So much scripted drama while everybody involved is on the same page and wants and regulation and more censorship of FB:
Facebook wants regulation for itself to kick the ladder down for future competitors, the current "whistleblowers" want it for FB because of personal idelogical leanings toward modern identity politics, the legacy media corporations want regulation applied to FB hoping that it will somehow save the former's outdated business model and the Biden administration wants it in order to manufacture consent in the face of falling popularity ratings and to keep those pesky allegations of election fraud down (except for their own allegations against the opponent).
Who is this news org, why should we trust them? A cursory look at their content suggests we shouldn't.
It's easy, all you need to do is spot the term "Russiagate", in this case the "gate" is being used to suggest that Russian influence in American politics is a fake news story (which it definitely isn't, see Muller report)
It basically talks about how Sussman's work on the Alfa Bank story (about how there was a relationship between Trump and a Russian Bank) was accused of fabrication and was lead by the Clinton campaign, as described by research from the FBI. (You can read the judicial document in its original form here: https://www.justice.gov/sco/press-release/file/1433511/downl...) Although the title is quite polemical and should have been toned down if it were to adhere to HN standards, I think it is a valuable news story and shouldn't be shrugged off as just "fake news".
I've posted that article yesterday in HN, and it was flagged immediately. Guess some people in here don't really recept well to any media that is outside of the mainstream (which in this case with FB, were all repeating the identically constructed narrative)
Idk, it seems to be that Facebook has become too good at targeting people and started to be used so effectively for political purposes, that parties obviously decided that it's too much risk to let them have that kind of influence without them being able to control it.
This isn't mathematics. Nobody is asking anybody to accept the statements as 100% truth.
Obviously when there are incentives for people to hide the truth, it's going to be difficult to find citations.
It is broadly believed within the corporate sphere that companies do this. There is even a term called 'regulatory capture'. Why else would they hire lobbyists?
I have no idea why you are being downvoted... perhaps FB zealots fear the truth.
Regulation is exactly what large corporations want. Regulation prevents competition from ever getting started.
What's an extra £30 million a year for regulatory compliance to someone like FB, or Google, or any billion dollar corp? It's literally zero. Nothing at all. The (insignificant) cost of doing business.
For a startup? It's certain death right at the idea stage...
I would put money on FB actually helping government draft regulations _against_ FB themselves knowing that they won't be financially affected by them and that they will help kill any potential competition from ever getting started.
Yeah this pretty much sums up the the corporate playbook. Build a regulatory moat which makes it impossible for startups to compete... Use the government to reframe honest entrepreneurs as criminals (who are in breach of regulations) in order to protect corporate interests.
These days you can't take a crap without a license...
Is this a specifically american thing, that regulations are bad? Thats exactly what FB would say. Next you tell me, that "trickle up economics" are bad, and we should try "trickle down"
Regulation tends to protect incumbents everywhere.
Whether or not you consider that bad depends on how much you value progress over stability. Stability often seems fine for the first decade or too, until one day you pause to wonder why you’re still connecting to the internet using acoustic coupler modems, or paying hundreds of dollars per month for insulin.
It is very American, and seem to see people speaking out about it more there, but I don't think it is quite limited to the US.
It does go hand-in-hand with the failed thinking of trickle-down economics: In other words, conservatives use this talking point. I think it is louder in the US simply because the trust in government that you would find in, say, Norway simply doesn't exist and you get a few more "regulation in print only" there, it seems.
And of course some regulations limit who does some things, but in a lot of cases, we probably wouldn't want folks that refuse to follow regulations - particularly when they deal with health and safety.
Its basically in every country where people vote against their best interest because rich people told them to do so, but it isnt as celebrated as much. I agree that if the government misuses the population in every way possible, that you start to lose trust in it. But how can it be that people think the solution to this is less democracy, more power to companies? It looks like some weird form of masochism.
Every law creates and restricts freedom. Food safety laws restricts the freedom of restaurants: need to clean kitchen, remove all the cockroaches etc., but gives the people the freedom to eat food everywhere without getting sick.
More regulations on FB restricts its freedom to misuse the attention of the population to make more money, but also gives citizens the freedom to consume less fake news.
I'm a fan of regulation where it's necessary. For example, when it comes to things like building sites they are incredibly safe now, thanks to many regulations. I'd argue that they're an absolute necessity.
However, for some things, like website I visit on the internet, the regulation should be all but nonexistent (for the most part, there are likely some things like child porn and generally illegal stuff that should be covered).
Everyone wants to have regulations "where its necessary". This boils down to "rules for thee but not for me". If you work in construction, you want more building site safety. If you are the own who uses his money to construct one building after another, you want to have it cheaper, so less safety. Democracy is the process of finding a nice middle ground.
Nowadays, it seems that common people are mostly convinced by the rich to vote against their own interest.
> This boils down to "rules for thee but not for me"
I don't believe that. Taking the building site example, I'd rather work on one that's got a bunch of site posters up and does all the right safety stuff than one ran by a bunch of cowboys with no regard for my safety...
> Nowadays, it seems that common people are mostly convinced by the rich to vote against their own interest.
Perhaps, but the rich have control over the propaganda machines like social media and MSM so it's no wonder people are convinced that they're doing the right thing.
Really I haven’t seen any crisis despite the newspapers printing “the end is nigh”
facebook is as full of bots and personality quizzes as it ever was, it doesn’t need whistleblowers to make it irrelevant
If I was any more cynical I’d bet that the whistleblowing is a ruse — if so, whomsoever leaks the data revealing the conspiracy could become the first meta-whistleblower, blowing the whistle on fake whistleblowing!
Maybe facebook are sick of being all about the boomers and bots all shilling crazy conspiracies.
What better way to pivot than to clean out house while grabbing a bit of attention. Perhaps these whistleblowers are a symptom of internal conflict and factions at war over where they go.
Limited hangout disinformation whistleblower from FB counterintelligence would be a great way to weaponize the current "FB hatred" of the mass public to control the narrative to fit FB agenda. Would such a tactic be beyond their capacity or morality to achieve?
