to avoid having to meet the GDPRs requirements. They are also appealing the belgian decision to restrict Facebook's collection of users' and non-users' personal data across the internet.
Zuckerberg is forever apologising and promising to do better, and this article is only the latest attempt to try to manage the repetitive poor news cycle that Facebook has generated over the last year.
Translation: the deep state is very concerned the internet allows people to bypass the establishment media and create influence that affects the outcomes of democratic elections in ways that upset the elite.
I've seen it used so casually and often that feel like that has become a meaningless phrase that amounts to "anything established in any way, anywhere, that I don't like and I wish to add a negative connotation to those things, people, or whatever I don't like".
It always seemed to me that this story you're repeating is one spread by the criminal elite (think Murdoch and friends) to the people they rule to convince them that their enemy is exactly the group working for fairness and human rights (namely people who have devoted their life to public service).
"Public service" is a heck of a euphemism. And when has the government ever cared a tinker's dam about anyone's rights? Unless the people force their governments to respect their rights, the government will publicly serve them into subjection.
Classic regulatory capture play. Create regulations so onerous that only a company with the resources of Facebook can operate under their restrictions. Lock in your dominant position. No small competitor can get a foot in the door.
I don’t think it is. First, lawmakers in several countries around the world were the first to propose these types of regulations, not Facebook. Second, Mark already acknowledged in the senate hearing that such regulations can hurt small businesses, so lawmakers need to be careful.
Hard problems require complex solutions. It’s not easy for small companies to get “a foot in the door” in the space or auto industries either. Content moderation is a hard and unsolved problem — so yes, companies with more resources will have a better chance of succeeding.
Can you suggest a better strategy at policing data misuse by social media companies, other than regulating social media explicitly (as this post calls for)? I agree that Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook is unshakably biased and shouldn't be writing the regulations themselves -- but nothing in the linked article seems to me to be written in bad faith. In fact, I see the same talking points (ex: bringing GDPR to the US, adopting a common standard for social media communication) all over HN.
The idea that small competitors should be able to launch with minimal capital, and the idea that social media vendors should protect users' data, are fundamentally in tension. It costs money to protect user privacy, full stop. Yeah, it's possible for a Facebook/Microsoft/Google/whoever to bend the regulations to widen their moat, but it's the job of the regulatory bodies to ensure that the regulations are fair.
The question shouldn't be "should we regulate social media?" The answer, IMO, is a resounding YES. The real question should be "who should be in charge of building those regulations?"
FINRA is a non-government, industry driven (self-regulatory) organization for the US stock market. It exists to discourage fraud and bad practices without requiring a heavy hand of government. The SEC mostly focuses on lawbreakers. Internet companies would do well to create a similar, open structure before government steps in to over-regulate.
Hmm, if you directly translated FINRA to internet companies, new startups would have to be licensed with the internet SRO (self-regulatory organization) before they could offer services to the public.
That's an interesting idea, is it actually what you are suggesting?
I don't have a concrete proposal. I was just trying to illustrate that there may be a model inbetween total and zero regulation.
The line of demarcation could be storing personally identifying information, interfacing with advertising networks, or maybe even ownership of certain patent/intellectual property rights.
This is exactly it, and happens in every other industry.
The big players will push for regulations, licencing, and standard, ensuring that their next competitor can't come from a few smart people tinkering in their garage or their dorm room.
A good example is the toy industry, where requirements for chemical and safety tests which cost tens of thousands of dollars per SKU, keep mom and pop shops making wooden toys from their garage. (Well, they do anyway, but can be stopped at any time if they get too big.)
When outside observers say something, they are the guardians of the people. When zuckerberg says the same thing (or even a stronger pro-regulation stance) he's the devil.
One of the most interesting parts of this column is that it is published in the Washington Post. You can't ignore the fact that this was likely run past Jeff Bezos, and Zuckerberg knows that. In almost all other circumstances, opinion columns from Mark were published on his public Facebook profile (example: "Building Global Community" [1]). The context of releasing this on WaPo is important as it represents an explicit call-to-action to the broader "community" of big tech (not just facebook.com). On the other hand, it represents an implicit approval of that call-to-action for Jeff Bezos (and thus Amazon).
I'd love to hear about the behind-the-scenes politicking that led to this mode of public outreach.
I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your account.
Harmful content is a tough one because you either have free speech or you don't. Judging content is a slippery slope that every generation before us has warned us about.
Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.
Data portability is always good for the consumers I don't think anyone would argue against that.
Technically the data is already portable. It just requires a motivated developer to create a program to parse the files that Facebook let's you download with all your Facebook information. That's not difficult.
No. Last time I checked years ago, the data was incomplete, lacked all kind of context, IDs, names, your comments, was structured idiotically, even as a HTML, etc.
I can write a personal data graph crawler in a weekend. I can’t release it because Facebook army of lawyers. Maybe zuckermort should look into the mirror sometime to find the bad faith actors ruining the internet.
Obviously, that data is not your data. You can pull out your own posts, photos, maybe replies. Because you made that, but al that context isn't yours, so FB won't let you take it out. Heck, it might even be a copyright violation.
The fact that this defends FBs position is just a coincidence...
> Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook
It's also the exact feature that allowed Cambridge Analytica to happen ("Push this button to share your address book with this third-party company") - seems like people are vocally against allowing that to happen just as strongly as they are vocally in favour of implementing all the features which allow it to happen, somehow not connecting the two...
I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In areas of the world where loss of privacy _has_ caused citizen harm, it's usually as a result of a despotic regime (thinking specifically of Venezuela).
I agree. I am not sure that any substantial "loss of privacy" has even occurred.
Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased.
Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?
Yes because the process of credit evaluation is non-transparent and punishes people who choose not to take on debt and indirectly punishes people who dared not to be born in the top 2% and couldn't rebound from a personal emergency in a timely enough manner for a stratified class of creditors.
Seriously. If people actually cared about privacy, let's do something about credit bureaus and insurance companies. Because I can do something about it if I don't want Facebook to know I'm friends with someone or bought something on Amazon. But I can barely do anything about credit or insurance. They literally ruin lives, cost people thousands of dollars, target the poor, have terrible security, literally sell your data, and yet everyone is all up in arms about the permissions on their photos that they voluntarily posted on Facebook.
It's unfortunate that HN is more willing to downvote dissenting ideas like this than discuss them.
