Will America's Next President Break Up Facebook? (politico.com) 171
With 25 days until Joe Biden becomes America's next president, Politico writes that throughout the US government, "From lawmakers on Capitol Hill to antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission, Washington is training its sights on the world's largest social network like never before."
Biden's antitrust enforcers will take ownership of a lawsuit the FTC filed this month threatening to dismantle the sprawling company. And his staff will negotiate legislative proposals with congressional leaders who have hammered Facebook for mishandling its users' personal data and spreading hate speech and dangerous falsehoods. It's a historic moment of legislative and regulatory upheaval with profound consequences for Facebook and its Silicon Valley brethren.
The Trump era opened the floodgates for Facebook detractors, who accused the world's largest social network of silencing conservatives on one side, and abetting disinformation about the U.S. election on the other. Now, under Biden, the company's critics see a prime opportunity to finally tame Facebook — for the sake of election integrity, privacy and fair play in the digital era... "It's just not a great business strategy to piss off the incoming president," said Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, which has advocated for antitrust enforcement against Facebook, Google and other big tech firms. She and other tech critics are putting pressure on Biden to take a different approach than past administrations, and they already have several allies advising the transition as it prepares to take over next month...
The now-president-elect has called for the internet industry's sacred legal liability protections to be revoked, specifically citing Facebook's handling of election-related misinformation. He turned heads in January when he said bluntly, "I've never been a fan of Facebook," a company whose digital reach helped propel the Obama-Biden ticket to the White House in past elections... "[I]t's certainly possible that skepticism about Facebook from the Biden team could result in a greater likelihood of antitrust scrutiny by the Justice Department and the FTC," said Matt Perault, a former Facebook public policy director who now leads Duke University's Center on Science and Technology Policy. "And it's possible that a Biden White House could use their bully pulpit to try to force changes that they can't achieve through executive action or legislation...."
Republicans, too, have gripes about Facebook's handling of political speech, with some saying its lack of meaningful competition gives it the leverage to censor users' political views. After the FTC and state attorneys general announced their Facebook lawsuits this month, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed support... But bipartisan frustration with tech has yet to mean lawmakers will set aside partisan differences. Both sides have been frustrated with how Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube police political content, for instance, but Democrats want more moderation and Republicans have called for less...
Even with such divisions, the general animosity toward Facebook could help the anti-Facebook advocates to gain traction with the new administration. And they're pushing their agenda hard ahead of the inauguration.
The Trump era opened the floodgates for Facebook detractors, who accused the world's largest social network of silencing conservatives on one side, and abetting disinformation about the U.S. election on the other. Now, under Biden, the company's critics see a prime opportunity to finally tame Facebook — for the sake of election integrity, privacy and fair play in the digital era... "It's just not a great business strategy to piss off the incoming president," said Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, which has advocated for antitrust enforcement against Facebook, Google and other big tech firms. She and other tech critics are putting pressure on Biden to take a different approach than past administrations, and they already have several allies advising the transition as it prepares to take over next month...
The now-president-elect has called for the internet industry's sacred legal liability protections to be revoked, specifically citing Facebook's handling of election-related misinformation. He turned heads in January when he said bluntly, "I've never been a fan of Facebook," a company whose digital reach helped propel the Obama-Biden ticket to the White House in past elections... "[I]t's certainly possible that skepticism about Facebook from the Biden team could result in a greater likelihood of antitrust scrutiny by the Justice Department and the FTC," said Matt Perault, a former Facebook public policy director who now leads Duke University's Center on Science and Technology Policy. "And it's possible that a Biden White House could use their bully pulpit to try to force changes that they can't achieve through executive action or legislation...."
Republicans, too, have gripes about Facebook's handling of political speech, with some saying its lack of meaningful competition gives it the leverage to censor users' political views. After the FTC and state attorneys general announced their Facebook lawsuits this month, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed support... But bipartisan frustration with tech has yet to mean lawmakers will set aside partisan differences. Both sides have been frustrated with how Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube police political content, for instance, but Democrats want more moderation and Republicans have called for less...
Even with such divisions, the general animosity toward Facebook could help the anti-Facebook advocates to gain traction with the new administration. And they're pushing their agenda hard ahead of the inauguration.
Certainly should...... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an unwieldy, control avoiding leviathan, happily avoiding laws in *every* country it operates in, step up to the bar Mr. Bidon, Trump was a catastrophic failure, you can put this right.