The conflation of 'the political left's perception of reality' with 'the truth' is outrageous, and nothing more than an attempt to censor views that conflict with the political left's agenda, which corresponds with polls showing registered Democrats are increasingly gravitating toward authoritarianism:
> In one alleged incident, Tucker Bounds, a Facebook communications official, dismissed concerns about the platform’s role in 2016 election manipulation. “It will be a flash in the pan,” Bounds said, according to the affidavit, as reported by the Post. “Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile, we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.”
Sounds like a really positive environment to work in. Lots of solid, meaningful contributions to the planet.
It’s very likely that some employees were worried either for their employment or their stock grants. It’s easy to dismiss most tech workers as financially comfortable but some make commitments (buying a house being the obvious large one) based on the current value of their heavily Facebook-loaded portfolio.
There’s been a lot of things said about the 2016 elections, mostly about the company’s responsibility and possible actions to take; picking an extract of one answer isn’t always representative of that conversation. “We don’t expect meaningful financial impact for employees” is a reasonable answer to a legitimate employee question about what will happened to them personally but not a good summary of how the company talked about this.
"...dismissed concerns about the platform’s role in 2016 election manipulation." - A great deal of people dismiss those concerns, including myself. Is dismissing those concerns, because we believe they're insubstantial, now a crime that you can get whistle blown on? You would think these whistleblowers would be revealing crimes, but they're just revealing things that half the political spectrum wants to talk about. It's actually quite boring.
I dunno, as far as respect is concerned I personally rank most legislators somewhat below, say, the addicts in Tenderloin. Regardless of who does it, something that makes them upset but impotent would be a big positive in my book.
I think that the media is overusing the term "whistleblower". There are many of wrong things happening at big companies (FB, Google, Amazon) and you are not really a whistleblower by bringing this up. Media labelling those people as "whistleblowers" feels like encouraging conformity in a place that needs changing. But I guess they get more clicks when they put "whistleblower" in the headline.
The reason they are using it might be for legal reasons: many employees sign an NDA and it seems like they would be breaching that contract by sharing those.
The Whistleblower status was meant when breaking laws like Official Secrets Act, so a meaningfully different concern as you mention, but by presenting leakers that way, the press is framing them in a protective light. I believe that the official status of whistleblower is only in certain circumstances (the institution is knowingly breaking the law or “mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety”) and I’m not sure who decides whether someone applies—presumably the judge in one of the subsequent cases, which comes much later and therefore expose the person leaking information to a substantial legal risk in the meantime.
I suspect that the press is trying to encourage more leaks by avoiding headlines about how previous leakers ended up in hot waters.
I’m not sure that Assange broke any laws: most apply to government employees and contractors (he’s never been either) and in general only to citizens and residents of that country (same); international laws are rare, and I can’t think of any related to espionage.
The press tries to redact private information that is not relevant for their stories out of compassion (and it’s universally seen as a good thing) but it’s not always clear that they have a legal duty to do so. The one case that I know is illegal _in the US_ is to reveal the name of a CIA agent, but a most other information revealed by Wikileaks falls under fairly standard First amendement rights. Assange wasn’t a whistleblower: he found an alternative way to protect whistleblowers by hiding their identity, including voluntarily ignoring it himself.
A lot of Americans are dismissive of the idea that US laws doesn't apply to non-residents, but there’s plenty of examples that will show how absurd it is. Turkey bans saying anything bad about Ataturk: if you did, would you feel like you broke the law? No, because you don’t live there. It might reduce your holiday options but I get the feeling that Assange was never the DisneyWorld kind of guy.
It would be great if folks could think beyond questioning the business model in terms of what (controversial content) increases user attention and think about questioning the model itself: using the internet to sell attention. There is nothing that demands the internet must be used this way.
The big tech companies like to combat the possibility of any such thinking by invoking people's fear of change. Something like "The internet would not be as you know it today if advertising decreased." The reader is supposed to think, "Oh my gosh, what a scary thought." However the internet as we know it today is not necessarily the best the internet could be. That should be obvious. Tech employees are having a crisis of conscience.
Tech companies and their investors want everyone to presume the way things are now is the best possible outcome. That is because they know they have a money printing machine (see, e.g., Tucker Bounds quote) so long as the internet remains open for unregulated advertising. They will keep advancing this idea that the internet would suck without unregulated ads, but there is no evidence that is true. No one can predict the future. Tech company spokespersons try to paint a picture of a possible future where web users would have to pay for using websites. There is nothing that indicates that would be the outcome. Tech companies do not control the internet. They do not own the internet. Tech companies might die without advertising, but websites might flourish. Both commercial and non-commercial. People might find relief from excessive screen time. The mom and pop retailer or SMB/SME are not going to charge customers to use their websites. Users will continue to pay access fees to ISPs. "The tech industry" !== the internet. It uses the internet to advance its own interests (these may be aligned somewhat to those of advertisers, but they often conflict with the interests of users). Tech companies must use the internet for advertising or face an existential crisis. That is not true for users. We can use the internet for whatever we want. We pay for it. Generally, advertisers do not pay our internet access fees.
We pay for access to a network that tech companies usurp to sap our attention for a fee, paid by advertisers. We do not get a cut of those payments. The whole system is incredibly one-sided and should be questioned. It is far from ideal.
It’s like capitalism, without proper antitrust regulation, creates growth expectations such that even the most popular products will eventually plateau, but revenue growth is still expected, so how do you raise additional revenue? You sell access to your user base in the form of ads. The one-sidedness is entirely the point: you do not possess your own agency in this transaction as the company who makes the product you’re using literally believes they own your attention. All you can do is start ignoring the product.
What the unfollow everything app showed is that given some basic information and controls users can eliminate most of the problematic material in favor of what they actually want which is to keep up with friends, family, and other close relations.
The root issue seems to lie, in large part, in the normalization of “free”. It is very, very good to established big social, but it breaks how the market is supposed to work.
It’s a two-hit knockout:
1. Because users aren’t the ones paying, their interests and well-being fundamentally don’t matter. Paying customers are investors & advertisers, and the only thing that matters to them is that users don’t leave.