Yes, the loss of privacy the internet has brought has been immense. However, the complete overhaul of social structures, the influence of large platforms on them (such as by optimizing for clicks/adverts), and the social pressures and influences that come with these by default is something that directly impacts most people for literal hours a day, and has run-on externalities that will affect the whole of society for the rest of our lives. Most people are only tangentially and occasionally affected by their numerous privacy losses.
Sure, I'm not certain in the studies showing that Facebook is negatively associated with wellbeing. I'm not certain that the degradation in conversation quality due to platforms optimizing for controversy is a real effect. I'm not certain that echo chambers preventing people from hearing moderate opinions of opposing sides is going to permanently damage public discourse. But these are not small risks, they are almost everything when it comes to humanity's ability to steer its future, and the potential impact on people's lives should not be so easily dismissed.
Say I’m selling highly profitable, highly addictive opioid painkillers. Hydrocodone has been around forever, so what do you do?
You use your access to workers comp and insurance claim data to find doctors treating conditions likely to require pain treatment. Then you find populations with high densities of patients and market heavily to their physicians. You buy ads that appeal to insured people who aren’t working.
The loss of privacy is needed for the microtargeting used in misinformation campaigns. It is exactly FBs profiles that allowed targeted ads for fear mongering, conspiracy theories, perhaps even school shooting victims.
Similarly, Google's profiles help push people to 'engaging' content on YouTube. It just so happens that extreme claims (anorexia is good, x was a conspiracy, group y is inferior) happen to be very engaging.
Our loss of privacy has a lot of responsibility here. It has allowed for a very subtle division of the public forum.
Playing devils advocate here, i want to build my understanding out further.
My question is: So what?
If we have good privacy laws tomorrow (assume temporary magic), how does that do anything but change the modus operandi of manipulation?
wait for a large event, and then flash your ads. Similar to pre internet behavior, true. But it’s still at internet scale, and you could target via groups right?
Currently, you can split the discourse. I'd hope that the majority of people would be outraged if sandy hook denial was pushed to them for example.
If you cannot target your message, you need to take into account everyone who will hear it. This requires a more palpable message, and almost forces the adoption of a universal framework of facts.
Similarly, the profiling has lead to echo chambers. Having that fall away also helps create some universal discourse.
The ability to generate echo chambers at scale is a direct product of the loss of privacy, even if generally voluntary in this case. Now regardless of how extreme your personal views may be, you can find a group to affiliate with where you'll probably be pretty much a moderate. This in turn drives further extremism as people fall out of touch with reality and slide further down their own distorted world view - left, right, white, black, man, woman -- it's happening to people of all persuasions.
The problem is that most people are more comfortable around people that they identify with. This naturally trends towards echo chambers as people gravitate towards 'similar' others. And this is probably unstoppable. Companies rapidly accelerated the process of it by doing everything they possibly could to drive "engagement" but in the digital age you're not going to be able to stop people from forming 'like minded' groups, regardless of whatever rules and regulations somebody might try to dream up.
The problem is even more simple than that. Simply, is the web public or private? The answer in practice is that the web is what ever the service provider needs it to be, which is a shitty answer and why these kinds of problems are present in the first place. The answer to these problems is also simple, but likely more aggressive than Facebook would prefer.
"The web" is not public. Most companies are dedicated to tying your public and private lives. If this weren't true, then why would facebook pay for your private information.
> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.
And, importantly, all the 'solutions' I've seen amount to either public or private censorship with little direct accountability to the public and insufficient due process (1). That doesn't seem like a clear improvement over the status quo.
(1) Yes, even private governance needs due process protections.
> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.
I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important.
Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?
> knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important.
If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"?
> putting controls on campaign spending is important
That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?
Controlling campaign spending is a ridiculous notion anyways because there is (fortunately) no global law. Even if there was, you can bet there would be a black market.
Campaign spending limits and requiring the publication of some political donations is settled law in many countries. In fact, this is true to at least some degree in the US, too. These are not new ideas and the debate about whether they are worth implementing has already been won. The problem is that online advertising can get past existing laws.
Look, the issue is there's a pretty steep gradient here. There's the unwashed masses making just enough to survive, and a small group of millionaires and billionaires making calculated use of millions to secure policies that will print them billions in the future. Pretty sure some quick look-ups will show there are working definitions for this disparity in election literature.
So, while I appreciate your "Americans aren't poor, they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires" version of equality for the farce it is, I'd appreciate it if you tried mangling the truth somewhere else.
> If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"?
That's absolutely correct. If you donate more than a certain sum to campaign, you should be forced to be transparent about it.
> That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?
I live in a country where all political parties are bound by exactly such rules. Moreover TV advertising by political parties are is explicity banned. Instead parties are allocated short 'Party political broadcast' slots on the main channels.
This reply doesn't persuade me to belive that persuasion works, thus proving that people can't be arbitrary persuaded into ideas that they don't agree with.
Seriously? There is a $20 Billion dollar advertising industry with countless studies behind it, and hundreds of thousands of people working in, all of which says persuasion works. You’re going to need a little more proof.
> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.
It's not about forcing people to do something.
No ads, about any topic, can force anyone to do anything.
Yet billions of dollars are spent every year on ads. This money is spent not because it can force people to do things, but because it can influence people. This influence leads to real, concrete effects.
Coca Cola isn't forcing anyone to buy Coke, but they can influence people, and on a population level their ads can lead to more people buying Coke.
The key to understanding this is to not consider the matter in terms of any one individual, but in terms of a population of people, and thinking of the influence as a statistical nudge in a particular direction.
This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them.
They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else.
Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like.
How does that work if your social graph doesn’t move with you? This reminds me of the 90’s when we had so many messenger apps - you needed different apps to talk to different people. Data portability doesn’t help that. I suppose Zuck is well aware of that.
Spend 10 minutes in some of the FB comment threads for a major news article and just look at all the toolbags citing Breitbart and/or Mother Jones as journalism and then come back and tell me that election integrity is media hysteria.
Facebook is the only place some of these people get their "news" and Facebook does nothing to distinguish an opinion blog from an actual journalist. We have millions of people flocking to Alex Jones for information and calling into question the authenticity of Reuters.
That and it's 2019 and we don't even have a secure MEANS of voting. We can make Facebook, which is probably a billion LOC with hardly any security flaws yet our voting machines have default credentials of admin/admin and run on decade old technology that has never been peer reviewed.
Finally. I've been predicting this is exactly what FB would do eventually: ASK for regulation.
Facebook could do all these things in isolation, but generally speaking this could be really bad for long-term revenue. Essentially Facebook is stuck between a rock here; big moves will satisfy their user base, but annoy their large investors. On the other hand, doing nothing will harm users in the long run, but probably they could generate plenty of revenue in the process, so share holders would encourage this. Additionally if Facebook did this on their own, but other platforms are not subject to the same restrictions, they are at a huge competitive disadvantage.
