A brilliant suggestion by Mark Zuckerberg. Rules, regulations and compliance are a burden and a barrier to entry for startups and competition. In most countries there are only a couple of regulated telcos.
Imagine with the tech landscape and how many fewer companies there will be if it is regulated like telcos.
Governments and regulators will have a bigger say in picking winners and losers.
"Hero myths like the ones surrounding Musk and Jobs are damaging in other ways, too. If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular, lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less tax dodging.
And finally, technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. Why should governments do the hard work of fixing and expanding California’s mass transit system when Musk says we could zip people across the state at 760 miles per hour in a “hyperloop”? Is trying to colonize Mars, at a cost in the billions of dollars, actually the right direction for future space exploration and scientific research? We should be able to determine long-term technology priorities without giving excessive weight to the particular visions of a few tech celebrities.
Rather than placing tech leaders on a pedestal, we should put their successes in context, acknowledging the role of government not only as a supporter of basic science but as a partner for new ventures. Otherwise, it is all too easy to denigrate public-sector investment, eroding support for government agencies and training programs and ultimately putting future innovation at risk. As Mazzucato puts it, “It’s precisely because we admire Musk and think his contributions are important that we need to get real about where his success actually comes from.”"
Of course Zuck wants you to think he's a utility, essential and ubiquitous like electricity and running water. Absolutely not a predatory and amoral monopolist, no sir.
Those aren't actually contradictory. But anyway, the point of this article is that he's distancing Facebook from the "utility" category, not trying to join it.
So long as certain content (that is not restricted by external forces, i.e. the law) is prohibited from the platform, I fail to see why they should be considered anything other than a publisher. If the platform can only be used for content they approve of, they can't be defined as anything else.
I think the "default allow" of a social media platform is materially different from the "default deny" of a typical publisher. That's kind of tricky to build a sharp distinction on, but it's where I would start.
I think the issue is more nuanced than you think. I understand where you are coming from.
BUT
By your own logic, hackernews should be treated as a publisher, and not a platform.
Hackenews is a forum where the moderators restrict discussion to specific topics to keep discussion high quality. But I consider them a platform and not a publisher.
Or for example a car discussion forum, bans anyone who wants to discuss airplanes. Again, I would still consider them a platform and not a publisher.
We might disagree with Zuckerberg about the specific consequences, but as far as the headline goes he's mostly right. Social media is a new thing, and trying to use existing regulatory frameworks for it, like those for telcos and newspapers, will lead to us all having a bad time.
Where I disagree, or at least am uncertain, is that the right regulatory framework for social media lies on some kind of straight line between the two others mentioned. In particular, those are both pretty heavyweight, and I don't want any real obstacles for new competitors or people just running a phpBB.
Can you elaborate a bit on how anyone "but" Facebook has a bad time by applying the existing regulatory frameworks? You mention itsy-bitsy start-up boards, but really none of the concerns being address in courts world wide have anything to do with minor boards and everything to do with Facebook's lack of control over their advertisers, the amount of information being shared out to said advertisers, their position as a news platform (upon Facebook's own insistence) plus their lack of vetting (keep in mind, this isn't about them generating content or user posted content, it's about Facebook's algorithms purposefully promoting this content; this is much different than some nutcase spinning up a site on a VM somewhere an trying to SEO as much as they can to get some attention from random google searches on hot-topic subjects).
Social media walks a strange line where it seems that its proponents both want to be treated as legitimate news, but not held to the same standards of veracity and validation of the claims that traditional news sources purport to follow*. Such scrutiny of Facebook isn't a concern for a start up unless they're already engaging in bad-faith practices and/or problematic practices per stringent Privacy Law (i.e., EU law).
Simply put, Facebook can see that their ability to expand past the US strongly (more than it already has) is gated by the public perception of what Facebook is/does. I'm no in the EU proper but close enough and get various Warnings/messages about Facebook from facebook itself...and for me it's empty.
But make no mistake, Facebook really is trying to muddy the waters by pretending that existing legislation targets or directly affects persons who are not engaged in the non-sense which was required before.