Deffo.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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What if Facebook is split up and you get to pick the piece that gets to keep the copy of your data? I would obviously pick the piece that convinces me it would do the best job of protecting my data. You might prefer a piece that sells your data but gives you the highest percentage of the sale price. To provide the current services the pieces just need to agree on the communication and query protocols, but that can handled with public standards.
Maybe the dumbest thing I've heard Biden say (Score:5, Interesting)
Biden in a NYT interview: "I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he's a real problem. [....] we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you're not exempt. You [The Times] can't write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it's a tech company is that, you know, Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms."
If you're unfamiliar with why this is dumb, please see "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act | Techdirt [techdirt.com]" Or just read the relevant part of Section 230 [cornell.edu], section C. It's short and simple and doesn't allow Facebook to "write something [they] know to be false".
If I owned a web site with any user-created content, I would want Section 230 or something very much like it to exist so that I don't get sued for allowing user-created content. People say "let's do something about section 230!" as a slogan, but have you seen anyone who uses this slogan correctly describe what section 230 contains? I haven't. Biden certainly didn't.
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Biden in a NYT interview: "I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he's a real problem. [....] we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you're not exempt. You [The Times] can't write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it's a tech company is that, you know, Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms."
If you're unfamiliar with why this is dumb, please see "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act | Techdirt [techdirt.com]" Or just read the relevant part of Section 230 [cornell.edu], section C. It's short and simple and doesn't allow Facebook to "write something [they] know to be false".
If I owned a web site with any user-created content, I would want Section 230 or something very much like it to exist so that I don't get sued for allowing user-created content. People say "let's do something about section 230!" as a slogan, but have you seen anyone who uses this slogan correctly describe what section 230 contains? I haven't. Biden certainly didn't.
What would you suggest?
Re:Maybe the dumbest thing I've heard Biden say (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, there is nothing wrong with 47 USC 230(c).
Subsection (c)(1) effectively says that sites are not responsible for reviewing all third-party content before it goes live, and are not responsible for any third-party content that you think should have been removed, but which they did not remove. (They are still responsible for their own first-party content, however)
Subsection (c)(2) effectively says that sites that remove third-party content because they considered it objectionable in good faith are not responsible for what they did remove. (Note that it is difficult to establish why they would be responsible for it to begin with; in the absence of this law, what would your grounds for legal action even be?)
People who think that sites remove too little content are SOL as far as changes in the law go. The government is bound by the First Amendment to not prohibit most content, and certainly not based on, for example, the particular opinions therein. People can post all manner of hateful, lunatic crap online and it's not illegal for them to do so, and it's not illegal for sites to host it.
People who think that sites remove too much content are only slightly less SOL. Sites are either run by individuals or by corporate 'persons' and in either event, they possess their own First Amendment rights which permit them to decide when to speak and when not to speak; they are not obligated to assist others, and can freely remove content because it's their site. Sites are not bound by the First Amendment like the government is because they aren't governments. In fact it is uncommonly rare to find an instance of a non-governmental entity being treated as if it is a government, and it's not something that's going to fly for Facebook; social media is not a governmental function causing a business to step into the shoes of government.
However, were section 230 to be eliminated, sites would have to pursue one of three options in order to avoid being held liable for the third party content that they do not remove. (There would still be no clear source of liability for what they do remove). 1) A site could not remove anything, and be treated as a mere conduit, like a community bulletin board or xerox machine. It would then not be liable for what was posted on it... to some extent. In actuality, it would still be liable for some other content, so this is probably not really possible. Also, sites would rapidly be filled up with spam, hate speech, malicious posts (the kind that exploit bugs to hack your computer just by looking at stuff), etc. which could not be removed if following this option. 2) A site could remove some things and leave others as it saw fit, which is what we have now. But the downside is that it would face total liability for anything it left up but should have removed, even if it was unaware of the problem. So since no one can moderate everything perfectly on all possible criteria, no one will ever do this. 3) A site could remove everything, and only allow up material that it had carefully vetted and was willing to assume responsibility for, just as a magazine, newspaper, or book publisher does. This will mean the death of third-party content, and sites that rely on it, like Facebook, Reddit, and Slashdot.
Most likely you're looking at the type 3 scenario -- the Internet turns into something like magazines and cable TV.