I think this is the key value in broad government rules. Regulation here is both good for users and good for FB (and other platforms) in the long run. They can protect their users without having to explain to investors why they aren't just going straight for profits, because they will be bound by the rules established by regulation.
So in the end, FB should WANT regulation, because it's better for them in the long-run. I'm glad to see Mark appears to have finally realized this.
I think you need to account for the regulatory capture problem. I don't see how more regulations could be bad for Facebook as long as it's not broken up or banned outright.
Hahaha. I want to just blissfully assume this story was accidentally made live two days early. April Fools!
The Internet is doing just fine. It's these paperclip/engagement maximizing websites and crack-apps that are a problem. And the founder of one of the largest ones of these, after having built surveillance profiles on everybody, right as he's tightening the noose of censorship, is telling us that ambient "new rules" are needed now? Give me a break - Zuckerberg chose profitability over credibility a long time ago.
How about this - any rules that Zuckerberg thinks are "needed" can be simply tried by Faceboot itself. Then we can see if they actually fix the mess he's had a large part in creating, whether a different approach may be necessary, or whether the resulting environment ends up too draconian. This approach is blatantly obvious, but he's taken to lobbying rather than doing. So the actual question is what exactly is he trying to sell us on?
The guy who broke every single rule in his ruthless conquest of the internet is now asking for new rules. You have to admire the sheer audacity of this play.
It does make sense though. He can finally see the tide of public opinion turning against him. Facebook's business metrics will be fine for a while but the pace at which they are losing people's trust is increasing. He needed to make a grand statement now while there are still large swaths of the population that view him as somewhat credible.
[Edit]
Also note the timing. This op-ed comes literally one day after Facebook made headlines for "mistakenly deleting" a bunch of Zuckerberg's early posts, including all his posts from 2007-2008. Which is completely absurd on the face of it. (Yesterday's HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19527200)
Luckily, one way to ensure people don't ask too many questions about this story is to make some new headlines. Sure enough, google news is linking yesterday's story and today's post under the same "Full Coverage" page. As I write this, the "mistaken deletion" story is indeed getting buried under the avalanche of new coverage:
I think Zuckerberg is just helping the internet to learn and evolve. Without his evil products, we wouldn't understand the psychological harm of the internet. These will clear up in the next 5-10 years.
Every evil person out there, this is your road to salvation. Just say it was a lesson and fully expose every way you've exploited the system and the way others can do the same. Actually, isn't this a common thing? Where people get rich then support laws against doing what they did to get rich?
In particular, you might be thinking of Joseph Kennedy, who made his fortune with insider trading and was later made SEC Chairman by FDR, where he outlawed the methods he used to build his own fortune.
My bad. I didn’t realize we should be thanking him for making billions off of evil products while teaching us a lesson about psychological harm on the internet. Lesson learned! /s
Edit: Sorry for the snark. The idea that Zuckerberg is “helping” us with his lack of integrity is so absurd that I assumed you were trolling. It’s not just absurd but dangerous as the other reply to your comment stated better than I did.
Thanking him would be wrong. But I acknowledge that Facebook has provided early example into the real harms of social networking + data collection + psychological manipulation via ux. If Facebook became prominent later, after stronger ai was available to trap users attention, it could be a disaster. Are we inoculated? I am not sure. Also not sure why you are being downvoted, I think your comment makes a salient point and some snark is fine as long as it is not a personal attack.
Another point to consider is that the more the internet is regulated, the more difficult it is for new entrants to compete , as they have to comply first with existing laws. This is an easy way for incumbents to protect themselves from potentially swift-footed competitors.
> Another point to consider is that the more the internet is regulated, the more difficult it is for new entrants to compete , as they have to comply first with existing laws. This is an easy way for incumbents to protect themselves from potentially swift-footed competitors.
Perhaps the regulations could be written to be more onerous for the incumbents to implement?
E.g. a new entrant below a certain size is allowed to get away with a good-faith effort and only subject to small fines, while an incumbent is required to have a massive and empowered internal compliance bureaucracy and is subject to massive fines when non-compliant.
That is generally how they are written it is false way to claim you are pro small business by exempting small business from the regulation
All that does however is ensure the competition will ALWAYS be small.
where I am There are alot of employment regulations that kick in when you hire your 51st employee, under 50 and you are exempt, so guess what there are CRAP ton of businesses that can not expand beyond the 50 employee mark, they would love to higher more people but the burdens placed on them once they did would likely cause huge amounts of harm to the business, increase costs and revenue where they would no longer be able to afford that new employee.... Generally it makes is hard for a business to go from 50 to about 75 or 100 employees where the extra burdens no longer matter. So unless a business can double in size it is hard for those business to grow, they end up stagnate and often fail as a result
Not necessarily, it depends on the type of regulation. Regulation enforcing net neutrality, and regulation to combat anti-competitive behaviour, are both examples that enable new entrants.
For a good example, look at the history of BTs enforced breakup in the UK.
"Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." -- Mark Zuckerberg[1], defending Facebook's "Real" Name policy.
Based on his total disregard for privacy and his clear thirst for power, I want nothing coming from him or his company to ever influence actual policies.
I agree with Mark as far as social networks are concerned. The 'social' part of the name is important, and social relationships cannot function without some sort of stake.
Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.
But in social networks IRL, it doesn't really work that way - because real life bubbles mostly don't intersect, it's as if the person had a separate identity in each. Online social media effectively pushes all the bubbles together, which transforms accountability into witch hunts, where a singular misstep is quickly propagated and results in outrage mobs across all the bubbles. Thus, the scope of social ostracism is rarely proportionate to the transgression.
Very well put! I don't think I had quite connected the two that far. It's not even because the person actually used their real name while "transgressing", but because there's usually enough other real name metadata laying around to create an expectation that anyone can be doxxed.
This is a great concrete example of a rule that Zuckerberg himself worked to promulgate, and is presently causing real ongoing harm.
Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.
Awesome. So you're going to change your HN username to your real name and put your address and phone number in your "about" section?
No, because I don't treat this website as a social network. I have no friend connections here, don't expose private information, it's a technical discussion board in my opinion.
Facebook on the other hand is a network for the exchange of private or personal information, including for example people forming groups about particularly sensitive topics (abuse experiences, disease and so on), in which personal identity is important to not open yourself up to potential intrusion by people who are not trustworthy. (Cynically enough stalkers for example trying to inject themselves into support groups)
Which is also of course why privacy and identity considerations between HN and Facebook differ.