I feel that I should not have to justify the idea that applying laws designed around a certain set of assumptions, in a situation that violates those assumptions, is likely to produce bad outcomes. I feel that this should be the default belief. But since you asked so nicely...
The case of treating FB as a telco is obvious: no accountability. I think we're agreed that this is no good.
A news outlet (a) explicitly has their credibility on the line with regard to their output and (b) is very selective in what they publish (for better or worse). Neither of these is really the case for Facebook. For a given link, only the poster's and linkee's credibility is on the line. Facebook defaults to allowing posts, and is only somewhat selective in what it allows and promotes. If this means Facebook is legally equivalent to the New York Times, then so are HN, reddit, Pinterest, etc. Treating FB as a new agency requires all of these sites to take responsibility for the opinions of all of their users. This will discourage medium-sized sites where hand-moderation (doable for small forums) is just becoming infeasible, and more importantly have a chilling effect on people's online activity, because you'll never quite know when the admins of the site you're posting on, or their robotic minions, will panic about your controversial link. Better for them to delete your post just in case they get in trouble with the law, and maybe better for you to not bother and stay silent. This is also no good.
Of course that's just one scenario. Details may differ across the multiverse. But one thing that doesn't change is that basing policy on something other than reality always finds a way to go wrong.
So, treat them as a mash-up between one of the best known monopolies in US history and an industry known for equal parts educating and confusing people? That's both very forthcoming of him and completely terrifying.
The National Enquirer is a newspaper too, and probably the closer analogy to Facebook in reality than more reputable news organizations.
Treat Facebook like both and apply all the telco and content regulations to them.
One of the key principles in telco regulation is ensuring any-to-any connectivity. It is now established in most jurisdictions that telcos have a monopoly over connecting to their end-customers (i.e. the only was to call a T-mobile customer is for T-mobile to accept the call into their network). Hence regulators not only mandate interconnection, but require it to be done on fair terms and conditions, including a fair wholesale price, which is often set by the regulator.
Stop worrying about trying to please the PC police and just run the most addictive and profitable BBS you can. Promote whatever you want and shadow ban whatever.
The Europeons may object, but ultimately in the US the political will doesn’t exist to make you do more. A few politicians like Hawley on the right and AOC on the left may have an issue that works for them, but the American majority is going to look pretty skeptically at any significant regulation.
Suggesting they're a near necessary part of life, like a utility, is laughable. But since he brought it up, replacing them with a proper newspaper would be much more useful.
Facebook serves many important roles especially with the groups feature. I know many reddit/tech headasses will jerk off to the fact they abhor facebook but facebook is integral to many local communities helping facilitate an online flea market of sorts and almost being the most important network for students (used textbooks, study groups, entrepreneurship etc.)
dont like it but its much more useful than the local news website
Yeah, but I don't see how that's a good thing. Many groups near me have moved exclusively to Facebook meaning I'm essentially locked out from participating in them.
Previously stuff like this would have been organized through a mailing list or maybe a BBS. Facebook taking this over means that you have to allow them spying on you to take part in basic social activities.
But that is the point. It's a feature, not a bug, to filter out anyone who is not willing to click through a license agreement for the sake of participating in the community. Such an individual is antisocial.
What? Are you delusional? I rarely ever get this concerned at HN comments, but to say outright that one should be willing to give up any liberties or rights a corporation deems are dangerous, in order to participate in a group that has no inherent need for their products anyway, is beyond nonsensical. This is more than can be called a "social contract"; Facebook is committing social theft by stealing away any local groups into its servers.
Actually, on re-examination I thought I might've been a bit angrier than one should be when commenting on this site, but the poster confirmed they were serious.
Well, let's put it this way: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
You can stay away from Facebook and then feel really smug ten years from now when it eventually collapses. But until then, you'd have missed out on a lot of important things. The only winning move is to realize that you do not have a choice, and that the terms of service are just an illusion.
For the record, I think Facebook's existence is regrettable. But the notion that you have any ability, choice, freedom, right, or opportunity to opt out from it is laughable.
As for the idea of the social contract, I think you are actually spot on:
> Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority [...] in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.