2. Because it’s impossible to justify switching (and convincing all friends & family to switch) away from a free solution, and because no honest business can compete with free, users won’t leave.
The vast resources big social accumulates from elsewhere, it can throw at optimizing the GUI and algorithms to keep eyeballs glued—suggest posts that are likely to trigger this individual, make them engage in another pointless argument or mindlessly like and reshare. Behold the eternal enemy of the market—information asymmetry—taken to a whole new level.
When a product with millions of users is inevitably user-hostile due to the fundamentals of parent company’s business model, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it society-hostile.
Bringing the market back into the industry, turning users into paying customers and allowing them to vote with their money, could be the solution.
Free could be part of the problem but it’s not enough to qualify a cause compared to other online companies.
I would say the greater problem is centralization. If user content did not go through Facebook servers, for example if Facebook were only a client application, this problems and concerns would not exist regardless of profit motive or free access.
The problem is that advertisement is almost completely unregulated.
I think whole advertisement industry should be nationalized and ran not-profit in strictly controlled manner in a way that more money doesn't translate to more eyeballs.
Not saying we should make it illegal to give things away for others to build with. Open source code itself is not a product accessible by an end user, much less a service that connects many users and acts as a middleman in a two-sided market on which side of which are advertisers. I should clarify that I mean specifically the normalization of “free” in current context of big social.
I see we’re attacking it from different angles. I believe forcing big social to become paid by requiring it to open up is a better way, achievable with more narrowly focused, less far-reaching regulation.
I see making some service paid as more of a bandaid, and we'll get surprised by the next nasty thing fueled by advertisements that have all the incentive to enrage us and turn our brains into jello to opimize selling things.
Making Facebook paid doesn't help all that much because paid stuff also can have advertisements in them and they do. Also if somebody is selling something, they still want to play the same chords to keep us engaged and paying. Paying for something doesn't automatically make the seller work in your interest.
There is a psychological aspect to this, I believe. Switching between cheap and expensive is less of an effort than switching between free and cheap. Similarly, competition-wise, competing with however low number is easier than competing with zero.
I really think FB’s domination hinges on “free”.
However, changing business model like that cannot be directly required. What can be required is openness.
Mandating big social to provide interoperability seems like one way to go about it. Open APIs covering all functionality. Once proper cross-platform third-party clients can appear in which FB et al. can’t show ads, they will start bleeding users and perhaps be forced to change.
The resources required to provide the world with the valuable parts of these services are small enough to be funded through non-profits or benefit corporations. I'd gladly donate my time and money to a 501c3 facebook killer.
A self-hosted federated twitter replacement will never fly with the vast majority of potential users. It is also in desperate need of a name change. The first search result is to an awesome metal band.
I also think self-hosted solutions can’t compete. Luckily, if hosted platforms (either non-profit or with true paying users) offer open API, there would be no issue interoperating with Mastodon et al.
1: doesn’t have to be self hosted.
2: doesn’t have to be just twitter, it’s a federated protocol. Anything can go down the pipes.
3: doesn’t have to be called mastodon. How many forum users know the name of the software that runs their forum?
This is the fundamental problem. People think they should be able to do that. They should not.
It is extremely dehumanizing when some stupid ad works its way into my mind. I never asked for this. I never wanted it. They just keep forcing it. They feel entitled to it. They think it's their right to keep showing me this stuff. They think they own my senses. A couple seconds ago some asshole with a huge speaker just drove past my house blasting ads for what I assume was a local supermarket. Everybody thinks it's great. It's a nuisance but it creates honest jobs, right? How will the poor little companies get consumers otherwise?
Attention is precious. It should not be wasted on advertisers and their little brands and products. It's a privilege that must be freely given and punished severely if violated without consent. Like rape. That's what advertising is really. Mind rape.
You are not forced to use the pages/apps that are ad-funded you know ;) Traditional advertising that intrudes on public spaces is much more "evil" by that standard.
> You are not forced to use the pages/apps that are ad-funded you know ;)
It's not like they warn me beforehand. How am I supposed to know that clicking a link will lead me to a place where I will be assaulted by countless ads?
I'm done with that approach. I block all ads. If people send me free web pages, good. If they send me ads as well, they're gonna get deleted before I even see them. Anyone who wants to get paid for their pages can make the HTTP server return 402 Payment Required.
> Traditional advertising that intrudes on public spaces is much more "evil" by that standard.
Absolutely agree. I hate that noise so much. It used to be somewhat tolerable but now I can't even cross a street without being advertised to. The companies will literally put up banners on both ends of sidewalks, near traffic stops. I swear to god they'd put up ads inside my goddamn eyelids if they could. I don't know what to do to make this stuff go away. It's gotten to the point I wish some gang would start vandalizing those signs. I could waste time trying to lobby my city government to ban this stuff but I doubt I can match their lobbying power. I wish I had some sort of ad blocking augmented reality glasses.
> Never underestimate the power of NIMBYs to influence zoning ordinances.
I shouldn't underestimate the corruption of these politicians either. It's reasonable to assume the companies are paying them for the privilege of polluting my town. They've even taken over road signs, I can't even look at a stop sign without getting an eyeful of brands.
> repeated persistent drive-by paintball defacement of the articles in question may sap the companies’ will to carry on
... Has anyone ever done that before? What a hero!
Y'know, unless I want to participate in community events in my town, which seem to only use Facebook these days.
Or find out the hours of a local business, which only has a Facebook page (or worse, instagram!) and no website at all.
Or use a phone or tablet that can connect to the internet -- turns out both of the companies that make 99%+ of smartphones have advertising businesses. And nobody makes apps for any other platform, so they aren't viable.
It's a lot like riding public transit, or using public highways, all of which are plastered with ads in the vast majority of the US. These are things you really can't avoid, so the advertising has essentially become mandatory.
Agreed. The question is, how do you get individuals and organizations who couldn’t care less about tech monopolies and advertising ethics to switch away from private social media owned by ad companies? Like it or not, Facebook is “sticky” for those who don’t think about these things, and it requires a lot of convincing for people to move away from dependency.
Totally agree. I am a runner and most running clubs no longer have their own website. Often events are behind a Facebook paywall and I deleted by account in 2016... Many many others niche interests have the same issue.