> people forming groups about particularly sensitive topics (abuse experiences, disease and so on)
It seems exactly the opposite to me: I would not want to use my real name to publicly discuss sensitive personal topics.
For example, I may not want my friends or employer to find out that I'm a drug addict. In many workplaces, it could cost me my job. What if someone else in my support group happens to be a co-worker of mine?
This sure is getting a fair bit of downvotes. I mostly agree with you though. Having a single identity reduces trolling, it's as simple as looking at Facebook vs Twitter. People are less likely to message nasty things to others if their real life reputation is on the line, I take that as fact.
>Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.
No, it doesn't. People are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. When Youtube forced people's G+ accounts to merge into their comments and people suddenly found themselves commenting under their real names, it stopped the trolling and hate... for like a week.
Hell, plenty of people on Usenet were assholes with their real names and emails in their signatures.
By now it's pretty clear, to me at least, that Zuckerberg simply doesn't get it. He could have fixed the issues for over a decade. And even in 2019, after all the evidence of mismanagement and public distrust, he still refuses to relinquish any control of the company. This is a tone-deaf opinion piece.
I'd argue as far back as 2010 that indiscriminately selling user data was a bad idea especially when you are the sole network. A lot of people on here (HN) and elsewhere have been repeating those sentiments for years. As naive as it sounds, I simply wish Facebook was not so focused on building its ad platform but rather took on a more custodial role (albeit much less profitable).
As Roger McNamee is now excellently describing, the solution might be the sort of regulation Zuck does not want: regulation that makes it illegal to even get/gather/have a huge portion of all the data they amass.
Do note: Facebook doesn't sell data directly, they use it to sell ads. They actually buy data so that they can get more insights than what they get from only their own direct tracking.
There are probably plenty of ways you could word statements along these lines that make them technically correct. I've got a two-word response to all of them: Cambridge Analytica.
What does Cambridge Analytica prove about FB the company?
An academic from Cambridge made an app on the FB platform. That gave him access to data which he then sold for commercial purposes. When FB found out, they sent a legal notice to delete this data and cease using it.
Cambridge Analytica is ironically totally not a refutation - it was never bought or stolen but abused their shoddy permissions. Against security illiterate users they could get the same thing with just 'login through this for a chance to win a free iPad'.
> regulation that makes it illegal to even get/gather/have a huge portion of all the data they amass.
Like gdpr on steroids? I think this would ruin a lot of companies and make a lot of really interesting and useful services no longer possible... but I'm rather curious what it would really mean. I've never seen it proposed by someone who actually recognized what it would mean, though.
It would make entire classes of dangerous but also potentially useful companies illegal. The same way that we don't currently get to experience all the potential that is blocked because of privacy rules around medical records.
At the very least, there's been no societal consensus that we want the trade-offs that come from allowing every click, view, email, and contact to be scanned and used for profit in whatever ways companies want. It happened by pure assertion: the companies just did it and did all they could to avoid even letting people actually know so they wouldn't have to ask.
Maybe we overall would rather lose all the benefits in order to block the harms and dangers.
addendum: note that by "lose the benefits…" etc. I mean at a social level. It's very distinct to just not have certain businesses exist compared to the self-sacrifice of opting-out personally but still living in a world with these things otherwise.
I'd much rather have the status quo (and stronger) around privacy regulations for medical records than live in a world without that but then be one of a few people who forgo use of common medical facilitaties over personal privacy objections.
Watch out you are treading perilously close to one of the "things you can't say"[1] in the context of this site. Some people block people on twitter for implying just this sort of thing...
Well as someone who (rightly) got their handslapped recently by the downbutton-ers for making arude and snarky post, I'm happy to live in the wisdom of the crowd. There is a difference between a thoughtful opinion that disagrees with conformity and just being snarky about conformists - HN is pretty good about separating.
I think this group, amongst all others that I interact with, is critical enough to call a bad faith argument a bad faith argument. However, I think all of us need better training/practice on how to identify bad faith arguments. I see the turn that has been occurring on HN against Elon as one example of that. It may take time but it happens. Compared to other spaces on this here Cyberspace - higher quality and higher s/n ration on argumentation is what keeps me coming back to HN. When people disagree with me here, I actually learn something.
Added: My twitter account got blocked because it spent most of it's time autoreplying to people about how the freakonomics podcast became an advertising pitch for the Koch brothers. I only use facebook because my mother prefers it to text. I can't stomach reddit having known the founders as people. My HN account really only exists because someone said a nice thing about a talk I gave - which drew me out of the shadows. I like it here, can I stay? I'll even wear a north face fleece. I drive an EV I promise.
Are you joking? Isn't this entire post saying that he believes that he and his company shouldn't be the ones making these rules? That they should be done via a mix of regulation and trusted third parties?
That has never been Facebook's business model. The Hacker News crowd is smart enough to discuss these sorts of topics without dumbing down and misrepresenting the facts.
Facebook indiscriminately sells ads. In the past they also indiscriminately gave third parties access to user data. Doing that let them grow their market share and helped their primary business, but is not how they make money and is not a core part of the product.
Yeah it's nonsense. Having a separation between my work and personal life is a completely valid reason for having multiple online identities. There are plenty of other valid reasons. Obviously Mark would love us to be constrained to single username so that he can create a more complete profile for selling to advertisers. Data from a real name user is more valuable for correlation with other data sources. This "philosophy" is driven by the bottom line and nothing to do with "integrity".
He can't have his cake and eat it. Either he has to deal with two separate identities, or he gets a sanitized 'work me' which will be as good as useless for advertising. Your choice Mark.
Yes, the "privacy" regulation Zuckerberg describes in this article have no relation to an individual keeping their identity private from an online service - they merely involve strictures on companies' use of the knowledge they gain about their clients. It is taken as a given that the companies will have this information. Which is to say it requires customers to trust companies rather than actually have any control.
Two? He's making an issue about having two identities?
Over the past decade, I've probably had ~50 identities. Most have been minor, basically just an email address for some project or activity that I don't want linked to such persistent personas as Mirimir.
And it's also somewhat amusing, given how Facebook doesn't exactly advertize its origins as FaceMash. And this gem:
> I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Facebook is fundamentally a behavioral data company. Maximizing profits entails extracting, predicting, prescribing and controlling behavior, which is in the shareholders best interest.
However, FB needs a moot around their castle, so it acts via third parties, such as Cambridge Analytica.