Individuals have:
[?] consented explicitly
[x] consented tacitly
[x] to surrender some of their freedoms
[x] to submit to the authority [Facebook]
[ ] in exchange for protection of their remaining rights
[x] in exchange for maintenance of the social order
In fact, it could even be argued that this de-facto state of affair ought to be made de-jure. Certainly, it is the case already today that many of my local government agencies are more active on Twitter or Facebook than they are over phone or e-mail. In fact, they rarely use e-mail for regulatory reasons. If someone is suicidal, has an extreme drinking problem, or holds extremist political beliefs, we consider this a transgression and rightfully lock them up/commit them to involuntary psychiatric care. Why is this not the case for all self-harmful behaviors?
Considering many employers etc. already want it, it doesn't seem far-fetched to consider people hermits for refusing to participate, just as we consider an individual defect for not owning a smartphone.
I just finished a yoga retreat, on which they organized the group on Facebook. At the intro the karma yogi requested our phone numbers for WhatsApp, which, like FB, I refuse to participate in
(I happily provided my number, though)
You know what? A bit of an obstacle for the organizers and slightly more hassle for me (for example: I'll have to mail one of the participants so that he mails me the pictures shared on WhatsApp).
Else than that? A complete no-brainer for all involved.
I totally get why those tools are used to help organize such an event. They totally got why I refuse to come close to anything Facebook with a vengeance and were happy to work around it.
As an added bonus I was the only one in the group who shut the phone off on Sunday evening and didn't touch it again until the retreat finished the following Friday.
If people really believe that I'm an antisocial hermit, which cannot be trusted? Well, fuck them very much!
In many groups, that's not how it works - you either join up on Facebook, or all dice are off the table.
If so, then it's quite apparent ex-facto why they want to move to Facebook - if people are not willing to go through that hoop to join in, then why would they want them?
I'm saying that's already how it is, and that it might as well be made official, i.e. law.
To be clear here, I tried to do this, and all it earned me was ostracism. It is not a virtuous act at all, despite what some may like to give you the impression of.
In Finland, Internet access is considered to be a human right, and it's not feasible to do a lot of things otherwise, such as banking errands. Considering Facebook == the Internet to many people, I don't see why the same rules can't apply there.
> In Finland, Internet access is considered to be a human right
Can Facebook be voted into a law where it is considered to be a human right? It's possible, but before that ever happens chases are much bigger that scientology becomes official religion and everyone will mutate to look like Moomins.
"You must sign on to Facebook to participate in society" to
"[In Finland] internet usage is considered a human right"
By essentially changing your argument and implying something which I never said and which has nothing to do with what I said you invalidate your argument.
And that "neat trick" (which is pretty transparent, alas) makes you intellectually dishonest.
I think we can close the discussion here. Thanks for playing.
I wasn't trying to move the goalposts, and I find your accusation rude. If using the Internet is considered a human right in Finland, it stands to reason you must use the Internet to participate in society. If Facebook equals the Internet, then you need to use Facebook to participate in society.
That you need use Facebook in order to participate in society also seems rather obvious - a great deal of events are only announced there, so you have to use it if you want to know what's going on.
If that claim is correct, then it seems like it would be a good idea to inform people about it, so that they do not make the same mistake I did and think that you can opt out of Facebook.
And if people do make this choice, knowing full well that they will be ostracized over it, then I believe that by definition makes them antisocial - the claim made in my initial post.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't perpetuate flamewars or be a jerk in comments here, regardless of how wrong or irritating another user is, or you feel they are.
I think the main difference is that you have to actively choose to participate in those groups on reddit, but on FB/IG, that kind of content is pushed at you.
It’s true and sad it’s come to this. Meetup is great but just doesn’t get the attention FB does. I either have to deal with the inconvenience of two accounts or let my local frisbee team look up my info, friends, any posts FB “resets” privacy settings on on, etc.
It’s just software. There dozens of alternatives: Craigslist, next door, targeting all the things you say
You’ve fallen for exactly Zuckerbergs real goal: make his printing press the only one that matters.
