Jokes aside, not only Facebook but a lot of companies do that so it seems they are proactive while they pretty much do nothing valuable and hope they don't get regulated.
I am curious, given the international nature of Facebook which makes it hard to rely on country authorities to settle content moderation disputes: what would be a better alternative? (Disclaimer: I work at FB)
None. I see too often the argument 'it's difficult for company X to follow the law, so how should countries change the law to fit the company needs?'.
I have worked for decades in regulated markets. It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports. But, we always follow the law, we do what local regulators ask us to do, we filter, or change the content to fit the local government decisions.
Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit.
If you work for Facebook, ask the company to look for experienced companies in regulated markets. And I do not mean just to hire lobbyists but to create a technical infrastructure that allows to follow the rule of law in all countries where it operates. To just lobby for more political power only makes Facebook mindset worse.
> Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit.
I wouldn't trust Facebook any further than I could throw my smartphone, but many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". All the censorship laws out there, lese majeste in Thailand, "don't allow insults to our religious feelings" in other jurisdictions... Then there's all the various forms of protectionism.
"Society's needs" is not a phrase that can effectively advance our understanding of Facebook, and if we're going to talk about the goodness and badness of the mindset, we should be critical on both ends. Which needs are we talking about? Why does this society's rulers think it needs them, and not the society next door? And are these so-called needs really about entrenched powers oppressing someone?
> many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs".
Philosophical question: what is a better approach to advancing society's needs' than government and its regulations? If a given corporation, ala Friedman, best serves its owners by maximizing profit, it seems corporations are not in a position to serve any interests but their own.
Trump is exactly why a great deal of power needs to be vested in non-state institutions which are comfortable defying the state. Imagine the situation if the US didn't have robust free speech laws. Trump would have clamped down on dissent and we would be much worse off.
It will. But a less robust free speech tradition can give you an Orban or a Modi, who are both worse than Trump. On net I'd rather take that risk because of its greater potential to correct itself when it goes wrong.
All speech is manipulation in some way. It's not clear to me what "harmful speech" is supposed to mean other than that one group of people are upset another group of people are able to say something they disagree with and want to shutdown the other group's speech.
This is a common canard of those who wish to regulate or manipulate with their speech. But consider alternatives such as these for your next use of speech: to convey information, to inform, to persuade, to enlighten.
> Which needs are we talking about? Why does this society's rulers think it needs them, and not the society next door? And are these so-called needs really about entrenched powers oppressing someone?
Counter question: Why would Facebook (or any other tech company of your choosing) know any better what a society needs than the society itself?
Tech companies love to paint themselves as the brave protectors of the powerless against the oppressive regimes of the world.
This may be true in certain cases - however, this still doesn't seem to keep them from doing business with the exact same regimes - and it doesn't seem to motivate them to adhere to regulations any better if they are passed by functioning democracies.
They wouldn't necessarily. The better question is: Why would Facebook's Users know better what they, as individual human beings, want, rather than whoever is in charge of the society, including their meddlesome neighbors, self-aggrandizing politicians, and repressive religious leaders?
(n.b. there are real meaningful answers to this question which respect individual agency instead of simply collectivizing all decisions about who is allowed to send bits to whom; it's just much more work to nail them down.)
>Counter question: Why would Facebook (or any other tech company of your choosing) know any better what a society needs than the society itself?
This is a strange question. (1) Society isn't a singular being that has perfect information about what it wants. (2) Society has a terrible track record for what it wants. There's a rather large slice of society that believes it's ok to enact vigilante justice on minorities and a president who has routinely parroted conspiracy theories. I'm not convinced "society" knows that it needs either and I'd rather see Facebook destroyed than it's power handed over to "society".
> It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports.
I am becoming familiar with this pain. I wonder (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/) whether there is a way to simplify, or at least manage, compliance with multiple partially overlapping regulations, e.g. by having one database with reports generated per-regulation. I am curious about learning what experienced people in this space know. Any pointers?
> Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit.
I don’t think this is their argument at all.
Facebook regulates and removes far more content than required by law.
Under the US 1st Amendment almost everything offensive, racist, bad, pornographic, etc is legal. Facebook still removes quite a lot of legal content from their posts and their content moderators get PTSD from having to look at content which may be legal.
I think Facebook’s real issue is that they know they and their user base want them to be stricter than the law requires, but where should those standards fall?