If you look at some of the entities behind the recent push for abolishing section 230 -- i.e. abolishing the Internet -- you'll see why this is attractive to them. Disney hates the Internet, it's a hive of piracy, and it has been going after section 230 for a while. A relatively new contender is Marriott, the hotel chain. They hate Airbnb, and the user listings on Airbnb fall within the scope of section 230; without it, Airbnb faces additional liability for their users, and perhaps that could be used to destroy it. And there's the newspaper and magazine industries that have seen their fortunes decline steadily and who want
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A tricky point on its own, but compounded by the fact that different forums might need different rules. It might be perfectly reasonable for say a gardening forum to moderate political comments as off-topic, while a "public square" platform like Facebook or Twitter should never interfere with political speech. They're just too involved
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And fuck you.
An explicit line is functionally impossible; content-based speech restrictions are tremendously vague in terms of line-drawing, and it's deliberately so.
Further, "involvement" in public discourse by private parties does not give the government the option of ignoring the First Amendment. If anything, it heightens the concerns about the government interfering in free speech. Facebook and Twitter are not public fora and never have been, and nothing about how they function makes them such.
Additio
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Subsection (c)(2) effectively says that sites that remove third-party content because they considered it objectionable in good faith are not responsible for what they did remove. (Note that it is difficult to establish why they would be responsible for it to begin with; in the absence of this law, what would your grounds for legal action even be?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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Not a great cite.
Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy for having not removed posts accusing them of being shady (which is ironic, because they absolutely were; they're the firm that was depicted in Wolf of Wall Street).
So the Prodigy case has to do with subsection (c)(1).
If Prodigy had removed those posts, Stratton Oakmont would not have sued Prodigy, but perhaps the person accusing the firm could have. But my question is, on what grounds could the poster sue Prodigy? If it's simple contract terms (you agreed to
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Biden in a NYT interview: "I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he's a real problem. [....] we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you're not exempt. You [The Times] can't write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it's a tech company is that, you know, Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms."
If you're unfamiliar with why this is dumb, please see "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act | Techdirt [techdirt.com]" Or just read the relevant part of Section 230 [cornell.edu], section C. It's short and simple and doesn't allow Facebook to "write something [they] know to be false".
If I owned a web site with any user-created content, I would want Section 230 or something very much like it to exist so that I don't get sued for allowing user-created content. People say "let's do something about section 230!" as a slogan, but have you seen anyone who uses this slogan correctly describe what section 230 contains? I haven't. Biden certainly didn't.
For those not paying attention the past four years, when Trump took office, those who love free speech were afraid he would be able to fulfill a quieter promise: to make liability lawsuits easier. He was famous for wanting to be able to more easily sue detractors. (Without getting into details, there is a whole famous person escape clause that lets you be much nastier in speech.)
And now, your cynical statement of the day re: Biden. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
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If you're unfamiliar with why this is dumb, please see "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act | Techdirt [techdirt.com]"
That techdirt article itself had some logical gaps, including the precise one you're alluding to.
"Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" -- the techdirt article responds that "at no point in any court case regarding Section 230 is there a need to determine whether or not a particular website is a 'platform' or a 'publisher.'" DOH! That's the whole point of this argument. When someone says that the law as written isn't any good (in this case because it
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What I've been saying is that 230 is good, but Facebook and Twitter went beyond
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If I owned a web site with any user-created content, I would want Section 230 or something very much like it to exist so that I don't get sued for allowing user-created content.
That was not the situation before Section 230 passed and that is not what Section 230 does.
Previously there were two court decisions which recognized immunity for distributors who did not moderate content and liability for distributors who did moderate content. Section 230 changed that by making the later immune so that online service providers could perform censorship without liability, which is exactly what Facebook and Twitter and others now do. Congress specifically legalized and encouraged the behavi
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Why Facebook breakup WILL Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, that's the comment I was looking for and it's already modded up. Still, it could have gone into the solution space...
I'd favor revisions to the tax code to penalize too-big-to-fail. Call it the too-big-fails tax? We don't have to completely outlaw such corporate cancers, though it wouldn't break my heart, but I think it would be sufficient to jigger the tax rules so the path to higher retained earnings leads directly to dividing overly large corporations right up the middle into honest competitors.
I t
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Slashdot of all places wanting the government to break up a free social media site is hilarious.
Re:Certainly should...... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trump's been trying to kill section 230...... (Score:4, Insightful)
This coming from the party who wanted to steal TikTok from Chinese ownership because they claimed too many free tickets at Trump rallies? The same party who wanted to invoke Section 230 against twitter because too many people were hurting their feelings? The same party who jumped ship to Parler to get their own safe space is against free speech?