But then his invention isn’t as unique as a physical printing press would have been to a community even just a generation ago.
It’s not as hard to duplicate.
This is where we ended up with forums like this one jacking itself off at how novel it’s Todo app, and IM clone are. So ubiquitous it’s banal, a single example is barely worth the extreme value placed upon it.
This site spent years being mesmerized by the values placed in these companies. It was market manipulation: keep attention on a select few. Government let them become a monopoly of information because they could see the value in distributing their message. Powers that be are always at the cutting edge of information distribution. Not cause they care about tech but propagandizing the public.
And the people cheered it on.
And since you’re so worried about the local value: imagine the local value to tech workers who are hired to deal with local tech needs instead of it being outsourced to FAANGs which can restrict hiring and manipulate wages as they have.
Your post is pure propaganda, mate. You’re regurgitating exactly the talking point they want. Please continue to carry water for the rich man, since he’s so concerned about the local value you highlight... while bailing on taxes that would directly help locals that prop his wealth up by continuing to go to work.
If Hacker News is a pack of cigarettes, what is Facebook? I mean, this platform itself isn't tracking me across a major portion of the internet or trying to manipulate me to any significant degree relative to Facebook. Maybe some users are, but at least the platform itself isn't. Like any bad habit, some of worse than others.
Just because an insidious corporation has a tone-deaf marketing ploy to sell a brainwashing machine to wannabe brainwashers like cambridge analytica, that doesn't mean said brainwashing machine actually works. Was the attempt made? Sure, but Facebook's user data is still based on the garbled manic ramblings, likes, and shares of 50-million Facebook users who eschew posting anything of substance or resembling real life. Somehow, SOMEHOW, from that fundamentally flawed dataset Facebook thinks it can learn every user intimately enough to accurately predict how you'll react to content before you do. It then claims to possesses the computational power to analyze the data and project any media directly to its intended audience, never missing the target or accidentally displaying content to wouldbe dissenters who would, in kind, publicly rebuke the fallacies of dank memes and destroy the credibility of disreputable news sources in real-time.
Oh wait, that's what happened. We all saw the memes, the Breitbart articles, the Alex Jones videos the same time Trump supporters did. We all made our attempts to rebuke shillary/immigration articles. We all had our Tea Party libertarian cousins subsequently block us. What kind of propaganda machine allows malcontents to sew dissent against major clients of Facebook like Cambridge Analytica? If Facebook intended to show the world that their brainwashing machine worked they failed pretty hard.
If you want to build a propaganda machine in this day and age you can't attempt to control what users see, that's why we all left TV behind for the internet. You have to make it seem like the content is coming from other users. What you do is you give your users the power to control what other users see and don't see. On Reddit or HN, content is ranked, and even removed, based on a popularity contest-- or as it's more insidiously known, "mob rule." Then, subreddits and HN can control the direction of the content by simply pruning the mob of any dissenters, which then skews the mob's vote in a particular direction even more. That gives Reddit and HN a needed degree of separation from themselves and the actual content you see, which legitimizes the rankings (and removal) of certain content, while being still completely curated by the website's creators.
Or maybe HN and Reddit are better mediums than Facebook for free speech. That's too hard for me to tell. There's no such thing as a flawless system. Simply stating that a social media platform has problems with free speech isn't enough for me to decide if one is good or bad, or better or worse, than anything else.
The reality is, even if these websites are all attempted propaganda machines, none of them have been proven to work. We can't even be brainwashed by others. We can only brainwash ourselves. We were never going to win those arguments on Facebook because Trump supporters had already made up their minds long before any memes came along and added some higher-than-usual production value to their racism and xenophobia. We believe in timely and convenient untruths. Conservatives bought the story about hillary because they were in a hurry to discredit hillary, just like progressives bought the story about russian hackers and cambridge analytica because they were in a hurry to discredit trump.
There's an even more fundamental flaw to all of this: can I quantify who you are into numbers? Without that I can't even target an audience. How accurate can those numbers possibly be? And if you knew how my tests worked and how I calculated your stats, you'd be able to game the system so your stats read anything you wanted.