And even if FB would not engage in large scale behavioral influencing, then through US law, various three letter agencies can force FB to hand over the data, all the while muting the company to disclose such practices.
I have reported obvious violations of the real name policy and Facebook always replies with some BS about it not being verifiable. Things like a “person” profile setup for a storefront instead of a proper page for it.
Yeah, and very clever: a regulation that serves him well, and one that that's appealing to the government, as well. Surely his people/lobbyists are even using the phrase "win-win" when pitching this idea to Congress. They (Congress) will get to say "we regulated FAANG", and Zuck can claim his virtue prize, to boot.
Yes, we have multiple identities. It is not a lack of integrity.
"An identity is the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person. For example, individuals have meanings that they apply to themselves when they are a student, worker, spouse, or parent (these are roles they occupy), when they are a member of a fraternity, when they belong to the Democratic Party, when they are Latino (these are memberships in particular groups), or when they claim they are outgoing individuals or moral persons (these are personal characteristics that identify themselves as unique persons). People possess multiple identities because they occupy multiple roles, are members of multiple groups, and claim multiple personal characteristics, yet the meanings of these identities are shared by members of society. Identity theory seeks to explain the specific meanings that individuals have for the multiple identities they claim; how these identities relate to one another for any one person; how their identities influence their behavior, thoughts, and feelings or emotions; and how their identities tie them in to society at large." - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/identity-theory-9780...
Smart. "The ball is on your court, governments. Never again will you be able to blame facebook with impunity." FB doesnt stand to lose anything from regulation.
Exactly. Facebook strategy is always let's generalize the problem so that our competitors are also affected, this way we can dilute the discussion, change the narrative (and also end up doing nothing concrete).
Data portability is kinda useless if all your contacts are on a single network. What we really need are federated social networks.
If Facebook loves the GDPR so much why did they move all non-EU users out of its scope when it came into force?
A simple fix to get rid of targeted political ads would be to scrap the ad network altogether. Of course, this is anathema to Facebook because they would stop making money.
Finally, the problem with harmful speech is not that there are multiple services but that the definition of harmful speech differs around the world. What good are independent bodies in the US that regulate Facebook when other countries want different standards?
> What we really need are federated social networks.
If you care about privacy and how your data is used and who has access to it, federated networks are probably the worst. You do get some benefits for the loss of those things, though.
F*ck MZ. He is the last person I want advice from on making the Internet better. FB is part of the problem and I have little to no hope they will ever be part of the solution.
Zuckerberg is a rational actor that's smart enough to know that he's not going to want any knee-jerk solution put together by idiot politicians. I'm confident that he doesn't want FB being permanently hobbled by laws or acts of Congress.
He's a rational actor who also somehow doesn't actually get it in a broad sense. Consider Kara Swisher's interview with him on Recode Decode… or Doug Rushkoff (Team Human book/podcast etc) wondered publicly if part of the problem was how Zuck dropped out of college. Rushkoff speculated about all these deeper philosophical, economic, political, humanism, etc. courses that might have got Zuck to actually get a more mature perspective instead of basically going right from adolescent snarky asshole to just applying that maturity level (albeit with a lot of intelligence) to his business.
He's rational in a sense, but he very well might not have ever stepped back far enough to really consider broader perspectives with an open mind, even as he reads and hears concerns. He probably reads them all with some strategic/tactical mindset that blocks him from truly getting the point.
I started using FB in '05 as a junior in college and it instantly became my 'favorite thing in the world'. IMO, Zuckerberg gifted University students across America with FB and single-handedly made the college experience better than it had ever been prior. On top of that, he's a smart guy who made it big in a world where endless shitloads of smart people never succeed in life and visionaries like Nikla Tesla die penniless. IOW, for a bunch of reasons I'm always rooting for the guy and I'd always thought of him as extremely lucky for getting to fast-track into the real world.
Now that you and Rushkoff mention it, the second half of the 4yr undergrad experience is exponentially better than the first, and success effectively robbed Zuckerberg of all of the great upper-division courses.
“I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.”
My irony just exploded. My solution is to say goodby to your Facebook “friends”, switch off the computer and go outside and socialize with real people. Yea, I know you can't unfriend people when they annoy you, but that's a small price to engage in a real social life.
>So we’re creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions. We’re also working with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems.
So content posted online should be moderated by the government. Fuck Zuck. He's advocating for the Chinese model for the entire world.
"Jam the door shut behind you." strategies employed by even the earliest monopolists and lobbyists in the US.
Or, in other words : "Let's regulate the loopholes that we used for success so as to diminish the opportunity for competition to arise in the same sector."
I don't think I expected anything different. Without choosing sides, I have to say that it all sounds very corporate, and I didn't expect anything else from him.
Yep! If a politician were proposing such regulations, we'd welcome her as a guardian of the people. But fuckin A man, this is mark zuckerberg proposing these things. He's a damn snake.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadOne only hopes there is some free room for small companies from regulation, so this helpful regulation doesnt end as a moat for FB and others.
This is what has me worried. If regulations go as far as requiring content filtering, it would effectively cement Facebook/YouTube/etc as the dominant internet platforms, because small competitors can't afford to build those systems just to get started.
I assume Zuckerberg is primarily interested in this for exactly that goal.
You’re right as far as the origin goes though.
Probably "flak", then.
I just checked the article. Proposal #1 is primarily there to limit Facebook’s liability. That said, it is incompatible with the First Amendment. A government or government sponsored regulatory body deciding what is socially harmful speech is precisely what the First Amendment guards against. You would have to go with a corporate governed body on a corporate volunteer basis for it to be a meaningful proposal. Essentially, Facebook can ban le Nazis, but the US Government can’t.
2 is arguably a good proposal, but it isn’t a new proposal. To the extent that the People in Power give a damn about protecting the integrity of elections, it is to protect their own seats. When election integrity is inconvenient, it gets pushed down as a non-issue. The real goal here is to force Facebook’s ad competitors to play on the same playing field as Facebook has been pressured into to stave off further regulation. This is regulation to protect their business, and if it happens to also protect what is left of the integrity of our elections, elections that the Russians didn’t make a considerable dent in the last time around despite their best efforts, great. There are however more effective measures to defend the integrity of our elections, if we care to.
3 and 4 are both items that Facebook could roll out globally if they cared, so I’m inclined to believe that on Facebook’s political calculus, they have determined that it is politically expedient for them to come out for GDPR-style rules globally, even if they could already provide their global user base the same tools, rights and privileges afforded their European users by GDPR. Data portability is a technical challenge that is relatively easily resolved. The primary politics involved in preventing this are corporate, not governmental, and back when Web 2.0 was hot stuff, open standards were both expected and the default. Facebook played an enormous role in data portability backsliding on the web.