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Boys and girls! The Republicans want to do the same thing, hurt them by section 230 changes, too! They just want to do it because the Democrats seem to be having success coercing facebook and twitter to censor "harrassing" tweets of politicians by threatening the exact same thing.
Democrats: We will hurt your stocks by section 230 changes if you don't censor harrassment. Pssst! Our opponents tweets you shall consider harrassement.
Republicans: Oh yeah? We will destroy 230 if you do do that.
Curiously em
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I'm not claiming Trump can do any better, due well having to respond to a just as corrupt party, but hoping Biden will is not very good.
Re:Trump's been trying to kill section 230...... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Republican Party has been trying to kill Free Speech just as hard. It's a question of who's speech they don't like that the elected fools will try to destroy.
Nothing good comes from trying to do this. If it made sites like 4chan and similar illegal, that might be a net benefit to the public-facing web, but the public-web's loss is the dark-web's gain.
Remember, you don't kill the weeds by cutting the heads of the plant off, you have to dig up all the soil as well. You may as well salt the earth after so nothing grows.
Look at how piracy evolved. It went from largely dark unconnected-to-the-web IRC, to download sites, to p2p apps, to torrents, and to "file locker" sites which are now obfuscated from being indexed by search engines.
As much as I dislike troll sites and bad information, as soon as you try to police it, 10 more pop up every time one goes down. You just legitimize the need for free speech when you try to stomp on it.
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The problem is that he has the democrat party to respond to, and i don't think they want free speech at all.
Claiming that free speech is a partisan issue just shows that you haven't been paying attention. Neither party is in support for completely free speech. They haven't been for a long time. Both parties have shown support for banning *some* speech and both parties have shown support for holding platforms accountable for the speech of others. Both parties have also put effort into discrediting speech, drowning out speech they don't like, and have even attempted to regulate speech either directly or through thr
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I'm not claiming that the other side wants it either, just that you shouln't think that Biden (or Trump) have any choice in the matter.
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This. The democratic debates were a horrow show in one respect: they fell all over each other to make the biggest threats against the tech giants for not censoring harrassment. And, as we all saw, there were loud cries from those politicians to censor the "harrassing tweets" of their political opponents
At one point, facebook stated they would deliberately not censor politicians because political speech is the most important free speech, and they caught hell for it.
Personally, I want to see any politician
'Social media' was a mistake to begin with (Score:4, Insightful)
Blue page bad - smash blue page (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole premise of a social network, from the user's point of view, is you need all your friends/acquaintances/groups on it, mostly all easily inter-accessible.
How will a group of companies operating inter-operable pieces of the social network be in any sense better than one company co-ordinating most of it.
1) It will be more confusing and complex for users.
2) Groups of contacts will likely become artificially siloed.
3) All of the companies will still be trying to sell you targeted ads, just like now.
I'm not sure what the solution is; hell, I'm not even sure what the problem is, other than people are gullible and tribal as f*ck and social media shines a high-beam on that uncomfortable fact. But I do know that "breaking up facebook" or whatever is just a gorilla-level reaction and won't help anything.
Re:Blue page bad - smash blue page (Score:4, Insightful)
Users coped with facebook, instagram, and whatsapp as separate entities. They'll cope again.
Re:Blue page bad - smash blue page (Score:5, Insightful)
EMail is an example.
Amazinlgy, an Apple user can email a Microsoft user can email an Android user, all on the same mailing list. A historic anachronism.
Re:Blue page bad - smash blue page (Score:4, Insightful)
Usenet is an even better example.
Based on open standards yet the spammers killed it. Running a private email server today is asking for one of the majors to block messages randomly as well. Any broken up social media will let the spammers bypass the control system unless there is a very heavy handed law that can be enforced internationally to prevent it so not much can be done.
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Will ceiling cat ever play with that hamster toy again?
Will the Martians accept Elon Musk's giant metal rocket?
Will CowboyNeal finally hulk-smash reddit?
Nobody knows. Will President Biden appoint Joe Biden as a Federal Judge, and will he preside over the case attempting to separate advertising sales from social media networks? This one is a clear no.
Re:Blue page bad - smash blue page (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole premise of a social network, from the user's point of view, is you need all your friends/acquaintances/groups on it, mostly all easily inter-accessible.