Isn’t that the very problem with Facebook, that it wants to impartially serve content like a telco, but partially control the content like a newspaper?
Zuck wants to have cake and eat it too, and now it's as if somehow he'll genetically engineer himself to shit out more cakes for everyone - that's the facebook for ya'll, enjoy it!
I don’t think Facebook wants to control content, it’s hard, expensive, and hurts their reputation. It’s users and governments complaining that forces them into that game.
There are couple different kinds of "controlling the content". Facebook does want to promote certain things, i.e. make them easier to find, but it doesn't really want to delete or block things entirely, which is what I think GP was talking about.
I think data and metadata is a good analogy. They don't want to control the end content (the data), but want to route users to the content that is engaging (the metadata, aka knowing the users prefs and knowing what content meets those prefs).
Argued to the extreme, there could be infinite variations of content that you could route users to, and the routing algorithm is so good that it effectively 'controls the content' by selecting which exact content to route to, even though technically speaking they are not controlling the content.
This kind of hairsplitting is basically the 'have cake, eat it too' situation.
I don't think Facebook wants anything, as it is simply an abstract legal concept. Employees and shareholders of Facebook are the ones to watch. They were the first movers on the totally not coordinated Alex Jones shunning. Youtube had previously struck a video or two, but Facebook was the first to bring down the ban hammer. Days later Jones was banned from every other major platform - with Twitter being the single exception.
It's just that companies like Facebook, Twitter etc don't want to attract negative PR attention by being the first to move. Once one of them does move it's far less risky to follow.
That is a distinction without a difference, even in the most charitable light. Do I think they're meeting in smoke filled back rooms to plot their dark deeds? No. They are actually very open about it, sending company officers and employees to panels on the topic, echoing the same messaging about their self appointed burden in policing the thoughts of others.
It is not unlike a mob. While it is comprised of autonomous individuals, there is a feedback loop of their own making that results in an emergent behavior. Translated into moonman talk: something something social contract, something... collective will.
They do and they have. They already let the genie out. They could reimplemented themselves as a privacy focused dumb pipe but they clearly do not want to do that.
Facebook is really big so lets treat it as such, and look at things piece by piece. Start with treating Facebook's NEWS FEED as a newspaper perhaps, then move on to other problems like hate groups using facebook to organize, marketplace fraud, etc.
Shall we go and ask the head of Exxon Mobil what level of regulation he thinks we should enforce for sub-standard engineering practices on oil tankers and oil rigs?
How about next time the policeman stops a drunk driver we ask the drunk driver what BAC would be reasonable for him to be driving with?
I'm still not sure why we don't regulate companies like facebook like we did the rail industry. Force facebook and other social media companies to develop an open API and standard and guarantee interoparibility, akin to other federalized networks that already exist.
This takes the biggest anti-competitive aspect of facebook out, the network and walled garden effect they have due to their sheer size.
It will mean that companies like Signal have much greater chance to compete with whatsapp, it will reward whoever provides the best service to their users, and it is relatively light and uncomplicated regulation.
I'll admit, I just don't think the way we've been regulating social media has been bad. I think perceiving it as a source of news or truth instead of just a place where people talk to each other is weird. I understand that people don't like what some social media sites have become, but outside of removing content that isn't protected by the first amendment, I really don't see why we would want to create regulations surrounding it.
A phone company doesn’t suggest other phone numbers or people you should be calling, or try and optimize for your engagement on making the most phone calls. A telco company also traditionally does not directly market to users, or sell ads based on the content of their data (voice calls and text messages). So by this test, no, Facebook is nothing like a telco.
That seems to be the point in the article, it's not like a telco. Another thread here points out that it's not like a newspaper either.
In reality it's an entirely new category and applying regulations from the 20th century isn't going to work as well as coming up with entirely new ones to address entirely new problems.
Treat Facebook like a website. It's just a website. It's not so important that it needs a special designation. I think it makes sense to come up with data and privacy laws that apply to all companies, not just Facebook.
100 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadImagine with the tech landscape and how many fewer companies there will be if it is regulated like telcos.
Governments and regulators will have a bigger say in picking winners and losers.
