This article first appeared at ProPublica and The Washington Post. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Why is Facbook allowed to continue, when yesterdayās tech giants IBM and AT&T were both sued under anti-trust regulations. I would be a lot happier, and feel safer, if IBM and AT&T were still on top instead of Facebook and Google.
am I the only one not seeing any real hope for regulation changes?
Ah, for those halcyon days of the early internet, when everyone was so excited about access to good information from a variety of sources at your fingertipsā¦i assumed everyone would want that, just as in theory everyone wants good, healthy food all the time. i really did not anticipate that a significant portion of the population would opt for digital junk food, disinformation and agenda-driven websites. Suffice it to say, a major disappointment.
There is, always has been and always will be a lot of money in bullshit. Thatās especially true if the bullshit youāre spreading can cause confusion or conflict in any way. The real problem isnāt Facebook. The problem is an unregulated internet thatās allowed to spread toxic bullshit everywhere and without consequence.
Social media is like any other corporate entity in the U.S. It will go where ever the money is as long as itās allowed. What we need to do is to stop crying about all of the awful bullshit thatās spread on social media and start passing laws that threaten real consequences for such actions.
Mail fraud is a real crime that has real consequences. If laws similar to our mail fraud laws (though greatly modified) were created to police the internet, many of the problems weāre having with social media would disappear. Obviously, people like Zuckerberg, Putin, Roger Stone and Robert Mercer will do everything in their power to block such legislation (as will most Republicans) but this is really our only hope if we wish to preserve our democracy.
Social media is a lost cause, other than finding out most of my extended family in Texas are Trumpers. Iāve wasted loads of time on there and finally quit. I havenāt missed a thing and Iām not mad all the time.
Early on, when the World Wide Web layer came into existence, I felt it would devolve into a mess. And then after a bit I thought I was wrong. It was a solid, functional tool. I stand corrected again. It is a mess and social media is one of the major cancers that is killing it.
āThe notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd,ā Pusateri said.
It is right there my mind shut down and just simply went ānopeā. Oddly, the word Absurd is the tell as to the veracity of the statement.
I think Iāve discovered your problem. Bad in-theories. I had a bad in-theory before the 2016 election. There werenāt enough crazy people out there that couldnāt see through Trump. I was woefully mistaken.
Iām a long time LinkedIn member who uses it for mainly career related social media.
Its safe and secure with no trolls or content designed to inflame or propagandize. Same with my Google account. Itās obvious that itās Facebooks algorithm design that has wrecked havoc on the planet right up to the Rohingya genocide and insurrection.
Theyāll do none of it and did not do any of it. This FB silliness is just so damn childish. These people live in that worldā¦safe at home behind a Bald Eagle avatar positing empty BS on a ridiculous site called FB. Look at the clowns when there in the real world. Look at the pictures of the idiots crashing the Capitol. All have their phones out or are posing for someone elseās phone. Then they go home to that avatar and live it over in pixels and bytes as if that means shit. No need to act as if any of their lame virtual pretending means shit. There will NOT be a revolution, a civil war or a rising in the streets other than in anime or photo shopped vid. Losers. Fuck em.
Just curious how many of the āItās a private company, they can do what they likeā commenters are going to show up on this thread to support Facebookās choices.
One could take the line that yes, i support their right to make these decisions but it proves they should be considered a utility/public good like radio/tv in the old over-the-air days and be subject to regs that do take away that ability to make damaging decisions.
Some folks are working on it, but who knows if it can get anywhere with this Congress? The approach in the article below is interesting, but Iād rather see stiff personal data privacy protections; the kind that would basically destroy Facebookās business model but it would solve the problem.
That bit about maximizing engagement for a stagnating user base makes me think of guns in the US, where a shrinking population of owners buys ever more guns.
Iām just mildly curious because when the news broke yesterday about MTGās suspension from the twitters, people were all over the āItās a private company, sheās got no right to speakā.
So they should be showing up in full support of Facebook here, since itās up to the company, after all, to determine what content they do or donāt allow.
(Noting that thatās not my position, Iād rather see something more akin to public utilities with regulations that most closely adhere to freedom of speech principles while possibly mitigating debunked stuff like this)
With respect to free speech and its limits, remember when it was said āYou canāt yell āFIREāā in a movie theater? Ah, the good olā days. Now the incendiary lies and disinformation are flowing like the gushing water out of a fire hose.
greed is greed is GREED
AT&T funded Qanon.
I was coming here to make a similar point: I was recalling those ads from the late-90s or so promoting the virtues of debate and discourse on the Web: what would rise to the top would be Good Ideas, independent of the gender/age/race/ethnicity of the people presenting them. Wasnāt it pretty to think so.
Facebook existed in those days, but membership was confined then to faculty and students in college. Not that correlation is causation, but the expansion of FB and the emergence of other social media certainly enabled (by the platformsā very designsānever mind the algorithm stuff) the tribalism that can arise from our natural human tendency to seek out people who think and believe more or less like we do. The easy solution would be to burn the FB house down, but itās so enmeshed itself into the way businesses (and some governments, overseas) conduct their affairs that making it go away would indeed cause huge, unintended and even undesirable disruptions.
Iām just yammering. I have no answers. It is true, though, that FBās MO for going on 20 years now has been to play the naifāāOh, who could have foreseen? Weāll police ourselves and do better!āāand theyāve about run out of room to play that role.
Of course it did.
Zuckerberg plays dumb and counts the money.
Sandberg leans in and helps him count what falls on the floor.
Itās a Publisher without adult supervision, not a Platform made out of plywood.