I don't think you understand what it is they are proposing to break up. The social network will be just fine, and the user won't be affected. What they are trying to break up is this idea that you need a social network account to use VR hardware, that a company that provides social media messaging also controls WhatsApp and Beluga, that a social media giant that has a photo sharing media system also owns Instagram, that the same company who owns all of the above use it as an advertising platform, that this trove of accounts is used to authenticate users for 3rd parties, that this company owns a market place, and is even attempting to create its own currency.
Nothing of what matters to users is the target of breaking up facebook.
Semi-off-topic complaint. (Score:2)
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Would've already happened (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering Facebook was fact-checking every single post a sitting president made, don't you think that president would have broken Facebook up already if they felt there was legal justification? Facebook was firmly on Biden's side, so he doesn't even have the motivation Trump has, and yet Facebook is still in one piece.
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Either that, Trump is simply full of shit.
Re:Would've already happened (Score:4, Informative)
FaceBook is largely what got Trump elected in the first place. This time around the motivating/rallying conspiracy theory for many Trump supporters was QAnon, and in 2016 it was PizzaGate. Batshit-crazy conspiracy theories like this don't just spread themselves - they need a complicit social media platform willing to let anything go under the guise of "free speech" as long as it makes them a buck.
You only have to look at Trump's use of Twitter, even in the face of belatedly marginally better fact checking there, to realize that Trump would never in a million years have done anything to stop these social media companies from being as useful to his spreading of lies as they have been. Same goes for FaceBook - Trump's campaign spent 10s of millions of dollars advertizing there in 2016 as well as 2020, so clearly regarded it as an important way to reach his target audience.
Don't like Facebook? (Score:2, Troll)
Don't like Facebook? Then don't create an account, don't open Facebook.com in your browser, don't buy ads on Facebook... Is this that difficult?
There are plenty of opportunities to communicate with others. There's Twitter, Instagram, FreeRepublic.com, DailyKos.com, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Or, just create your own website and convince your friends and acquaintances your postings have sufficient value for them to go look at it regularly and/or accept email/texts when there's new and exciting content. Or, you c
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Or, just create your own website
With Blackjack! And hookers!
In fact, forget the website!
Re:Don't like Facebook? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not use facebook. But there are several reasons why not joining Facebook does not solve the problem.
1) Facebook tracks you even if you are not a member. Very hard to stop them from tracking you. From cookies on your computers, friend's addressbook that includes your email, phone number, name, and address, photos of you that have been labelled, Facebook has a ton of info on people.
2) Facebook has become the user identification method for non-facebook companies. How many times do you sign in to something and are 'offered' the chance to use your facebook sign in to log in. Some of them can ONLY login via facebook to 'prove' your identity. You want X service but you have to set up a Y account to do it.
3) MONOPOLY. Maybe you do in fact want the Facebook services, but you do not like them, for whatever reason. I have a choice between Coke and Pepsi, Shake Shack and InandOut. I want a choice among my privacy invading advertisement agencies. Monopolies are bad for the country, bad for consumers (advertisers), and bad for their farmed resources (people).
4) Political Influence. They have a huge amount of political power because they are so big. They USE this power to influence politics. Yes, it is subtle - they do not obviously abuse their own facebook likes and messages. But even if they never intentionally use subtle powers, they can still lobby politicians legally. For more power.
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I do not use facebook. But there are several reasons why not joining Facebook does not solve the problem.
1) Facebook tracks you even if you are not a member. Very hard to stop them from tracking you. From cookies on your computers, friend's addressbook that includes your email, phone number, name, and address, photos of you that have been labelled, Facebook has a ton of info on people.
And they aren't the only ones.
2) Facebook has become the user identification method for non-facebook companies. How many times do you sign in to something and are 'offered' the chance to use your facebook sign in to log in. Some of them can ONLY login via facebook to 'prove' your identity. You want X service but you have to set up a Y account to do it.
And they aren't the only ones.
3) MONOPOLY. Maybe you do in fact want the Facebook services, but you do not like them, for whatever reason. I have a choice between Coke and Pepsi, Shake Shack and InandOut. I want a choice among my privacy invading advertisement agencies. Monopolies are bad for the country, bad for consumers (advertisers), and bad for their farmed resources (people).
They still aren't the only ones.