If they want to profit from the whole of society then they'll have to strike a balance that minimizes offences which will drive away too many users or attract too many regulators.
Ah, yes, standards set by society - you mean laws?
I'm a big Facebook detractor generally but this illustrates why their problems are hard. In the case of the US, most of the calls to "respect society's standards" seem to mean "listen to me and mine as the sole arbiters of what society wants" instead of anything to do with actual objective standards, turning public policy from a matter of established process of law into a circus where loudness wins. If you want speech banned, campaign to change actual law rather than trying to use platforms like FB as an end-run around legal protections.
Honestly, the whole mess is why having massive centralized platforms at all is a mistake. Moderation is so hilariously fractal that comminutes placed close to the sources of local standards, who do not attempt to be accountable to nobody and everybody at once, and content-agnostic protocols, which defer the hard decisions around moderation to those nodes, are better-placed to deal with the complexities of reality.
How does their user base want them to be stricter as it applies to private communications? They censor posts on private pages and private messages. How is anything beyond what the law requires in that case not the policing of thought?
Users who get scammed or get spammed are usually unhappy, so that’s a big request right there.
I’m not a fan personally that Facebook has extended their anti-spam infrastructure to block some sharing of other disfavored links in PMs (e.g. the open-source gun building website was blocked). But I’m sure there are plenty of anti-gun facebook users who cheered that move.
Agreeing on standards is one thing but what about taking proactive measures to limit the spread of harmful content in the first place?
Is giving anyone the opportunity to stream to thousands of users unchecked a responsible thing to do? We've already seen the downsides to that, how Facebook failed to remove the stream when it was in progress and their numerous failings to curb the spread of the video in the weeks that followed.
1) That's not an argument they've made or implied by their actions. If Facebook didn't follow the law they'd be much easier to deal with.
2) Apparently societal needs include _more_ Facebook, given they continue to grow their active user base even though they're already in the multiple billions.
This answer misses the fundamental nature of the OP's question.
The problem is that regulations really don't exist and are not formulated properly in a meaningful way in most places.
I don't suspect most nations are prepared to implement and follow through on well-reasoned policy. Maybe a Scandinavian country.
(Edit: I should ad it's not that I think Scandi countries are better, it's just that they are small and well enough organized you see a lot of decent ideas get implemented quickly. Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, a lot of neat things happening)
Each country makes its own rules and FB has to abide by all those which are relevant based on how content is distributed? That's rather the point of nation state (or supranational legislative bloc) sovereignty, you don't have to agree with anyone else to make the law.
Facebook is one of many global companies trying to abide by (or cheat) national laws and regulations. If they want to abide by the law, it can be very expensive and burdensome. If they want to cheat the law, they can play nation-states against each other.
Global governance should better match global companies. Right now, many of the global laws and regulations seem more like suggestions than enforceable laws.
I wonder if Facebook and other global companies want stronger global governance or prefer the status quo. In other words, would these companies want more standardization across regions or prefer to play the regions against each other?
Love their self-righteous call to action in the footer.
"just when we need it the most. The Guardian’s honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting has never mattered more. As we face the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, we’ll remain with you, so we can all better understand and combat the crisis. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an existential threat. With advertising revenues plummeting, we risk losing a major source of our funding. More than ever before, we need your support to help fill the gap."
According to The Guardian, The Guardian is honest, authoritative and fact-based.
Easy enough to not use the site if I don't like it. The same applies for FB. Apparently non-violent opt-out isn't enough for The Guardian though. The Guardian (honest, authoritative) proposes that the state should guard us all from FB and their "supreme leader" Zuckerberg.
At what point do the principles of private property and free speech no longer apply to the websites we create?
Exactly my thoughts. Posted in the "opinion" section, I'll give them that. It's disappointing, I generally like The Guardian, especially what they did around publishing the Snowden docs initially.
Speaking of companies that want to regulate themselves, The Guardian is pretty much the only UK publication that's refused to join the industry-wide, nominally independent press regulator IPSO, which means that they're effectively the only one who are not held to any external standards regarding the honesty and factual accuracy of their reporting. Which is more than a little ironic in this context. They've also been using their opinion section to undermine IPSO for such offences as not being aggressive enough in helping their preferred political party send different messages to its members and its voters by forcing other publications to take down articles revealing to the everyone else what they've been telling their members. (Remember how we were told Facebook ads were a danger to democracy because they'd allow politicians to promote different, contradictory messages to different audiences?)