And finally, technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. Why should governments do the hard work of fixing and expanding California’s mass transit system when Musk says we could zip people across the state at 760 miles per hour in a “hyperloop”? Is trying to colonize Mars, at a cost in the billions of dollars, actually the right direction for future space exploration and scientific research? We should be able to determine long-term technology priorities without giving excessive weight to the particular visions of a few tech celebrities.
Rather than placing tech leaders on a pedestal, we should put their successes in context, acknowledging the role of government not only as a supporter of basic science but as a partner for new ventures. Otherwise, it is all too easy to denigrate public-sector investment, eroding support for government agencies and training programs and ultimately putting future innovation at risk. As Mazzucato puts it, “It’s precisely because we admire Musk and think his contributions are important that we need to get real about where his success actually comes from.”"
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...
BUT
By your own logic, hackernews should be treated as a publisher, and not a platform.
Hackenews is a forum where the moderators restrict discussion to specific topics to keep discussion high quality. But I consider them a platform and not a publisher.
Or for example a car discussion forum, bans anyone who wants to discuss airplanes. Again, I would still consider them a platform and not a publisher.
Where I disagree, or at least am uncertain, is that the right regulatory framework for social media lies on some kind of straight line between the two others mentioned. In particular, those are both pretty heavyweight, and I don't want any real obstacles for new competitors or people just running a phpBB.
Social media walks a strange line where it seems that its proponents both want to be treated as legitimate news, but not held to the same standards of veracity and validation of the claims that traditional news sources purport to follow*. Such scrutiny of Facebook isn't a concern for a start up unless they're already engaging in bad-faith practices and/or problematic practices per stringent Privacy Law (i.e., EU law).
Simply put, Facebook can see that their ability to expand past the US strongly (more than it already has) is gated by the public perception of what Facebook is/does. I'm no in the EU proper but close enough and get various Warnings/messages about Facebook from facebook itself...and for me it's empty.
But make no mistake, Facebook really is trying to muddy the waters by pretending that existing legislation targets or directly affects persons who are not engaged in the non-sense which was required before.
The case of treating FB as a telco is obvious: no accountability. I think we're agreed that this is no good.
A news outlet (a) explicitly has their credibility on the line with regard to their output and (b) is very selective in what they publish (for better or worse). Neither of these is really the case for Facebook. For a given link, only the poster's and linkee's credibility is on the line. Facebook defaults to allowing posts, and is only somewhat selective in what it allows and promotes. If this means Facebook is legally equivalent to the New York Times, then so are HN, reddit, Pinterest, etc. Treating FB as a new agency requires all of these sites to take responsibility for the opinions of all of their users. This will discourage medium-sized sites where hand-moderation (doable for small forums) is just becoming infeasible, and more importantly have a chilling effect on people's online activity, because you'll never quite know when the admins of the site you're posting on, or their robotic minions, will panic about your controversial link. Better for them to delete your post just in case they get in trouble with the law, and maybe better for you to not bother and stay silent. This is also no good.
Of course that's just one scenario. Details may differ across the multiverse. But one thing that doesn't change is that basing policy on something other than reality always finds a way to go wrong.
The National Enquirer is a newspaper too, and probably the closer analogy to Facebook in reality than more reputable news organizations.
Imagine if William Randolph Heart and Ma Bell had a love child.
shall I burn it or wipe my arse with it.
One of the key principles in telco regulation is ensuring any-to-any connectivity. It is now established in most jurisdictions that telcos have a monopoly over connecting to their end-customers (i.e. the only was to call a T-mobile customer is for T-mobile to accept the call into their network). Hence regulators not only mandate interconnection, but require it to be done on fair terms and conditions, including a fair wholesale price, which is often set by the regulator.
Stop worrying about trying to please the PC police and just run the most addictive and profitable BBS you can. Promote whatever you want and shadow ban whatever.
The Europeons may object, but ultimately in the US the political will doesn’t exist to make you do more. A few politicians like Hawley on the right and AOC on the left may have an issue that works for them, but the American majority is going to look pretty skeptically at any significant regulation.