No true!! Those ads didn't follow you to the toilet and didn't jump before your eyes!! You had to look up to see them, and you could easily ignore them!!
Why is selling attention suddenly bad ? We're living in the Attention Economy. Time is money. Ads support free content. TV programming exists to keep people in their seats between commercials. Et cetera et cetera ad nauseum. Putting a halt to selling attention is attacking not just Faceborg, it's attacking the entire modern media economy. That's not to say it would be a bad idea :)
What do you mean suddenly? It has always been bad. It took time for me to realize it and start posting about it. I'm sure others will eventually realize it too. Especially since companies keep ramping up the abuse.
That's what this industry is all about really. Doing things we don't want. Making us see and hear things we never asked for. Sucking up information we never wanted them to have. It's basically abuse incorporated but society forgives them because they pay for all the media we consume.
Let the media companies go bankrupt. We don't need it to survive. It's entertainment.
> Tech companies do not control the internet. They do not own the internet.
While I generally agree with you, sadly that hasn't been true for a few years already, by now a select few tech companies control the majority of the web and increasingly even own more and more of it [0]
In many developing countries Facebook is acting as sudo-ISP, for millions, if not over a billion, people, FB is literally the whole web they experience, they don't know anything else and they've been very successfully convinced that they don't even want anything else.
> Tech company spokespersons try to paint a picture of a possible future where web users would have to pay for using websites.
If you think about it, we're already there. I think services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc. have normalized paying for websites. Maybe if social media had emerged later, the concept of paying for it wouldn't be so alien.
Some of us remember the Web before even banner ads. I would absolutely spend less time in a browser if we rolled back to the 90's ... but that might be. good thing. ;-)
The "roll back to the 90's" argument is a common (sometimes deliberate) misinterpratation of any suggestion for change to the status quo of the internet that supports "tech" companies.
We could not go back to old days even if we wanted to; no one is suggesting such an idea. We can however look back and learn lessons from the past. We can remember, for example, that neither Google nor Facebook required any business plan that included advertising in order to be created. We can contemplate how bad things have gotten.
Some say online advertising today bears little resemblance to the online advertising of the 1990's, that it has been infiltrated by people who would otherwise be working in finance, e.g., "qwants", that online ads have become like HFT and that the market being run (unfairly) by its largest participant, Google, may explode.
Given all the concerns that FB is a threat to democracy, it’s fascinating to look back at 2008’s glowing praise for Barack Obama’s use of social media to propel him to the presidency [1].
And without Twitter there would be no Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Whose ascension is a huge win for American democracy.
It is so easy to paint social media as the bad guy, when meanwhile it has been responsible for some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring
I feel we don’t talk enough about the rotten underlying dynamics that make the US society so vulnerable to Russian interference, demagogues, and conspiracy theories. Social media is weaponizing these awful dynamics, but it’s feeling like so much “blame the messenger”.
FB has literally been asking to be regulated for years now. (And yes, cynically, it’s also smart to get the government to help you dig your moat.) But I’d be surprised if new sm rules alone are the answer to the societal rot and division, precarity and poor education that defines so much of American culture.
> transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring
This illustrates the benefits and the hazards nicely; open comms can give you a revolution, but it's not sufficient to produce a functioning democracy.
> ollowing the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it first had great success. It launched a civic political party—the Freedom and Justice Party—to contest elections, which it described as having "the same mission and goals, but different roles" than the Brotherhood,[8] and agreeing to honor all Egypt's international agreements.[9] The party won almost half the seats in the 2011–12 parliamentary elections, and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the June 2012 presidential election.[10] However President Mohammad Morsi was overthrown after mass protests within a year[11] and a crackdown ensued that some have called more damaging to the movement than any "in eight decades".[12] Hundreds of members were killed, and hundreds—including Morsi and most of the Brotherhood's leadership—were imprisoned. Among the general Egyptian population, a "huge hostility" was felt towards the MB.[13] In September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations,[14] and ordered that its assets be seized;[15] and in December the military-backed interim government declared the movement a terrorist group following the bombing of security directorate building in Mansoura
The people got democracy back briefly, and the first party they elected was an even more repressive Islamist government that had to be overthrown again.
> some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring
In what exactly was the Arab Spring successful? As a show-case for how far-reaching, and heavily, American social media can influence even rather foreign cultures? [0] [1]
Most of the places impacted by this "spring", are nowadays worse off than they were 10 years ago.
Can you really blame FB for it thought? Looking back, Arab spring would have happened with or without FB. If FB never got off the ground we could be talking about how MySpace or Twitter influenced the Arab spring.
First of all, “transformative” is the word I used, intentionally.
I don’t know if it’s typical or advisable to try to judge the “success” of a revolution 10 years out. That the revolutions have been met by counter-revolutions doesn’t negate the fact that they changed the trajectory of the countries concerned. And inspired movements and strategies elsewhere, too.
> Most of the places impacted by this “spring” […]
I wonder if you appreciate just how long that list might be. For instance, I believe Arab Spring strongly influenced Occupy Wall Street. Which kicked off the American discourse about wealth and income inequality and added the “99%” and “1%” to the lexicon.
Which had a host of follow-on results (rise of Bernie Sanders…contrast with moderate Dems like Hillary…Dems not seen as doing enough to help inequality…losing to Trump)
Even worse, the Arab Spring protests were not a phenomenon that was spontaneously organized, but was the result of careful planning by American government-financed organizations.
To be fair, the US was supporting the other side as well:
> “While we appreciated the training we received through the NGOs sponsored by the U.S. government, and it did help us in our struggles, we are also aware that the same government also trained the state security investigative service, which was responsible for the harassment and jailing of many of us,” said Mr. Fathy, the Egyptian activist.
The US government seems to do a lot of this, funding both sides of an overseas political conflict to induce chaos within the country, which would destabilize them in the long run and make them powerless to fight against US imperial interests. Ah postmodern realpolitiks, Putin would be really proud...
I feel like you're making an assumption that Twitter/FB users are representative of the broader population.
