Congress Should Subpoena Facebook Officials | Talking Points Memo

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1390924
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I regard Zuck as one of the most dangerous men in the world. I don’t think he’s consciously dangerous. He just puts revenue first and to hell with the consequences.
In politics worldwide, FB is one of the worst examples of unintended consequences. irresponsible posting can literally trigger wars or mass murders-- nay, “ethnic cleansing”.

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Ok this was said repeatedly in the article and it’s all well and good but just what can Congress do to Facebook to make it behave? Congress can compel Zuckerberg’s testimony but then what?

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At first this seems very straightforward. If we’re going to have a functioning representative democracy, then people should be obliged to go forth and be honest when summoned by Congress. On the other hand, while that seems mostly fine with Democrats in charge, it doesn’t seem fine with Republicans start harassing private citizens over nonsense. It wasn’t so long ago that Republicans were trying to drag these people in front of committees for the sin of “censoring” conservative voices as “fake news.”

As with all things government, be careful what you wish for because sometimes the other side is in power.

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Woo!

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Meanwhile Facebook will be plowing ahead with new ventures that it does not have the capacity desire to safely or effectively implement.

FIFY

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Require facebook to notify and inform users every time they’ve been sold, and to whom, every day.

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If they require that of FB - and it’s fine by me; I don’t like FB - aren’t they going to have to make the same requirement for everyone who does that?

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Back in the ancient times before the innertubes, some of us used to subscribe to an information device called a magazine (not to be confused with a MAGA-zine). If I ordered one, I would receive all sorts of unsolicited offers from other magazines, credit card companies, cremation services, folks who wanted to sell me commemorative Ronald and Nancy plates…

My information has been for sale ever since I let Ma Bell include my name in the phone book

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Do most FB users have access to terabytes of data storage?

Asking as a non-FB user.

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I would like to see some regulatory consequences.

Not sure how we deal with the first amendment without becoming a bigger problem then the one we are trying to solve.

With foreign involvement we are basically at war and I don’t think I have an issue with our federal government acting accordingly.

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Remember how fb was started, as a rating system for college boys to facilitate getting laid.

That’s like DOS to all them fancy tablets and phones and what not. It’s fundamental.

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That would be a side benefit. But it won’t happen, big social media learned to buy critters about 10 years ago.

PS. Would love it if credit reporting agencies had to notify you every time they sell your score.

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There are several orders of magnitude difference between selling “so and so lives at this address” vs. “so and so talked to person X at this instant in time and they discussed subject Y”.

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The reporting info would be stored on facebile and the users can access it there and choose whether to download it or subsets of it.

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That isn’t going to do anything to solve a lot of the problems that are under discussion, like the affect that Instagram has on the psyches of young women and girls.

Or all the fake shit posted by bots and foreign agents.

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Those are mostly problems that can be addressed only by fixing humanity, and we all know you can’t fix stupid. But what we can do is mitigate and reduce facebile’s effect. Peeling off some of their more valuable users by reminding them daily that they are the meat being bought and sold here would reduce facebile’s userbase to the sort of people who flocked to myspace.

In addition to all the crapola, people do have real interactions on facebile with real people that they know are real. By context and proximity, this increases the perceived value of the crapola.

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You mean a few thumb drives?

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A daily summary would suffice: yesterday we sold your ass to this list of N entities. Click here to see the list.

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on Facebook it is entirely possible to get away with shouting “FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!!!” in a crowded virtual theater…

and there will not be any examination of the actions until long after all of the bodies killed & maimed in the mad stampede are dead & buried …
and then the examination will focus on why the people responded in the way that they did and what to watch out for in the future if something like this were to happen again … maybe then a pattern could be discerned … and then people could be encouraged not to stampede …

many many of Facebook’s responses could not be any more obtuse and dense - it is as if they put an incentive on crafting the most vapid reaction to adverse events.

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