Suggesting they're a near necessary part of life, like a utility, is laughable. But since he brought it up, replacing them with a proper newspaper would be much more useful.
dont like it but its much more useful than the local news website
Previously stuff like this would have been organized through a mailing list or maybe a BBS. Facebook taking this over means that you have to allow them spying on you to take part in basic social activities.
Anywho, I'm still waiting for their Lifepoint feature to be implemented
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHefhIId4qY
You can stay away from Facebook and then feel really smug ten years from now when it eventually collapses. But until then, you'd have missed out on a lot of important things. The only winning move is to realize that you do not have a choice, and that the terms of service are just an illusion.
For the record, I think Facebook's existence is regrettable. But the notion that you have any ability, choice, freedom, right, or opportunity to opt out from it is laughable.
As for the idea of the social contract, I think you are actually spot on:
> Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority [...] in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.
Individuals have:
[?] consented explicitly
[x] consented tacitly
[x] to surrender some of their freedoms
[x] to submit to the authority [Facebook]
[ ] in exchange for protection of their remaining rights
[x] in exchange for maintenance of the social order
In fact, it could even be argued that this de-facto state of affair ought to be made de-jure. Certainly, it is the case already today that many of my local government agencies are more active on Twitter or Facebook than they are over phone or e-mail. In fact, they rarely use e-mail for regulatory reasons. If someone is suicidal, has an extreme drinking problem, or holds extremist political beliefs, we consider this a transgression and rightfully lock them up/commit them to involuntary psychiatric care. Why is this not the case for all self-harmful behaviors?
Considering many employers etc. already want it, it doesn't seem far-fetched to consider people hermits for refusing to participate, just as we consider an individual defect for not owning a smartphone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY
You know what? A bit of an obstacle for the organizers and slightly more hassle for me (for example: I'll have to mail one of the participants so that he mails me the pictures shared on WhatsApp).
Else than that? A complete no-brainer for all involved.
I totally get why those tools are used to help organize such an event. They totally got why I refuse to come close to anything Facebook with a vengeance and were happy to work around it.
As an added bonus I was the only one in the group who shut the phone off on Sunday evening and didn't touch it again until the retreat finished the following Friday.
If people really believe that I'm an antisocial hermit, which cannot be trusted? Well, fuck them very much!
If so, then it's quite apparent ex-facto why they want to move to Facebook - if people are not willing to go through that hoop to join in, then why would they want them?
I'm really rather glad that we quite obviously don't inhibit the same world.
To be clear here, I tried to do this, and all it earned me was ostracism. It is not a virtuous act at all, despite what some may like to give you the impression of.
In Finland, Internet access is considered to be a human right, and it's not feasible to do a lot of things otherwise, such as banking errands. Considering Facebook == the Internet to many people, I don't see why the same rules can't apply there.
Can Facebook be voted into a law where it is considered to be a human right? It's possible, but before that ever happens chases are much bigger that scientology becomes official religion and everyone will mutate to look like Moomins.
You're moving the discussion from
"You must sign on to Facebook to participate in society" to
"[In Finland] internet usage is considered a human right"
By essentially changing your argument and implying something which I never said and which has nothing to do with what I said you invalidate your argument.
And that "neat trick" (which is pretty transparent, alas) makes you intellectually dishonest.
I think we can close the discussion here. Thanks for playing.
That you need use Facebook in order to participate in society also seems rather obvious - a great deal of events are only announced there, so you have to use it if you want to know what's going on.
If that claim is correct, then it seems like it would be a good idea to inform people about it, so that they do not make the same mistake I did and think that you can opt out of Facebook.
And if people do make this choice, knowing full well that they will be ostracized over it, then I believe that by definition makes them antisocial - the claim made in my initial post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Reddit has some of the most toxic communities on the internet bar none e.g. /r/gamersriseup, /r/kotakuinaction.
And not sure how FB/IG would push that content to you unless you were friends with people posting that sort of content.
You’ve fallen for exactly Zuckerbergs real goal: make his printing press the only one that matters.
But then his invention isn’t as unique as a physical printing press would have been to a community even just a generation ago.