The Arab Spring was a CIA op. It wasn't a natural result of wide spread social media use. The CIA may be using social media now, but they've been causing social unrest across the globe since their inception.
The Arab Spring was not "a CIA op". The CIA certainly aligned with various forces/groups/nations to maximize the benefits to the US after the Arab Spring protests and its consequences, but strongmen like Ben Ali/Mubarak/Assad were useful (read: preferred) to the US and Israel in maintaining relative stability and hegemony. Social media adoption was a dominant catalyst in these very controlled environments.
Lest we lose track of context, the actual spark of the movement was the self immolation of a poor street vendor who set himself aflame in protest of the corrupt local authorities.
Except the training started literally years before the uprisings. From the article I already posted:
>Some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department. “We learned how to organize and build coalitions,” said Bashem Fathy, a founder of the youth movement that ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings. Mr. Fathy, who attended training with Freedom House, said, “This certainly helped during the revolution.”
The Arab Spring started in the 2010s. The IC may or may not have been caught off guard by the specific timing of events but that's a non-sequitor.
The revolutionary groups were trained and funded by the US government years before the Arab Spring even started. In some countries like Syria it even provided weapons to terror groups. What components of an op do you believe are missing here?
So far all you have provided is an insinuation that Freedom House meeting attendees are controlled by the CIA years later.
The article you linked doesn't back up your claim either. It says, "No one doubts that the Arab uprisings are home grown, rather than resulting from 'foreign influence,' as alleged by some Middle Eastern leaders."
I’m not aware of any historic parallels to an ultra progressive (for America, anyway) young bartender who tweeted and Insta’d her way into Congress and whose national profile is far past what one would expect given her tenure.
Would you rather tweets or action? Because she has only provided one of those things. The party thinks she's a joke, and allows her the associated amount of influence in policy direction (zero). Nancy Pelosi is a 700lbs counterweight to AOC, ensuring she's irrelevant.
What action do you want from a freshman congresswoman aside from showing up, voting and performing her assigned committee duties? Tweeting is a form of action that potentially increases her influence in congress. I don’t follow her, so I don’t know if she is doing that effectively, but she is probably the only freshman congressman from outside my state who I can name.
I bought into the hype and used to think about social media the same way as you. Then I came across a comment on HN mentioning Geek Heresy (https://geekheresy.org) and got that book from our public library. It has strong arguments against everything you have written above.
> It is so easy to paint social media as the bad guy, when meanwhile it has been responsible for some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring
No. Oppression, absence of freedom of speech and basic human rights, and the people who decided to not put up with this crap anymore is what was responsible for the Arab Spring.
Saying social media was responsible for that is like saying the football is what helped the team to win the superbowl and not the team effort (ok ok, it may have been the case in 2015 ha!)
I agree with Jimmy Dore —- real whistleblowers are imprisoned and hunted (Snowden, Assange). This is a fake whistleblower. “I’m blowing the whistle that Facebook didn’t censor enough!” The government wants to transfer the massive power to shape speech (by blocking posts and adding clever little Orwellian “misinformation” tags) from SV to itself directly.
A real whistleblower will draw the wrath of the people they expose. That doesn’t always take the form of being imprisoned and hinted. Sometimes the stakes are much lower.
Haven’t looked into the details of this supposed crisis, but I’m guessing that the outrage is from the free press over the unjustified suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to influence a democratic election. Am I right?
Compare and contrast with "Deflategate". Everybody knows basically what that was. Deflated footballs. People don't go around saying "the Tom Brady cell phone story". You don't have to be initiated into esoteric knowledge to understand.
It's a bit like how everyone refers to the "Panama Papers" or the "Pandora Papers" - the laptop contained a trove of information on damning activities, any one of which would have been newsworthy in its own right and relevant to the public's judgement of a presidential candidate.
I believe in some countries there were major politicians taken down, and I bet you a dollar the media and public referred to the reasons with more specificity.
There’s no lack of specifics here. Drug addiction. Sextapes. Misplaced firearms. Cushy jobs with massive conflicts of interest and no qualifications. Shady deals with foreign adversaries. 10% for the big guy. But since the media suppressed the information, he (the president’s son) is now brazenly selling his amateur “artwork” for 500k a pop to “anonymous” bidders. Nice work.
We've seen how in the 2020 election, social media worked to prevent Trump from winning. So of course, most of the emphasis on Facebook being biased will be on the 2016 election. In the 2020 election, well, Facebook tried to be a good guy by suppressing the right, but was stymied by the evil forces of Trump and by their own unwillingness to stop the right by enough.
It would be great if more oversight of Facebook would lead to Facebook just not interfering in politics at all and maybe giving up on "engagement", but that's not what the government and "whistleblowers" are trying to do. It's a power struggle to make sure that the right people make Facebook political in the right way.
I don't really know how this is surprising or a crisis. I assumed this was going on. I mean Facebook is full of genius level intellects and only an idiot could miss the garbage that shows up in 99% of the feeds on Facebook (political/pandemic conspiracy and made up memes). There is literally no way they weren't discussing it internally. Now everyone is pearl clutching? That period was over a decade ago, if not longer. The US government isn't going to do anything about this except hold more hearing where old white men think about how this affects the tubes the young folks are using these days. Maybe the European governments will accomplish something.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadFacebook wants regulation for itself to kick the ladder down for future competitors, the current "whistleblowers" want it for FB because of personal idelogical leanings toward modern identity politics, the legacy media corporations want regulation applied to FB hoping that it will somehow save the former's outdated business model and the Biden administration wants it in order to manufacture consent in the face of falling popularity ratings and to keep those pesky allegations of election fraud down (except for their own allegations against the opponent).
It's easy, all you need to do is spot the term "Russiagate", in this case the "gate" is being used to suggest that Russian influence in American politics is a fake news story (which it definitely isn't, see Muller report)
It basically talks about how Sussman's work on the Alfa Bank story (about how there was a relationship between Trump and a Russian Bank) was accused of fabrication and was lead by the Clinton campaign, as described by research from the FBI. (You can read the judicial document in its original form here: https://www.justice.gov/sco/press-release/file/1433511/downl...) Although the title is quite polemical and should have been toned down if it were to adhere to HN standards, I think it is a valuable news story and shouldn't be shrugged off as just "fake news".