4) Political Influence. They have a huge amount of political power because they are so big. They USE this power to influence politics. Yes, it is subtle - they do not obviously abuse their own facebook likes and messages. But even if they never intentionally use subtle powers, they can still lobby politicians legally. For more power.
And of course they most definitely are not the only ones.
What not make those things illegal then, rather than trying to go after every single company tracking us and getting rich doing it?
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They have the largest cache of information about people and the largest number of users. That makes them stand out. So they have the means and opportunity to make profit by externalizing consequences on society.
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A lot of sites track you for advertising. If that bothers you, take defensive actions ("virgin" browser sessions, blockers, etc) to mitigate. Your name, phone number, and address are not secrets -- I can legally buy all of those
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First of all you gave true responses, but they do not take into account all of the ramifications.
1) Facebok's tracking is different because it is huge. That makes it one stop shopping to get almost everyone which is qualitatively different than having everyones' tracking information split among multiple companies. Among other things it makes it easy and you would be surprised how much evilness gets done simply because it is easy to do.
2) You admitted it was a problem, but claimed it was small (one site yo
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So, just outlaw all tracking (and expect most "free" sites to go away - you'd pay to do Google searches, join Facebook, or use Google maps etc). I just don't see how some
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What information do they have on you?
Why do you let other people take pictures of you that they may end up posting on Facebook? Anyway, if you're in public, anyone can take pictures of you that and post them wherever they want -- completely legal in almost all cases. The fact that Facebook provides a forum that allows this is no different than tens of thousands of other providers where I can set up a web page (often without even bothering to get my own domain) or post things in comment sections (like this -
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Facebook is of course no more responsible for misinformation from customers posting material than the government is responsible for misinformation spread by BLM in protests on public lands (parks, streets, sidewalks). One can't insulate stupid people from all sources of manipulation and misinformation and both the government and Facebook are merely providing a forum with limited oversight (with the government's oversight limited by the First Amendment).
As well, "misinformation" is sometimes actually accurat
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Agreed - yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater with the intent of causing panic (rather then because there really is a fire or because you're an actor on stage doing a "Ready, Aim, Fire" or a "Put another log on the fire" line that's in the script) is something that is a criminal act.
Similarly, posting a bona fide threat (such as "I'm going to shoot and kill you, I know you live at 123 Main St and work from 4PM to 11 PM on weekends at Joe's Diner on Second street and I will kill you with my S&W .357 Magnu
I can't wait for NOSEBOOK! (Score:4, Funny)
No (Score:2)
And - No. Hope that isn't too curt.
Congress might... (Score:2)
...break up Facebook, since they're the ones writing the laws. The Pres? All he can do is sign or veto what they put in front of him...
That said, it's completely pointless. People do FB to communicate with friends/family/acquaintances. If I used FB, and the Feds broke it up, I'd just be switching to the new version that includes all the people I currently deal with. As would everyone else.
So, after a while, everyone will be using the same babyFB, and the others would die on the vine....
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I don't think the case for breaking up FaceBook is anti-monopoly concerns, and as you say the tendency is going to be for consolidation anyway as people want to group together.
What's really called for is better regulation of social media, not breaking up the giants. FaceBook is clearly well over the line into allowing it's platform to be used for any purpose whatever, society-be-damned, as long as they can make a buck from it.
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Censorship grows (Score:4, Informative)
https://reclaimthenet.org/face... [reclaimthenet.org] - a 360k user group called "Stop the Steal" was censored. Regardless of the veracity of information spread by this group, can you see how this sets a precedent for corporations to push their agenda for future elections where fraud may be a real possibility? Countless groups [reclaimthenet.org] are being pressured monitor users or face a ban themselves.
https://reclaimthenet.org/face... [reclaimthenet.org] - Similar to the above - blocking any hashtags which hint at election fraud. They even purge Jewish groups [reclaimthenet.org] if they happen to support the wrong candidate.
https://reclaimthenet.org/face... [reclaimthenet.org] - White people are being treated differently compared to other groups. I'm sure this will completely reduce the degree of bitterness that's been mounting up for the past decade.
https://reclaimthenet.org/baby... [reclaimthenet.org] - It's not just politics; Even Monty Python is not immune from the invisible hand of censorship.
Re:Censorship grows (Score:4, Insightful)
Private company regulates the content of its platform, shocking. So does slashdot. What is your point exactly?
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Regardless, I wasn't necessarily suggesting action against them. If they want to dig their own grave, so be it.
