What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

Landlords cannot just evict renters based on the landlord's own terms of service, not even a renter's non-paying children or girlfriend with whom the landlord didn't contract, and not even the renter himself although the stopped paying: The landlord needs to follow the rules of society, go through a bailiff's court or follow similar strict procedures defined in society to ensure that mandatory law is followed.

Not everybody can set up a medical clinic on their private property, even if they offer their services for free.

TV stations in many European countries can't show hidden ads in programmes and cannot show ads for kids for certain products. Even though the viewers didn't pay. Even though they are free not to watch.

In most places landowners cannot freely decide to do what they want with their land, like building a factory, without taking into consideration zoning laws and without hearing the neighbors or wider community as well.

For millennia, what we today call criminal laws, have applied on private property as well. You can't just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can. Think that's ridiculous? Well, it used to be that restaurants in America could chose to serve whites only. It was the choice of the property owner. Until it wasn't. Courts and congress decided that such practices were so despicable that the general interest of non-discrimination outweighed the interest in business owners getting to decide for themselves. Same with businesses hiring men only. Today most of us regard it as obvious that non discrimination laws trump the interest of private owners. A few decades ago, most people thought the owner could choose freely whom to hire.

I hope we will start regulating the new advertising industry comprised of social networks and search engines more tightly.

Apparently a stray nipple is more of a threat to society.

No, they banned him because they can do what they damn well please, and their approach to content moderation starts with a hammer and escalates from there. It would've sufficed to delete the offending post and issue a warning, even ban him from the group where he misposted the nude. Completely severing access, for a week, from a primary means of social interaction, is vastly disproportionate - that's something you do because someone has demonstrated a clear pattern of deliberately shitty behavior, not because he got loaded and acted the fool one time.

Considering the extent to which Facebook has inveigled itself into so many people's social lives, and the consequent scope and impact its moderation actions may have, I think it's long past time that some severe regime of external regulation be imposed on the corporation, whether by legislation - although that's a forlorn hope at best in the US, where Congress is largely useless no matter who's in it at any given time - or by shareholder activism, as someone else here suggested. I'm not the man to run that project, but I'd surely buy a few shares to participate in it.

To be clear, I don't want Facebook fixed, because I don't think it can be. I want Facebook gone, engineered out of profitability - and thus out of existence - and replaced with a world in which no new Facebook can arise because everyone can both own her data and identity outright, and participate in what we now call "social networking" without having to make herself beholden to any corporate behemoth at all.

It's possible! There are a lot of smart, capable people working on it, and more join in every day. Eventually, someone's going to hammer that stake into Facebook's heart. Before then, finding a way to enforce nuance upon it is a good place to start. Facebook hurts people every day, and cares not at all that it does so. As we work toward the ultimate goal of killing it, we do well also to reduce its ability to do this sort of harm.