Obviously when there are incentives for people to hide the truth, it's going to be difficult to find citations.
It is broadly believed within the corporate sphere that companies do this. There is even a term called 'regulatory capture'. Why else would they hire lobbyists?
Regulation is exactly what large corporations want. Regulation prevents competition from ever getting started.
What's an extra £30 million a year for regulatory compliance to someone like FB, or Google, or any billion dollar corp? It's literally zero. Nothing at all. The (insignificant) cost of doing business.
For a startup? It's certain death right at the idea stage...
I would put money on FB actually helping government draft regulations _against_ FB themselves knowing that they won't be financially affected by them and that they will help kill any potential competition from ever getting started.
These days you can't take a crap without a license...
Whether or not you consider that bad depends on how much you value progress over stability. Stability often seems fine for the first decade or too, until one day you pause to wonder why you’re still connecting to the internet using acoustic coupler modems, or paying hundreds of dollars per month for insulin.
It does go hand-in-hand with the failed thinking of trickle-down economics: In other words, conservatives use this talking point. I think it is louder in the US simply because the trust in government that you would find in, say, Norway simply doesn't exist and you get a few more "regulation in print only" there, it seems.
And of course some regulations limit who does some things, but in a lot of cases, we probably wouldn't want folks that refuse to follow regulations - particularly when they deal with health and safety.
Every law creates and restricts freedom. Food safety laws restricts the freedom of restaurants: need to clean kitchen, remove all the cockroaches etc., but gives the people the freedom to eat food everywhere without getting sick.
More regulations on FB restricts its freedom to misuse the attention of the population to make more money, but also gives citizens the freedom to consume less fake news.
However, for some things, like website I visit on the internet, the regulation should be all but nonexistent (for the most part, there are likely some things like child porn and generally illegal stuff that should be covered).
And I'm in Scotland, not the US
Nowadays, it seems that common people are mostly convinced by the rich to vote against their own interest.
I don't believe that. Taking the building site example, I'd rather work on one that's got a bunch of site posters up and does all the right safety stuff than one ran by a bunch of cowboys with no regard for my safety...
> Nowadays, it seems that common people are mostly convinced by the rich to vote against their own interest.
Perhaps, but the rich have control over the propaganda machines like social media and MSM so it's no wonder people are convinced that they're doing the right thing.
facebook is as full of bots and personality quizzes as it ever was, it doesn’t need whistleblowers to make it irrelevant
If I was any more cynical I’d bet that the whistleblowing is a ruse — if so, whomsoever leaks the data revealing the conspiracy could become the first meta-whistleblower, blowing the whistle on fake whistleblowing!
What better way to pivot than to clean out house while grabbing a bit of attention. Perhaps these whistleblowers are a symptom of internal conflict and factions at war over where they go.
When you scale up to levels no one else has, you hit problems no on else has seen. It takes a while to realize the size itself is part of the problem.
Sort of like the East India Company. Scale is great until there is a serious mutiny.
I think you may be underestimating the amount of hubris within Facebook, especially in the c-suite.
https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-a...
Sounds like a really positive environment to work in. Lots of solid, meaningful contributions to the planet.
There’s been a lot of things said about the 2016 elections, mostly about the company’s responsibility and possible actions to take; picking an extract of one answer isn’t always representative of that conversation. “We don’t expect meaningful financial impact for employees” is a reasonable answer to a legitimate employee question about what will happened to them personally but not a good summary of how the company talked about this.
I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment.
And really it's just one short quotation from a single employee.
Not "an employee", but an apparently very senior "communications official".
I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment.
For starters: a management culture that is profoundly cynical, and completely devoid of principle.
The Whistleblower status was meant when breaking laws like Official Secrets Act, so a meaningfully different concern as you mention, but by presenting leakers that way, the press is framing them in a protective light. I believe that the official status of whistleblower is only in certain circumstances (the institution is knowingly breaking the law or “mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety”) and I’m not sure who decides whether someone applies—presumably the judge in one of the subsequent cases, which comes much later and therefore expose the person leaking information to a substantial legal risk in the meantime.
I suspect that the press is trying to encourage more leaks by avoiding headlines about how previous leakers ended up in hot waters.
The press tries to redact private information that is not relevant for their stories out of compassion (and it’s universally seen as a good thing) but it’s not always clear that they have a legal duty to do so. The one case that I know is illegal _in the US_ is to reveal the name of a CIA agent, but a most other information revealed by Wikileaks falls under fairly standard First amendement rights. Assange wasn’t a whistleblower: he found an alternative way to protect whistleblowers by hiding their identity, including voluntarily ignoring it himself.
A lot of Americans are dismissive of the idea that US laws doesn't apply to non-residents, but there’s plenty of examples that will show how absurd it is. Turkey bans saying anything bad about Ataturk: if you did, would you feel like you broke the law? No, because you don’t live there. It might reduce your holiday options but I get the feeling that Assange was never the DisneyWorld kind of guy.
The big tech companies like to combat the possibility of any such thinking by invoking people's fear of change. Something like "The internet would not be as you know it today if advertising decreased." The reader is supposed to think, "Oh my gosh, what a scary thought." However the internet as we know it today is not necessarily the best the internet could be. That should be obvious. Tech employees are having a crisis of conscience.
Tech companies and their investors want everyone to presume the way things are now is the best possible outcome. That is because they know they have a money printing machine (see, e.g., Tucker Bounds quote) so long as the internet remains open for unregulated advertising. They will keep advancing this idea that the internet would suck without unregulated ads, but there is no evidence that is true. No one can predict the future. Tech company spokespersons try to paint a picture of a possible future where web users would have to pay for using websites. There is nothing that indicates that would be the outcome. Tech companies do not control the internet. They do not own the internet. Tech companies might die without advertising, but websites might flourish. Both commercial and non-commercial. People might find relief from excessive screen time. The mom and pop retailer or SMB/SME are not going to charge customers to use their websites. Users will continue to pay access fees to ISPs. "The tech industry" !== the internet. It uses the internet to advance its own interests (these may be aligned somewhat to those of advertisers, but they often conflict with the interests of users). Tech companies must use the internet for advertising or face an existential crisis. That is not true for users. We can use the internet for whatever we want. We pay for it. Generally, advertisers do not pay our internet access fees.