That's a slightly odd reading of the situation. The Guardian is a member of the other regulatory body IMPRESS. The history of both organisations is a bit complex, but the short version is that press self-regulation in the UK has been something of a joke for the last hundred years or so, and IPSO is the latest incarnation of that. The Leveson enquiry tried to set up regulators with more teeth, which was faced by a heavy rearguard action by the established press. This was either a principled attempt to head off censorship, or a shameless attempt to protect profits, depending on which side you were on.
IMPRESS is the Leveson-compliant regulator, IPSO the continuation of the old PCC by another name. Most newspapers went with IPSO, The Guardian didn't.
As far as I can tell The Guardian isn't a member of IMPRESS either - at least, they're not on their list of members, and in fact none of the other major newspapers are either. Their complaints page also doesn't mention membership of any independent regulatory body - it suggests complaints are handled entirely in house with no avenue of external appeal or complaint, which is my understanding as well.
Asking users for donations is a very different business model to Facebook's history of abusing user data. I'm somewhat perplexed that HN users are apparently unable to see the distinction.
Besides which, someone writing an opinion piece for the guardian has no control over the business model.
I don't subscribe to the view that random internet companies should be regulated by nation states more than our discussion here on HN.com should be regulated.
If it applies to FB.com, it can apply to any company or individual online.
The only intrusive "ad" is their call to action for subscriptions/donations. The others appear in normal ad boxes on the page. The same type you get with most websites.
The "internet" is not a place. It's a network of physical infrastructure located in nation-states. It is not somehow a realm of its own separate from the physical world. The laws of nation-states apply to Facebook, its staff, its infrastructure, and its offices as much as they apply to anyone else—and the same goes for other random internet companies, including HN.com. It's reasonable to argue against particular forms of regulation, but not that internet companies have some special nature that exempts them from regulatory oversight altogether.
The really toxic thing about the guardian is that they pretend to be a new source, and really they’re just Fox News for the left. Nothing but smug crap about evil capitalists...
I work in a completely different industry, but it is a well-known principle that if you can show the regulator that you're regulating yourself effectively they'll leave you the fuck alone. As soon as a fuckup becomes public, the regulator will start delving into every detail of your fuckups (of which you have many). It costs money and ties up valuable resources to respond to the regulator when they start getting stuck into details, so it always pays dividends to maintain an outward display of effective self-regulation.
It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.
All of that is very contingent, even by your description. Facebook is itself very visible and in an industry that has a target painted on its back, and it's an election year in America. They could pull it off though, who knows.
Peter Thiel has takes about this kind of propaganda (he calls it "lies") in the context of antitrust law. Firms in highly competitive markets will lie that they are highly differentiated from other firms, while monopolistic firms will lie that they are highly competitive.
>It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.
Propaganda is right. Call me a cynic (because I am), but a significant portion of "effective" self-regulation is a self-interest spin on manipulating perception of efficacy.
As long as you can spin your self-regulation to a point the outside mostly believes you, you can make compromises between what you should be doing and what you can get away with in the framework of profit seeking motives. Perhaps this is still more effective than external regulation? I'm skeptical.
Unfortunately NDA's and raw intimidation suppress a lot of horrific abuses. I'm sure these abound at Facebook, which has had at least one workplace suicide this year. Some families don't have the resources to investigate, the way this victim's did [1].
I don't mean to dump on Facebook, this is just one of those rare cases where it came out into the sunlight.
Another breathless, gasping story about the evils of FB / technology / capitalism / <insert boogeyman here> from the Guardian, which has established itself as the nexus for alarmist 'journalism'. The footer: "in the coming year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times..." Doesn't sound much like a news outlet to me.
...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content, just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.
It's not like they have any context or history of gross, concerted efforts at manipulating public opinion through Facebook and/or a lack of social responsibility to draw upon. /s
What gives the newspapers special status here that changes it from being apples to apples? Why do newspapers get to use broadcast media to influence the public but others aren’t allowed or at least should be looked at negatively?
In all seriousness though, Facebook get a lot of shit but they are at least trying to clean up their act. Legacy media has been vastly more corrupt and treacherous for decades and shows no sign of any reform.
"Facebook is not a public body: it's a powerful and rich global corporation with no democratic legitimacy"
Facebook is a website. That is all. It does not even produce content, let alone run a business in the real world (e.g., Amazon).