It’s not as hard to duplicate.
This is where we ended up with forums like this one jacking itself off at how novel it’s Todo app, and IM clone are. So ubiquitous it’s banal, a single example is barely worth the extreme value placed upon it.
This site spent years being mesmerized by the values placed in these companies. It was market manipulation: keep attention on a select few. Government let them become a monopoly of information because they could see the value in distributing their message. Powers that be are always at the cutting edge of information distribution. Not cause they care about tech but propagandizing the public.
And the people cheered it on.
And since you’re so worried about the local value: imagine the local value to tech workers who are hired to deal with local tech needs instead of it being outsourced to FAANGs which can restrict hiring and manipulate wages as they have.
Your post is pure propaganda, mate. You’re regurgitating exactly the talking point they want. Please continue to carry water for the rich man, since he’s so concerned about the local value you highlight... while bailing on taxes that would directly help locals that prop his wealth up by continuing to go to work.
Give me a fucking break.
Oh wait, that's what happened. We all saw the memes, the Breitbart articles, the Alex Jones videos the same time Trump supporters did. We all made our attempts to rebuke shillary/immigration articles. We all had our Tea Party libertarian cousins subsequently block us. What kind of propaganda machine allows malcontents to sew dissent against major clients of Facebook like Cambridge Analytica? If Facebook intended to show the world that their brainwashing machine worked they failed pretty hard.
If you want to build a propaganda machine in this day and age you can't attempt to control what users see, that's why we all left TV behind for the internet. You have to make it seem like the content is coming from other users. What you do is you give your users the power to control what other users see and don't see. On Reddit or HN, content is ranked, and even removed, based on a popularity contest-- or as it's more insidiously known, "mob rule." Then, subreddits and HN can control the direction of the content by simply pruning the mob of any dissenters, which then skews the mob's vote in a particular direction even more. That gives Reddit and HN a needed degree of separation from themselves and the actual content you see, which legitimizes the rankings (and removal) of certain content, while being still completely curated by the website's creators.
Or maybe HN and Reddit are better mediums than Facebook for free speech. That's too hard for me to tell. There's no such thing as a flawless system. Simply stating that a social media platform has problems with free speech isn't enough for me to decide if one is good or bad, or better or worse, than anything else.
The reality is, even if these websites are all attempted propaganda machines, none of them have been proven to work. We can't even be brainwashed by others. We can only brainwash ourselves. We were never going to win those arguments on Facebook because Trump supporters had already made up their minds long before any memes came along and added some higher-than-usual production value to their racism and xenophobia. We believe in timely and convenient untruths. Conservatives bought the story about hillary because they were in a hurry to discredit hillary, just like progressives bought the story about russian hackers and cambridge analytica because they were in a hurry to discredit trump.
There's an even more fundamental flaw to all of this: can I quantify who you are into numbers? Without that I can't even target an audience. How accurate can those numbers possibly be? And if you knew how my tests worked and how I calculated your stats, you'd be able to game the system so your stats read anything you wanted.
Argued to the extreme, there could be infinite variations of content that you could route users to, and the routing algorithm is so good that it effectively 'controls the content' by selecting which exact content to route to, even though technically speaking they are not controlling the content.
This kind of hairsplitting is basically the 'have cake, eat it too' situation.
It's just that companies like Facebook, Twitter etc don't want to attract negative PR attention by being the first to move. Once one of them does move it's far less risky to follow.
It is not unlike a mob. While it is comprised of autonomous individuals, there is a feedback loop of their own making that results in an emergent behavior. Translated into moonman talk: something something social contract, something... collective will.
How about next time the policeman stops a drunk driver we ask the drunk driver what BAC would be reasonable for him to be driving with?
This takes the biggest anti-competitive aspect of facebook out, the network and walled garden effect they have due to their sheer size.
It will mean that companies like Signal have much greater chance to compete with whatsapp, it will reward whoever provides the best service to their users, and it is relatively light and uncomplicated regulation.
In reality it's an entirely new category and applying regulations from the 20th century isn't going to work as well as coming up with entirely new ones to address entirely new problems.