Re: Censorship grows (Score:3)
Trump derangement syndrome (Score:2, Insightful)
The unspoken truth is that a lot of liberals blame Facebook for Trump getting elected, that caused a massive change in treatment of Facebook in the media and by politicians ... which in my opinion is slightly insane. Facebook doesn't deserve this massively outsized level of attention.
An unspoken and here unspeakable truth, which rarely fails to get me downvoted.
Re: Trump derangement syndrome (Score:3)
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Facebook doesn't deserve this massively outsized level of attention. An unspoken and here unspeakable truth, which rarely fails to get me downvoted.
Have you been in a coma the past 4 years? Does Cambridge Analytica ring any bells, or the fact that Facebook openly admitted that their platform was disproportionately used to get Trump elected to the point that they went full Stasi on their own service banning accounts in the millions in the leadup to the recent election?
If you're getting downvoted it's because your head is so far in the sand that we can barely see your toes stick out.
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Cambridge Analytica was a storm in a teacup, a couple of provocateurs pissing in a sea of piss.
Liberals just need a witch, any social media platform suffices for people to talk to each other ... or for a couple of Russians to post some bullshit to make rent. Facebook wasn't and isn't special in any other way than being top dog, but there will always be a top dog.
Burning them at the stake will change nothing.
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Cambridge Analytica was a part of a much larger operation. What hit the media was a storm in a teacup with the rest of wide platform misinformation campaigns going largely unnoticed.
Liberals just need a witch
You still there? I can't even see your toes now.
Who gives a flying fuck about Facebook? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Depends on what you worry about.
Data agglomeration which could be abused by a dictatorship? Google and Facebook equally ... but Apple certainly on the horizon (that they only use their information internally doesn't make the power less scary if they become top dog). Amazon less so, purchase history is just not as powerful as social history.
Success being turned into an ever widening monopoly disrupting competition, Amazon and Apple about equally.
Nope. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is more posturing. There was an old The Onion cartoon with Mark Zuckerburg as CIA agent of the year. The Onion is supposed to be satire but this is basically true. Why would they disrupt one of their best intelligence gathering tools?
Don't break up Facebook (Score:2)
Just revoke their business license. We don't need a dozen little Facebooks all competing to fuck over the world. It's the business model itself that isn't acceptable.
Won't there be more important things? (Score:2)
Won't there be more important things that need to be done?
No but "President" and "Facebook" make (Score:2)
good clickbait. Who the fuck is stupid enough to imagine a POTUS can unilaterally do that or that lawyers cannot defeat any attempt?
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Prime for being broken up (Score:2)
Should happen, but plan for a new model also (Score:2)
I'm not a big fan of social media (Facebook, Twitter and such) for the simple fact that it enables advertisers to target ads even more than most methods and provides content that draws people further and further into their little bubbles. It's what's going to make the COVID recovery in the US take longer...half the population has been convinced that the vaccine is a government mind control device planted by Bill Gates so he can rule the world.
But, the question is whether they're violating antitrust laws, an
Not at all (Score:2)
As with all tricky issues... (Score:2, Interesting)
I fully expect Biden to announce he will form a panel of experts and give them six months to advise him - that's how he weaseled out on his promise to end trumps policies on the border. Oh, and toss in a "listen to the scientists" statement for good measure. (Apparently we elected Biden so that he could blindly obey whatever instructions unelected "scientists and experts" tell him.)
Simple (Score:2)
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The president doesn't have the power to break up a company because he doesn't like it. He has to do it because the company's practices broke some law, and the breakup has to somehow cure that.
If there is a breakup, it won't be a horizontal partitioning of the user base; it will be separating services -- most likely ones Facebook obtained by corporate acquisition like Instagram and WhatsApp -- that drive users to Facebook prime, as it were. That is, providing that Facebook's acquisition of those companies
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Facebook is an atrocity which needs to be reined in, but how?
Because of network effects, turning it into a utility seems like the correct answer. Because of regulatory capture it seems like the wrong answer.
Perhaps it should just be made easy to sue it for libel for anything that can be proven false. But that leads to huge grey areas where "opinions" are posted that appear to be assertions unless you read them carefully.
So you're saying sue the platform (Score:2)
Where it was the user who had to click a button to make their content public accessible i.e. who published the content?
Good luck with that.
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What harm has facebook caused you exactly?
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And how has that caused you harm?