It is a remarkable phenomenon, no doubt, but it is just a website, with billions of template pages each filled in with data from users.
They do not do anything else at Facebook except maintain a website and conduct surveillance. That's it.
If someone tomorrow started a website and offered to give out free web pages (i.e., not a paid blogging patform, not Wix, etc.) without any surveillance or ads/promotions, would you sign up?
There will always be naysayers whenever we share thoughts of the possibilities.
Surely, if someone told you in 2003 that he/she was going to start a website that would sign up billions of users who would submit photos of themselves and personal information to be published, most of you would dismiss the idea as impossible. There was no such thing as a single public website with _billions_ of pages of personal information voluntarily submitted.
The same goes for Wikipedia. What if someone told you in 2001 they were going to start a website and grow it to 53 million pages? No doubt, naysaysers would have asked "How do you make money?"
It is a website. Anyone can start one. Of course, Facebook is not fond of this reality hence the notion of "platform". It is still a website.
The fact that anyone can start a website is the only democratic aspect of the www.
You are very dismissive of Facebook, yet I'm not sure what insight should be gleaned from this simplification. I'm open to understanding your point, but it sounds like your point is that Facebook is a website. And I'm not sure what insight that simplification allows me to unlock.
Beyond being a website, it's also a mobile app, marketplace, communication platform, hardware manufacturer, and cultural driver. (Not to mention that it's a research organization, crisis response tool, ally to law enforcement, etc.)
Would you similarly describe the US Constitution as a piece of paper? Such a simplistic reduction doesn't seem all that useful to me.
You write: "Beyond being a website, ..." This is what the author is upset about. He thinks Facebook believes it is something other than what it is, e.g., it behaves as if it were a nation state.
When you continue: "it's also ...", you are simply referring to properties of computers, software, the internet and the www. This has been debated on HN before. Facebook is a website.
If Facebook were implemented in distributed Rolodexes and analog photo albums I doubt you would be making such statements.
As for the implication that a website, e.g., Facebook, can be compared to the US Consitution, this is the sort of thinking that sets off journalists and yields rants like the OP. Whereas you refer to my comment as "simplistic reduction", the author of the OP might refer to yours as "delusional thinking".
The properties of the US Consitution that make it important do not come from the fact it is a piece of paper or the conveniences that paper allows. They come from what is written on the paper and the authors of the document. Facebook does not produce content. It manages a website full of content submitted by the public, then surveils and spams them to service advertisers and promoters, for a fee.
The topic of the article is in fact how they purport to manage filtering that content. Much of the content on Facebook is very low quality. A website with billions of pages that takes submissions from the public, which has heaps of low quality content. Surprising. This is precisely what the web was designed for.
There are a bunch of problems with facebook. The biggest first one is moral cowardice.
The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its "freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo of the like. (Fair enough.)
They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards.
So, instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules.
The second problem is that they can't PR for shit.
Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand.
Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them. an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me about it that I realised what it was.
The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are 20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff (when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift through mountains of mindfulness crap.
In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.
Governments are forcing companies like Facebook to act as a judge and decide what content is acceptable. Yes, I think that's stupid, but that's the reality.
If you want some sort of democratic method for deciding this stuff, you need to get governments to stop dumping the problems on companies.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadJokes aside, not only Facebook but a lot of companies do that so it seems they are proactive while they pretty much do nothing valuable and hope they don't get regulated.
designed to "move slowly and keep things intact."
None. I see too often the argument 'it's difficult for company X to follow the law, so how should countries change the law to fit the company needs?'.
I have worked for decades in regulated markets. It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports. But, we always follow the law, we do what local regulators ask us to do, we filter, or change the content to fit the local government decisions.
Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit.
If you work for Facebook, ask the company to look for experienced companies in regulated markets. And I do not mean just to hire lobbyists but to create a technical infrastructure that allows to follow the rule of law in all countries where it operates. To just lobby for more political power only makes Facebook mindset worse.
I wouldn't trust Facebook any further than I could throw my smartphone, but many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". All the censorship laws out there, lese majeste in Thailand, "don't allow insults to our religious feelings" in other jurisdictions... Then there's all the various forms of protectionism.
"Society's needs" is not a phrase that can effectively advance our understanding of Facebook, and if we're going to talk about the goodness and badness of the mindset, we should be critical on both ends. Which needs are we talking about? Why does this society's rulers think it needs them, and not the society next door? And are these so-called needs really about entrenched powers oppressing someone?