If Facebook wants to bring out data privacy protections and data portability, then I’ll believe it when I see it. There aren’t any laws preventing this now.
We had something like that already, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
https://www.greenwichtime.com/opinion/article/The-internet-n...
Come to think of it... was the HTTP code chosen after Fahrenheit 451?
How do you reconcile this opinion with the knowledge that copycat crime¹ occurs.
One would imagine that an adult with critical thinking skills ought be able to observe that some people are easily influenced at least some of the time. Elsewise we wouldn't be here having this conversation.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime
There's no perfect answer to this problem, but censoring information just because it might reach a few unstable people is not the way to go.
One example that comes to mind is the film and TV rating system.
Plenty of reactionary assholes have been triggered to violence by disparaged groups having the gall to think of themselves as equals or transgress their taboos against things like interracial marriages. Heck, under that standard we should ban irrational numbers because they caused Pythagorean to drown their discoverer!
It does seem reasonable that there might be scope for regulation at least in the form of viewing guidelines.
I don’t know what that would look like in practice.
Zuckerberg is forever apologising and promising to do better, and this article is only the latest attempt to try to manage the repetitive poor news cycle that Facebook has generated over the last year.
They are not worried about the elections ..
I've seen it used so casually and often that feel like that has become a meaningless phrase that amounts to "anything established in any way, anywhere, that I don't like and I wish to add a negative connotation to those things, people, or whatever I don't like".
Hard problems require complex solutions. It’s not easy for small companies to get “a foot in the door” in the space or auto industries either. Content moderation is a hard and unsolved problem — so yes, companies with more resources will have a better chance of succeeding.
The idea that small competitors should be able to launch with minimal capital, and the idea that social media vendors should protect users' data, are fundamentally in tension. It costs money to protect user privacy, full stop. Yeah, it's possible for a Facebook/Microsoft/Google/whoever to bend the regulations to widen their moat, but it's the job of the regulatory bodies to ensure that the regulations are fair.
The question shouldn't be "should we regulate social media?" The answer, IMO, is a resounding YES. The real question should be "who should be in charge of building those regulations?"
That's an interesting idea, is it actually what you are suggesting?
The line of demarcation could be storing personally identifying information, interfacing with advertising networks, or maybe even ownership of certain patent/intellectual property rights.
The big players will push for regulations, licencing, and standard, ensuring that their next competitor can't come from a few smart people tinkering in their garage or their dorm room.
A good example is the toy industry, where requirements for chemical and safety tests which cost tens of thousands of dollars per SKU, keep mom and pop shops making wooden toys from their garage. (Well, they do anyway, but can be stopped at any time if they get too big.)
I'd love to hear about the behind-the-scenes politicking that led to this mode of public outreach.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-glob...
I'm not sure that's such a sure thing.
* harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability
I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your account.
Harmful content is a tough one because you either have free speech or you don't. Judging content is a slippery slope that every generation before us has warned us about.
Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.
Data portability is always good for the consumers I don't think anyone would argue against that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook.
What's the state of the discussion on how to do this sensibly?
The fact that this defends FBs position is just a coincidence...
It's also the exact feature that allowed Cambridge Analytica to happen ("Push this button to share your address book with this third-party company") - seems like people are vocally against allowing that to happen just as strongly as they are vocally in favour of implementing all the features which allow it to happen, somehow not connecting the two...
Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased.
Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?
Yes, the loss of privacy the internet has brought has been immense. However, the complete overhaul of social structures, the influence of large platforms on them (such as by optimizing for clicks/adverts), and the social pressures and influences that come with these by default is something that directly impacts most people for literal hours a day, and has run-on externalities that will affect the whole of society for the rest of our lives. Most people are only tangentially and occasionally affected by their numerous privacy losses.
Sure, I'm not certain in the studies showing that Facebook is negatively associated with wellbeing. I'm not certain that the degradation in conversation quality due to platforms optimizing for controversy is a real effect. I'm not certain that echo chambers preventing people from hearing moderate opinions of opposing sides is going to permanently damage public discourse. But these are not small risks, they are almost everything when it comes to humanity's ability to steer its future, and the potential impact on people's lives should not be so easily dismissed.
Say I’m selling highly profitable, highly addictive opioid painkillers. Hydrocodone has been around forever, so what do you do?
You use your access to workers comp and insurance claim data to find doctors treating conditions likely to require pain treatment. Then you find populations with high densities of patients and market heavily to their physicians. You buy ads that appeal to insured people who aren’t working.
Result: $$$
But more generally, how employers, insurance companies, etc trawl social media.
Similarly, Google's profiles help push people to 'engaging' content on YouTube. It just so happens that extreme claims (anorexia is good, x was a conspiracy, group y is inferior) happen to be very engaging.
Our loss of privacy has a lot of responsibility here. It has allowed for a very subtle division of the public forum.
My question is: So what?
If we have good privacy laws tomorrow (assume temporary magic), how does that do anything but change the modus operandi of manipulation?
wait for a large event, and then flash your ads. Similar to pre internet behavior, true. But it’s still at internet scale, and you could target via groups right?
If you cannot target your message, you need to take into account everyone who will hear it. This requires a more palpable message, and almost forces the adoption of a universal framework of facts.
Similarly, the profiling has lead to echo chambers. Having that fall away also helps create some universal discourse.
The problem is that most people are more comfortable around people that they identify with. This naturally trends towards echo chambers as people gravitate towards 'similar' others. And this is probably unstoppable. Companies rapidly accelerated the process of it by doing everything they possibly could to drive "engagement" but in the digital age you're not going to be able to stop people from forming 'like minded' groups, regardless of whatever rules and regulations somebody might try to dream up.
You need your private web - build it. Yourself.
To rely on fb to provide you with a private web - are you nuts?
This is fundamentally an issue of what rules apply to modern spaces where the masses congregate and interact.
And, importantly, all the 'solutions' I've seen amount to either public or private censorship with little direct accountability to the public and insufficient due process (1). That doesn't seem like a clear improvement over the status quo.
(1) Yes, even private governance needs due process protections.
I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important.
Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?
If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"?
> putting controls on campaign spending is important
That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?
Controlling campaign spending is a ridiculous notion anyways because there is (fortunately) no global law. Even if there was, you can bet there would be a black market.
