I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

"Companies over countries" is tolerable speech, but nation states will not find it tolerable as policy. As a citizen, I don't find "companies over countries" a tolerable policy. I get a say in how my country is run. I get NO say in how Facebook is run.

There is diaspora*, which aims to be a decentralized replacement. Though replacing the social inertia is much harder than creating the tech. https://diasporafoundation.org/

> The problem of participatory democracy is that the people need to be informed and participate and vote for the issues, if no one cares about the surveillance then nothing is going to be done about it

Incidentally this is also true of people patronizing large companies and exchanging their personal data for those companies' services. And I don't know why a constituency which accepts NSA surveillance from its government would be expected to pressure that same government to sanely regulate edge providers like Facebook. In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.

> yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign

"So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.

> facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.

Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way. Had the Russians run a similar number of hilariously bad ads in favor of Clinton, occupying an equally infinitesimal sliver of Facebook ad traffic, it correctly would be dismissed as largely inconsequential to the electoral result.

I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian, I'm open to the idea that FB and its ilk need to be reined back from some forms of data sharing and overly broad applications of their terms of service. But it's hilarious that what finally got people up in arms about this issue was Russia putting up a handful of vaguely pro-Trump Jesus arm wrestling memes on Facebook.

> You want to make the NSA an election issue? You can go campaign on it. Setup a party, gather people to your cause. Vote. You can't do anything even remotely similar to influence google or facebook.

This is sort of a bizarro-world comment to me. I'd bet good money that I have more influence on Google and Facebook than I do on the NSA, even ignoring any "I know an employee" personal channels.

I'm confused on several levels.

1. Anything I can apply to the NSA, I can apply to Facebook, probably with greater impact - and the reverse isn't true. For both Facebook and the NSA, I can lobby for regulation or sue them. I can campaign on Facebook just fine; it's not like the government has never acted against specific companies to satisfy the public. But for Facebook, I can also call for a user boycott, or promote lawsuits in other countries.

Meanwhile, I expect that campaigning and voting are better at influencing Facebook than the NSA. The US government will usually act on corporations that provoke enough public outrage, and the US (if perhaps no other government) can powerfully influence American tech companies. Three-letter agencies don't ever seem to stay constrained (the NSA nakedly lied to the Church Committee), and I usually can't even oppose their behavior because I don't know what it is.

I certainly don't see how I have more options for dealing with the NSA.

2. I basically disagree that I can go campaign on the NSA. There hasn't been a credibly anti-surveillance Presidential candidate since... Dukakis? Maybe? And the handful of primary candidates who seriously opposed it have lost badly, often via forces largely independent of actual popular opinion.

I can work for legislative reform, donate to Wyden and Udall, do all the rest. And I do, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Partly from lack of support, but partly because there are regulatory and legislative hurdles at every turn to insulate state surveillance from public influence. And even for that lack of support - the idea that democracy means you have a role in things is on an important level false. Democracy involves many people (>50%, essentially) in government, it doesn't represent everyone. It's better than dictatorship, obviously, but "accept this outcome as representing you" doesn't inherently follow from "you got to vote".

I'm not happy with Facebook, and I do think there are axes on which it's noticeably worse than government action. (Mostly, that any random jackass can start a social media surveillance empire, and that corporations can jurisdiction-hop to avoid regulation.)

But the idea that living in a democracy gives me more power over the NSA than Facebook? I'm struggling to think of a single way that's true.

This is a libertarian fantasy. Large companies can stay solvent by undercutting smaller companies and killing their business. This is what would happen if we were to remove regulations and restrictions. You wouldn't end up with a perfect competition utopia you end up with a dystopian garbage reality where the business elite control even more than they already do.