Philosophical question: what is a better approach to advancing society's needs' than government and its regulations? If a given corporation, ala Friedman, best serves its owners by maximizing profit, it seems corporations are not in a position to serve any interests but their own.
I guess by that standard, the US under Trump is a model society.
Counter question: Why would Facebook (or any other tech company of your choosing) know any better what a society needs than the society itself?
Tech companies love to paint themselves as the brave protectors of the powerless against the oppressive regimes of the world.
This may be true in certain cases - however, this still doesn't seem to keep them from doing business with the exact same regimes - and it doesn't seem to motivate them to adhere to regulations any better if they are passed by functioning democracies.
(n.b. there are real meaningful answers to this question which respect individual agency instead of simply collectivizing all decisions about who is allowed to send bits to whom; it's just much more work to nail them down.)
This is a strange question. (1) Society isn't a singular being that has perfect information about what it wants. (2) Society has a terrible track record for what it wants. There's a rather large slice of society that believes it's ok to enact vigilante justice on minorities and a president who has routinely parroted conspiracy theories. I'm not convinced "society" knows that it needs either and I'd rather see Facebook destroyed than it's power handed over to "society".
> It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports.
I am becoming familiar with this pain. I wonder (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/) whether there is a way to simplify, or at least manage, compliance with multiple partially overlapping regulations, e.g. by having one database with reports generated per-regulation. I am curious about learning what experienced people in this space know. Any pointers?
I don’t think this is their argument at all.
Facebook regulates and removes far more content than required by law.
Under the US 1st Amendment almost everything offensive, racist, bad, pornographic, etc is legal. Facebook still removes quite a lot of legal content from their posts and their content moderators get PTSD from having to look at content which may be legal.
I think Facebook’s real issue is that they know they and their user base want them to be stricter than the law requires, but where should those standards fall?
I'm a big Facebook detractor generally but this illustrates why their problems are hard. In the case of the US, most of the calls to "respect society's standards" seem to mean "listen to me and mine as the sole arbiters of what society wants" instead of anything to do with actual objective standards, turning public policy from a matter of established process of law into a circus where loudness wins. If you want speech banned, campaign to change actual law rather than trying to use platforms like FB as an end-run around legal protections.
Honestly, the whole mess is why having massive centralized platforms at all is a mistake. Moderation is so hilariously fractal that comminutes placed close to the sources of local standards, who do not attempt to be accountable to nobody and everybody at once, and content-agnostic protocols, which defer the hard decisions around moderation to those nodes, are better-placed to deal with the complexities of reality.
I’m not a fan personally that Facebook has extended their anti-spam infrastructure to block some sharing of other disfavored links in PMs (e.g. the open-source gun building website was blocked). But I’m sure there are plenty of anti-gun facebook users who cheered that move.
Is giving anyone the opportunity to stream to thousands of users unchecked a responsible thing to do? We've already seen the downsides to that, how Facebook failed to remove the stream when it was in progress and their numerous failings to curb the spread of the video in the weeks that followed.
2) Apparently societal needs include _more_ Facebook, given they continue to grow their active user base even though they're already in the multiple billions.
The problem is that regulations really don't exist and are not formulated properly in a meaningful way in most places.
I don't suspect most nations are prepared to implement and follow through on well-reasoned policy. Maybe a Scandinavian country.
(Edit: I should ad it's not that I think Scandi countries are better, it's just that they are small and well enough organized you see a lot of decent ideas get implemented quickly. Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, a lot of neat things happening)
Facebook is one of many global companies trying to abide by (or cheat) national laws and regulations. If they want to abide by the law, it can be very expensive and burdensome. If they want to cheat the law, they can play nation-states against each other.
Global governance should better match global companies. Right now, many of the global laws and regulations seem more like suggestions than enforceable laws.
I wonder if Facebook and other global companies want stronger global governance or prefer the status quo. In other words, would these companies want more standardization across regions or prefer to play the regions against each other?
Like the same one that pays the bills for theguardian.com?
(I just disabled my ad-block and saw scammy+nasty "feet" ads of some sort, pretty sure those would not be allowed on FB.com)
(edit: fixed The Guardian link)
"just when we need it the most. The Guardian’s honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting has never mattered more. As we face the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, we’ll remain with you, so we can all better understand and combat the crisis. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an existential threat. With advertising revenues plummeting, we risk losing a major source of our funding. More than ever before, we need your support to help fill the gap."