We pay for access to a network that tech companies usurp to sap our attention for a fee, paid by advertisers. We do not get a cut of those payments. The whole system is incredibly one-sided and should be questioned. It is far from ideal.
It’s like capitalism, without proper antitrust regulation, creates growth expectations such that even the most popular products will eventually plateau, but revenue growth is still expected, so how do you raise additional revenue? You sell access to your user base in the form of ads. The one-sidedness is entirely the point: you do not possess your own agency in this transaction as the company who makes the product you’re using literally believes they own your attention. All you can do is start ignoring the product.
It’s a two-hit knockout:
1. Because users aren’t the ones paying, their interests and well-being fundamentally don’t matter. Paying customers are investors & advertisers, and the only thing that matters to them is that users don’t leave.
2. Because it’s impossible to justify switching (and convincing all friends & family to switch) away from a free solution, and because no honest business can compete with free, users won’t leave.
The vast resources big social accumulates from elsewhere, it can throw at optimizing the GUI and algorithms to keep eyeballs glued—suggest posts that are likely to trigger this individual, make them engage in another pointless argument or mindlessly like and reshare. Behold the eternal enemy of the market—information asymmetry—taken to a whole new level.
When a product with millions of users is inevitably user-hostile due to the fundamentals of parent company’s business model, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it society-hostile.
Bringing the market back into the industry, turning users into paying customers and allowing them to vote with their money, could be the solution.
I would say the greater problem is centralization. If user content did not go through Facebook servers, for example if Facebook were only a client application, this problems and concerns would not exist regardless of profit motive or free access.
The problem is not that things are free.
The problem is that advertisement is almost completely unregulated.
I think whole advertisement industry should be nationalized and ran not-profit in strictly controlled manner in a way that more money doesn't translate to more eyeballs.
I see we’re attacking it from different angles. I believe forcing big social to become paid by requiring it to open up is a better way, achievable with more narrowly focused, less far-reaching regulation.
Making Facebook paid doesn't help all that much because paid stuff also can have advertisements in them and they do. Also if somebody is selling something, they still want to play the same chords to keep us engaged and paying. Paying for something doesn't automatically make the seller work in your interest.
I really think FB’s domination hinges on “free”.
However, changing business model like that cannot be directly required. What can be required is openness.
How exactly? Ban free content?
The resources required to provide the world with the valuable parts of these services are small enough to be funded through non-profits or benefit corporations. I'd gladly donate my time and money to a 501c3 facebook killer.
I thought that was a good idea. People get paid for all the attention suck instead of so much going to the tech firms.
This is the fundamental problem. People think they should be able to do that. They should not.
It is extremely dehumanizing when some stupid ad works its way into my mind. I never asked for this. I never wanted it. They just keep forcing it. They feel entitled to it. They think it's their right to keep showing me this stuff. They think they own my senses. A couple seconds ago some asshole with a huge speaker just drove past my house blasting ads for what I assume was a local supermarket. Everybody thinks it's great. It's a nuisance but it creates honest jobs, right? How will the poor little companies get consumers otherwise?
Attention is precious. It should not be wasted on advertisers and their little brands and products. It's a privilege that must be freely given and punished severely if violated without consent. Like rape. That's what advertising is really. Mind rape.
It's not like they warn me beforehand. How am I supposed to know that clicking a link will lead me to a place where I will be assaulted by countless ads?
I'm done with that approach. I block all ads. If people send me free web pages, good. If they send me ads as well, they're gonna get deleted before I even see them. Anyone who wants to get paid for their pages can make the HTTP server return 402 Payment Required.
> Traditional advertising that intrudes on public spaces is much more "evil" by that standard.
Absolutely agree. I hate that noise so much. It used to be somewhat tolerable but now I can't even cross a street without being advertised to. The companies will literally put up banners on both ends of sidewalks, near traffic stops. I swear to god they'd put up ads inside my goddamn eyelids if they could. I don't know what to do to make this stuff go away. It's gotten to the point I wish some gang would start vandalizing those signs. I could waste time trying to lobby my city government to ban this stuff but I doubt I can match their lobbying power. I wish I had some sort of ad blocking augmented reality glasses.
Never underestimate the power of NIMBYs to influence zoning ordinances.
Barring that, repeated persistent drive-by paintball defacement of the articles in question may sap the companies’ will to carry on.
https://streetartutopia.com/2013/03/28/graffiti-just-do-it/
I shouldn't underestimate the corruption of these politicians either. It's reasonable to assume the companies are paying them for the privilege of polluting my town. They've even taken over road signs, I can't even look at a stop sign without getting an eyeful of brands.
> repeated persistent drive-by paintball defacement of the articles in question may sap the companies’ will to carry on
... Has anyone ever done that before? What a hero!
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont).
Try visiting one of those states, and you'll be amazed at the difference it makes. Vermont and Maine are very high on my list of "next place to live."
> The law was (predictably) fought at all stages by business groups with a vested commercial interest in buying and selling prime public ad space.
This doesn't inspire me to try...
Or find out the hours of a local business, which only has a Facebook page (or worse, instagram!) and no website at all.
Or use a phone or tablet that can connect to the internet -- turns out both of the companies that make 99%+ of smartphones have advertising businesses. And nobody makes apps for any other platform, so they aren't viable.
It's a lot like riding public transit, or using public highways, all of which are plastered with ads in the vast majority of the US. These are things you really can't avoid, so the advertising has essentially become mandatory.
That's what this industry is all about really. Doing things we don't want. Making us see and hear things we never asked for. Sucking up information we never wanted them to have. It's basically abuse incorporated but society forgives them because they pay for all the media we consume.
Let the media companies go bankrupt. We don't need it to survive. It's entertainment.