So, while I appreciate your "Americans aren't poor, they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires" version of equality for the farce it is, I'd appreciate it if you tried mangling the truth somewhere else.
That's absolutely correct. If you donate more than a certain sum to campaign, you should be forced to be transparent about it.
> That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?
I live in a country where all political parties are bound by exactly such rules. Moreover TV advertising by political parties are is explicity banned. Instead parties are allocated short 'Party political broadcast' slots on the main channels.
It doesn't feel particularly "dangerous".
There doesn't need to be a global law.
Persuasion works and can be bought with money. It would be naive to think any of us in this thread are immune to persuasion.
Character
Emotion
Rational
Seriously? There is a $20 Billion dollar advertising industry with countless studies behind it, and hundreds of thousands of people working in, all of which says persuasion works. You’re going to need a little more proof.
Shut down Facebook as a company and three of those four problems are solved.
It's not about forcing people to do something.
No ads, about any topic, can force anyone to do anything.
Yet billions of dollars are spent every year on ads. This money is spent not because it can force people to do things, but because it can influence people. This influence leads to real, concrete effects.
Coca Cola isn't forcing anyone to buy Coke, but they can influence people, and on a population level their ads can lead to more people buying Coke.
The key to understanding this is to not consider the matter in terms of any one individual, but in terms of a population of people, and thinking of the influence as a statistical nudge in a particular direction.
This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them.
They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else.
Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like.
Real competition.
Facebook is the only place some of these people get their "news" and Facebook does nothing to distinguish an opinion blog from an actual journalist. We have millions of people flocking to Alex Jones for information and calling into question the authenticity of Reuters.
That and it's 2019 and we don't even have a secure MEANS of voting. We can make Facebook, which is probably a billion LOC with hardly any security flaws yet our voting machines have default credentials of admin/admin and run on decade old technology that has never been peer reviewed.
Facebook could do all these things in isolation, but generally speaking this could be really bad for long-term revenue. Essentially Facebook is stuck between a rock here; big moves will satisfy their user base, but annoy their large investors. On the other hand, doing nothing will harm users in the long run, but probably they could generate plenty of revenue in the process, so share holders would encourage this. Additionally if Facebook did this on their own, but other platforms are not subject to the same restrictions, they are at a huge competitive disadvantage.
I think this is the key value in broad government rules. Regulation here is both good for users and good for FB (and other platforms) in the long run. They can protect their users without having to explain to investors why they aren't just going straight for profits, because they will be bound by the rules established by regulation.
So in the end, FB should WANT regulation, because it's better for them in the long-run. I'm glad to see Mark appears to have finally realized this.
The Internet is doing just fine. It's these paperclip/engagement maximizing websites and crack-apps that are a problem. And the founder of one of the largest ones of these, after having built surveillance profiles on everybody, right as he's tightening the noose of censorship, is telling us that ambient "new rules" are needed now? Give me a break - Zuckerberg chose profitability over credibility a long time ago.
How about this - any rules that Zuckerberg thinks are "needed" can be simply tried by Faceboot itself. Then we can see if they actually fix the mess he's had a large part in creating, whether a different approach may be necessary, or whether the resulting environment ends up too draconian. This approach is blatantly obvious, but he's taken to lobbying rather than doing. So the actual question is what exactly is he trying to sell us on?
It does make sense though. He can finally see the tide of public opinion turning against him. Facebook's business metrics will be fine for a while but the pace at which they are losing people's trust is increasing. He needed to make a grand statement now while there are still large swaths of the population that view him as somewhat credible.
[Edit]
Also note the timing. This op-ed comes literally one day after Facebook made headlines for "mistakenly deleting" a bunch of Zuckerberg's early posts, including all his posts from 2007-2008. Which is completely absurd on the face of it. (Yesterday's HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19527200)
Luckily, one way to ensure people don't ask too many questions about this story is to make some new headlines. Sure enough, google news is linking yesterday's story and today's post under the same "Full Coverage" page. As I write this, the "mistaken deletion" story is indeed getting buried under the avalanche of new coverage:
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqOQgKIjNDQklTSURvSmMzUnZj...
Edit: Sorry for the snark. The idea that Zuckerberg is “helping” us with his lack of integrity is so absurd that I assumed you were trolling. It’s not just absurd but dangerous as the other reply to your comment stated better than I did.
Perhaps the regulations could be written to be more onerous for the incumbents to implement?
E.g. a new entrant below a certain size is allowed to get away with a good-faith effort and only subject to small fines, while an incumbent is required to have a massive and empowered internal compliance bureaucracy and is subject to massive fines when non-compliant.
All that does however is ensure the competition will ALWAYS be small.
where I am There are alot of employment regulations that kick in when you hire your 51st employee, under 50 and you are exempt, so guess what there are CRAP ton of businesses that can not expand beyond the 50 employee mark, they would love to higher more people but the burdens placed on them once they did would likely cause huge amounts of harm to the business, increase costs and revenue where they would no longer be able to afford that new employee.... Generally it makes is hard for a business to go from 50 to about 75 or 100 employees where the extra burdens no longer matter. So unless a business can double in size it is hard for those business to grow, they end up stagnate and often fail as a result
For a good example, look at the history of BTs enforced breakup in the UK.
Under what circumstances is a company evil for not allowing a user to delete posts? and under what circumstances are they evil for the reverse?
Based on his total disregard for privacy and his clear thirst for power, I want nothing coming from him or his company to ever influence actual policies.
[1] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/01/30/quoted-mark-zuckerberg...
Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.
Depends on what you mean by "function". Enjoying cat photos or playing a round of a video game doesn't take any stake at all.
This is a great concrete example of a rule that Zuckerberg himself worked to promulgate, and is presently causing real ongoing harm.
Awesome. So you're going to change your HN username to your real name and put your address and phone number in your "about" section?
Facebook on the other hand is a network for the exchange of private or personal information, including for example people forming groups about particularly sensitive topics (abuse experiences, disease and so on), in which personal identity is important to not open yourself up to potential intrusion by people who are not trustworthy. (Cynically enough stalkers for example trying to inject themselves into support groups)
Which is also of course why privacy and identity considerations between HN and Facebook differ.
No, it's not for me.
It seems exactly the opposite to me: I would not want to use my real name to publicly discuss sensitive personal topics.
For example, I may not want my friends or employer to find out that I'm a drug addict. In many workplaces, it could cost me my job. What if someone else in my support group happens to be a co-worker of mine?