According to The Guardian, The Guardian is honest, authoritative and fact-based.
Easy enough to not use the site if I don't like it. The same applies for FB. Apparently non-violent opt-out isn't enough for The Guardian though. The Guardian (honest, authoritative) proposes that the state should guard us all from FB and their "supreme leader" Zuckerberg.
At what point do the principles of private property and free speech no longer apply to the websites we create?
IMPRESS is the Leveson-compliant regulator, IPSO the continuation of the old PCC by another name. Most newspapers went with IPSO, The Guardian didn't.
Besides which, someone writing an opinion piece for the guardian has no control over the business model.
If it applies to FB.com, it can apply to any company or individual online.
I was referring to their ad-supported business model where they trade some of their customer's attention/data for money.
It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.
Propaganda is right. Call me a cynic (because I am), but a significant portion of "effective" self-regulation is a self-interest spin on manipulating perception of efficacy.
As long as you can spin your self-regulation to a point the outside mostly believes you, you can make compromises between what you should be doing and what you can get away with in the framework of profit seeking motives. Perhaps this is still more effective than external regulation? I'm skeptical.
I don't mean to dump on Facebook, this is just one of those rare cases where it came out into the sunlight.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/facebook-employee-suicide-be...
...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content, just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.
I think FB is creepy af personally, but this article doesn't do a good job of reviewing the oversight board.
In all seriousness though, Facebook get a lot of shit but they are at least trying to clean up their act. Legacy media has been vastly more corrupt and treacherous for decades and shows no sign of any reform.
Facebook is a website. That is all. It does not even produce content, let alone run a business in the real world (e.g., Amazon).
It is a remarkable phenomenon, no doubt, but it is just a website, with billions of template pages each filled in with data from users.
They do not do anything else at Facebook except maintain a website and conduct surveillance. That's it.
If someone tomorrow started a website and offered to give out free web pages (i.e., not a paid blogging patform, not Wix, etc.) without any surveillance or ads/promotions, would you sign up?
There will always be naysayers whenever we share thoughts of the possibilities.
Surely, if someone told you in 2003 that he/she was going to start a website that would sign up billions of users who would submit photos of themselves and personal information to be published, most of you would dismiss the idea as impossible. There was no such thing as a single public website with _billions_ of pages of personal information voluntarily submitted.
The same goes for Wikipedia. What if someone told you in 2001 they were going to start a website and grow it to 53 million pages? No doubt, naysaysers would have asked "How do you make money?"
It is a website. Anyone can start one. Of course, Facebook is not fond of this reality hence the notion of "platform". It is still a website.
The fact that anyone can start a website is the only democratic aspect of the www.
Beyond being a website, it's also a mobile app, marketplace, communication platform, hardware manufacturer, and cultural driver. (Not to mention that it's a research organization, crisis response tool, ally to law enforcement, etc.)
Would you similarly describe the US Constitution as a piece of paper? Such a simplistic reduction doesn't seem all that useful to me.
When you continue: "it's also ...", you are simply referring to properties of computers, software, the internet and the www. This has been debated on HN before. Facebook is a website.
If Facebook were implemented in distributed Rolodexes and analog photo albums I doubt you would be making such statements.
As for the implication that a website, e.g., Facebook, can be compared to the US Consitution, this is the sort of thinking that sets off journalists and yields rants like the OP. Whereas you refer to my comment as "simplistic reduction", the author of the OP might refer to yours as "delusional thinking".
The properties of the US Consitution that make it important do not come from the fact it is a piece of paper or the conveniences that paper allows. They come from what is written on the paper and the authors of the document. Facebook does not produce content. It manages a website full of content submitted by the public, then surveils and spams them to service advertisers and promoters, for a fee.
The topic of the article is in fact how they purport to manage filtering that content. Much of the content on Facebook is very low quality. A website with billions of pages that takes submissions from the public, which has heaps of low quality content. Surprising. This is precisely what the web was designed for.
The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its "freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo of the like. (Fair enough.)
They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards. So, instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules.
The second problem is that they can't PR for shit.
Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand.
Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them. an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me about it that I realised what it was.
The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are 20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff (when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift through mountains of mindfulness crap.
In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.
If you want some sort of democratic method for deciding this stuff, you need to get governments to stop dumping the problems on companies.