While I generally agree with you, sadly that hasn't been true for a few years already, by now a select few tech companies control the majority of the web and increasingly even own more and more of it [0]
In many developing countries Facebook is acting as sudo-ISP, for millions, if not over a billion, people, FB is literally the whole web they experience, they don't know anything else and they've been very successfully convinced that they don't even want anything else.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
If you think about it, we're already there. I think services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc. have normalized paying for websites. Maybe if social media had emerged later, the concept of paying for it wouldn't be so alien.
Spotify is heavily dependant on advertising. Spotify cannot operate on user fees alone.
But In this case - the problem isn't really the advertising. It's mostly the content itself.
We could not go back to old days even if we wanted to; no one is suggesting such an idea. We can however look back and learn lessons from the past. We can remember, for example, that neither Google nor Facebook required any business plan that included advertising in order to be created. We can contemplate how bad things have gotten.
The banners ads in 1994 had a CTR north of 40%.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-fi...
These days, it is less than 1%.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160302194635if_/http://www.wor...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150310125300if_/https://www.sa...
Some say online advertising today bears little resemblance to the online advertising of the 1990's, that it has been infiltrated by people who would otherwise be working in finance, e.g., "qwants", that online ads have become like HFT and that the market being run (unfairly) by its largest participant, Google, may explode.
And without Twitter there would be no Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Whose ascension is a huge win for American democracy.
It is so easy to paint social media as the bad guy, when meanwhile it has been responsible for some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring
I feel we don’t talk enough about the rotten underlying dynamics that make the US society so vulnerable to Russian interference, demagogues, and conspiracy theories. Social media is weaponizing these awful dynamics, but it’s feeling like so much “blame the messenger”.
FB has literally been asking to be regulated for years now. (And yes, cynically, it’s also smart to get the government to help you dig your moat.) But I’d be surprised if new sm rules alone are the answer to the societal rot and division, precarity and poor education that defines so much of American culture.
_ 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...
This illustrates the benefits and the hazards nicely; open comms can give you a revolution, but it's not sufficient to produce a functioning democracy.
Egypt in particular speedran the transition back to totalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt
> ollowing the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it first had great success. It launched a civic political party—the Freedom and Justice Party—to contest elections, which it described as having "the same mission and goals, but different roles" than the Brotherhood,[8] and agreeing to honor all Egypt's international agreements.[9] The party won almost half the seats in the 2011–12 parliamentary elections, and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the June 2012 presidential election.[10] However President Mohammad Morsi was overthrown after mass protests within a year[11] and a crackdown ensued that some have called more damaging to the movement than any "in eight decades".[12] Hundreds of members were killed, and hundreds—including Morsi and most of the Brotherhood's leadership—were imprisoned. Among the general Egyptian population, a "huge hostility" was felt towards the MB.[13] In September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations,[14] and ordered that its assets be seized;[15] and in December the military-backed interim government declared the movement a terrorist group following the bombing of security directorate building in Mansoura
The people got democracy back briefly, and the first party they elected was an even more repressive Islamist government that had to be overthrown again.
In what exactly was the Arab Spring successful? As a show-case for how far-reaching, and heavily, American social media can influence even rather foreign cultures? [0] [1]
Most of the places impacted by this "spring", are nowadays worse off than they were 10 years ago.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20110203-syria-democracy-protest...
I don’t know if it’s typical or advisable to try to judge the “success” of a revolution 10 years out. That the revolutions have been met by counter-revolutions doesn’t negate the fact that they changed the trajectory of the countries concerned. And inspired movements and strategies elsewhere, too.
> Most of the places impacted by this “spring” […]
I wonder if you appreciate just how long that list might be. For instance, I believe Arab Spring strongly influenced Occupy Wall Street. Which kicked off the American discourse about wealth and income inequality and added the “99%” and “1%” to the lexicon.
Which had a host of follow-on results (rise of Bernie Sanders…contrast with moderate Dems like Hillary…Dems not seen as doing enough to help inequality…losing to Trump)
Here's an NY Times article about this at that time: https://archive.md/LzQjB
> “While we appreciated the training we received through the NGOs sponsored by the U.S. government, and it did help us in our struggles, we are also aware that the same government also trained the state security investigative service, which was responsible for the harassment and jailing of many of us,” said Mr. Fathy, the Egyptian activist.
I'm not certain about this.
But let's face it, these places started with a backward culture and a dictatorship. The dictatorship was removed but the culture stays.
There's little FB and Twitter could do for that. Maybe restricting the brain drain from these countries would help?
The Arab Spring was a CIA op. It wasn't a natural result of wide spread social media use. The CIA may be using social media now, but they've been causing social unrest across the globe since their inception.
Lest we lose track of context, the actual spark of the movement was the self immolation of a poor street vendor who set himself aflame in protest of the corrupt local authorities.
http://www.voxnews.com/index.php/big-lie/item/88-arab-spring...
[0]https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.3.0255...
>Some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department. “We learned how to organize and build coalitions,” said Bashem Fathy, a founder of the youth movement that ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings. Mr. Fathy, who attended training with Freedom House, said, “This certainly helped during the revolution.”
The Arab Spring started in the 2010s. The IC may or may not have been caught off guard by the specific timing of events but that's a non-sequitor.
The article you linked doesn't back up your claim either. It says, "No one doubts that the Arab uprisings are home grown, rather than resulting from 'foreign influence,' as alleged by some Middle Eastern leaders."
Every generation has their own version of AOC who makes noise for a few years than falls back into obscurity.
This concept doesn't really have anything to do with social media.
No. Oppression, absence of freedom of speech and basic human rights, and the people who decided to not put up with this crap anymore is what was responsible for the Arab Spring.
Saying social media was responsible for that is like saying the football is what helped the team to win the superbowl and not the team effort (ok ok, it may have been the case in 2015 ha!)
I mean, why does everybody call it that, rather than referring to it by the dastardly deeds that were revealed?
I just keep forgetting.
It would be great if more oversight of Facebook would lead to Facebook just not interfering in politics at all and maybe giving up on "engagement", but that's not what the government and "whistleblowers" are trying to do. It's a power struggle to make sure that the right people make Facebook political in the right way.