Also, maybe some of us don't want to live in a creepy ad-supported pan-option where the links you click become your actual identity.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
No, it doesn't. People are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. When Youtube forced people's G+ accounts to merge into their comments and people suddenly found themselves commenting under their real names, it stopped the trolling and hate... for like a week.
Hell, plenty of people on Usenet were assholes with their real names and emails in their signatures.
I'd argue as far back as 2010 that indiscriminately selling user data was a bad idea especially when you are the sole network. A lot of people on here (HN) and elsewhere have been repeating those sentiments for years. As naive as it sounds, I simply wish Facebook was not so focused on building its ad platform but rather took on a more custodial role (albeit much less profitable).
Do note: Facebook doesn't sell data directly, they use it to sell ads. They actually buy data so that they can get more insights than what they get from only their own direct tracking.
There are probably plenty of ways you could word statements along these lines that make them technically correct. I've got a two-word response to all of them: Cambridge Analytica.
An academic from Cambridge made an app on the FB platform. That gave him access to data which he then sold for commercial purposes. When FB found out, they sent a legal notice to delete this data and cease using it.
Like gdpr on steroids? I think this would ruin a lot of companies and make a lot of really interesting and useful services no longer possible... but I'm rather curious what it would really mean. I've never seen it proposed by someone who actually recognized what it would mean, though.
At the very least, there's been no societal consensus that we want the trade-offs that come from allowing every click, view, email, and contact to be scanned and used for profit in whatever ways companies want. It happened by pure assertion: the companies just did it and did all they could to avoid even letting people actually know so they wouldn't have to ask.
Maybe we overall would rather lose all the benefits in order to block the harms and dangers.
I'd much rather have the status quo (and stronger) around privacy regulations for medical records than live in a world without that but then be one of a few people who forgo use of common medical facilitaties over personal privacy objections.
It is a deeply troubling mindset that goes beyond just being 'out of touch'.
1. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Marc Andreesen. olefoo is talking about Marc Andreesen.
I think this group, amongst all others that I interact with, is critical enough to call a bad faith argument a bad faith argument. However, I think all of us need better training/practice on how to identify bad faith arguments. I see the turn that has been occurring on HN against Elon as one example of that. It may take time but it happens. Compared to other spaces on this here Cyberspace - higher quality and higher s/n ration on argumentation is what keeps me coming back to HN. When people disagree with me here, I actually learn something.
Added: My twitter account got blocked because it spent most of it's time autoreplying to people about how the freakonomics podcast became an advertising pitch for the Koch brothers. I only use facebook because my mother prefers it to text. I can't stomach reddit having known the founders as people. My HN account really only exists because someone said a nice thing about a talk I gave - which drew me out of the shadows. I like it here, can I stay? I'll even wear a north face fleece. I drive an EV I promise.
That has never been Facebook's business model. The Hacker News crowd is smart enough to discuss these sorts of topics without dumbing down and misrepresenting the facts.
Facebook indiscriminately sells ads. In the past they also indiscriminately gave third parties access to user data. Doing that let them grow their market share and helped their primary business, but is not how they make money and is not a core part of the product.
then, does each user with multiple friends sub-lists exhibit a lack of integrity as well?
only if by 'identity' he means 'set of collectable data' and this seems to be the case.
"Having two identities is a reflection of how much trust I have in your integrity." -- me, to Mark Zuckerberg.
Over the past decade, I've probably had ~50 identities. Most have been minor, basically just an email address for some project or activity that I don't want linked to such persistent personas as Mirimir.
And it's also somewhat amusing, given how Facebook doesn't exactly advertize its origins as FaceMash. And this gem:
> I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Having two identities can save your life if you're a battered woman. Or of the wrong political persuasion in some countries.
I'm ok not 'liking' Zuckerberg's idea of integrity.
Facebook is not a small entity, they have overthrown governments and caused civil wars in third countries already.
However, FB needs a moot around their castle, so it acts via third parties, such as Cambridge Analytica.
And even if FB would not engage in large scale behavioral influencing, then through US law, various three letter agencies can force FB to hand over the data, all the while muting the company to disclose such practices.
He has been victim-blaming since Facebook was founded. (Remember the comments about how FB’s users were stupid to hand all that data over?)
Why expect him to stop at battered women or political refugees?
That isn't dishonest, that is behaving according to the role given.
They obviously don’t care.
"An identity is the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person. For example, individuals have meanings that they apply to themselves when they are a student, worker, spouse, or parent (these are roles they occupy), when they are a member of a fraternity, when they belong to the Democratic Party, when they are Latino (these are memberships in particular groups), or when they claim they are outgoing individuals or moral persons (these are personal characteristics that identify themselves as unique persons). People possess multiple identities because they occupy multiple roles, are members of multiple groups, and claim multiple personal characteristics, yet the meanings of these identities are shared by members of society. Identity theory seeks to explain the specific meanings that individuals have for the multiple identities they claim; how these identities relate to one another for any one person; how their identities influence their behavior, thoughts, and feelings or emotions; and how their identities tie them in to society at large." - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/identity-theory-9780...
Data portability is kinda useless if all your contacts are on a single network. What we really need are federated social networks.
If Facebook loves the GDPR so much why did they move all non-EU users out of its scope when it came into force?
A simple fix to get rid of targeted political ads would be to scrap the ad network altogether. Of course, this is anathema to Facebook because they would stop making money.
Finally, the problem with harmful speech is not that there are multiple services but that the definition of harmful speech differs around the world. What good are independent bodies in the US that regulate Facebook when other countries want different standards?
If you care about privacy and how your data is used and who has access to it, federated networks are probably the worst. You do get some benefits for the loss of those things, though.
the first enables the second (and iirc facebook has generaly been quite generous with exporting data)
> why did they move all non-EU users
"duh, because the frameworks were not harmonized"
He's rational in a sense, but he very well might not have ever stepped back far enough to really consider broader perspectives with an open mind, even as he reads and hears concerns. He probably reads them all with some strategic/tactical mindset that blocks him from truly getting the point.
Translation: I want regulatory capture so no startup can ever compete with Facebook, ever.
My irony just exploded. My solution is to say goodby to your Facebook “friends”, switch off the computer and go outside and socialize with real people. Yea, I know you can't unfriend people when they annoy you, but that's a small price to engage in a real social life.
So content posted online should be moderated by the government. Fuck Zuck. He's advocating for the Chinese model for the entire world.
Or, in other words : "Let's regulate the loopholes that we used for success so as to diminish the opportunity for competition to arise in the same sector."
I don't think I expected anything different. Without choosing sides, I have to say that it all sounds very corporate, and I didn't expect anything else from him.