(I like my privacy too, but that doesn't mean that I can necessarily maintain it)
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Turning Facebook into a utility is absolutely the wrong answer. You do that to the ISP. They are the real monopolies. Content providers are entertainment. The government is no business regulating them.
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Turning Facebook into a utility is absolutely the wrong answer. You do that to the ISP. They are the real monopolies. Content providers are entertainment. The government is no business regulating them.
When it becomes a workplace norm not to hire people who don't have a Facebook page, it makes Facebook way beyond an entertainment site.
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Actually, that's exactly backwards. ISPs should be broken up into small groups. The physical layer has arguments for monopoly/utility status, but the ISP has none. There used to be lots of ISPs, and the internet worked quite well. It was the physical layer that pushed things towards centralized control. E.g. fiber optics are not properly owned by the ISP. That's an artifact of monopoly contracts created by the cable companies for their own benefit.
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If there is a breakup, it won't be a horizontal partitioning of the user base; it will be separating services -- most likely ones Facebook obtained by corporate acquisition like Instagram and WhatsApp -- that drive users to Facebook prime, as it were. That is, providing that Facebook's acquisition of those companies can be shown to be anti-competitive.
That's a way of doing a breakup, but there is precedent for horizontal partitioning. Look at the Bell breakup, for example. Granted, that was based on geographical location (out of necessity, because of the way telephone networks work), but the end result is the same.
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Sure, that's obviously a possibility; but the question is the legal rationale. The regional Bell companies were set up as part of splitting local telephone service from national telephone service. It wasn't strictly necessary to break up the local service by region, but doing it that way would create a national monopsony that anyone who wanted to do long distance service would have to sell to.
Multiple small monopolies (Score:2)
Each with a different user base?
The correct way would be to enforce an open standard for social media, with any ISP able to host, just like EMail. Like the head poster suggested.
But the main reason people hate Facebook is because they do not censor the internet in ways that those people like. And that would become much harder to do with a broken up system. (Which is a good reason to do it.)
Alternatively, how about we just give up on Slashdot and make it into a Facebook group...
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Of course that's not the main reason they *should* hate Facebook. The main reason they should hate Facebook is that they are not the customer; they're the product; and they're the product in a very asymmetrical transaction where they have almost no information about what's going on.
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That could easily be solved if there were multiple competing services. If you split it into enough parts, odds are good that at least one of them would decide to offer (or become) a subscription service. No ads, $x per year. Some users would flock to it; others would flock away from it. The important thing is that users would have a choice.
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But how does that work?
The privacy concern is essentially that someone can build a social graph for people, and also dig in deeper and look at particular bits of content in the social media that go back and forth (did user X like this movie or do they dislike that food, etc.)
How is that alleviated with a more open social network that various providers can plug into? If anything, it's either less functional (you can't find friends of friends if they're on separate providers) or less private (to facilitate us
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I think the current state Instant messaging is closer to how it would work than e-mail. You will get a bunch of incompatible services (iMessage, Google Messages, Whats App, Telegram, ...). Then you have to ask the people you're communicating with which one they're on. If they aren't on one that you are, one of you has to sign up to the new service. In brief, a pain to deal with (from a user-interface point of view).
In the end, if Facebook were broken up, it would just have one eventual winner (maybe two) of
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And how well did breaking up AT&T work? I seem to have a choice between AT&T or Verizon and little else. And if the former keeps losing money the way it has been, they may soon merge and we'll just have "the phone company" again.
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The problem is selective enforcement of laws. If Google has broken laws but Facebook has not, then Google needs attention, even if what Facebook has done is morally equivalent, but not illegal. And vice versa.
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If they were going to attempt this, unless done right we would end up with just a new facebook. The problem is that the scale of users is part of what is sold, being able to reach everyone.
A functional, broken up social network would be one where users can post across the various networks, so much so where there is basically one network, but the interface, and tools is what is being sold are what are different, kind of like ISPs all giving various forms of access to the Internet.
Yeah, this. What's needed is to break it up into a dozen or more "Baby Books", with a shared wire data format and a requirement that they all peer with each other non-prejudicially for at least the next 100 years. Require them to all work together via public standards, both for data import-export (to move your data between sites) and wire formats.
Then allow Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple to buy one of them each, to keep the rest honest.
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Or we can just recognize that lies are free speech and only have government intervene with emergency powers in extreme circumstances, like Corona misinformation and riots.