121–130 of 215 posts
Serious question(s), not trolling. Why shouldn't Facebook take down the ad that's calling for a break up of their Company? How is this any different from a person walking into a store and asking to place an ad inside the store calling for breakup or shutting down of said store? What store owner would ever allow such a thing? Why would (or should) any business allow any sort of propaganda that strikes at the heart of…
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Because Facebook has a monopoly.
What’s their monopoly on? Serious question. Too many people like using fb so we break them up? lolwut. Is fb actively stifling competition? Is there a market failure?
If they're suppressing the debate, then yes, they are. When it comes to political speech, the democratic governance process is definitely a competitor.
> Is there a market failure?
As long as Facebook is the go-to platform for political advertising and they use their position as the market to influence market positions, then yes, there is a failure. Imagine if the NYSE chairman picked the stock winners every day, not because he's a prophet, but because he literally decided, in advance, who's going to get to move shares today.
While she views Facebook as too powerful, it is ironic she is happy to provide as revenue to the company.
It's not ironic, this is the entire point she is trying to make. It is impossible to reach a meaningful chunk of the public today without going through Facebook, and they have the ability to filter content as they see fit.
I think you could make the argument that Facebook finally allows for more niche politicians to reach meaningful chunks of niche audiences compared to TV ads. Whether you like them, hate them, or hate one of them, Trump and AOC would not be where they are without Facebook or Twitter. We can only pontificate, but this might also apply to Obama too. Fake news, filtering, and smear campaigns are a phenomenon that existed way before Facebook was created:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/08/22/mf.campaign.s...
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Does Facebook claim to be a content-agnostic middleman? I know we accuse them of it, but they pulled some GOP / Trump ads for being sensational, that hardly sounds like a dispassionate middleman.
It's not about what they claim to be, it's about the legal provisions that may or may not protect them. I'm not sure of all the details, which wouldn't fit in an HN post anyhow, but the short version is that if they are picking and choosing what can appear on their platform, they're also liable for it. Facebook, among other companies, want to both be able to pick and choose what appears on their platform and to enjoy…
You might be thinking of the pre-CDA rule suggested by the Stratton Oakmont case. But Congress specifically removed that rule!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
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People no longer receive daily, or even weekly, deliveries of newspapers. They no longer crowd around the living room radio, and increasingly avoid the television, which increasingly has neither a cable connection nor rabbit ears. Like it or not, the world has changed.
The world has changed, but not that much. People do have mailboxes, mailing addresses and receive letters at least once in a while. Again, they drive cars, use public transit, walk on streets, etc. The real life still here, far not everything has moved online. And even for that online part Facebook is not a monopoly. Influential online company? Absolutely. Monopoly? No.
Nothing they receive in their mailbox holds their attention long, the attention market is dominated by digital media.
>Again, they drive cars, use public transit, walk on streets, etc
With headphones in or bluetooth paired. Who the hell reads a billboard? Who pairs their cellphone with their car, or owns headphones? Damn near everybody. Just try to buy a new car without Bluetooth.
Old propaganda distribution channels are dead men walking, and everybody knows it. Unless you're advertising a chicken wings and cleavage bar at the next exit, you're a damn fool for paying for a billboard.
From what I can tell, Facebook did not take down all the ads Warren posted calling for the breakup of Facebook, there were specific ads which got flagged for use of the Facebook logo. So it seems to me that Warren’s team when fishing for ads about breaking up Facebook which would flag in the automated system, and then ran to report about it. It smells like a setup.
Small businesses are just as likely to block you negatively advertising about them on their platform as large ones, so Warren showing she’s blocked doesn’t tell us anything about Facebook’s size or practices compared to businesses in general, and thus doesn’t tell us if they’re a problematic monopoly. How many businesses let you use their service to argue against them?
Not even the news, collectively much less individually, accurately reports content on the news — and they’re the ones held forward as examples of a self-policing industry serving society.
The only way to conclude that Facebook abused their position here is if you already believe that; otherwise, it really doesn’t seem like anything unusual happened.
This seems like acting really aggressively, then whining when you get expected and normal pushback: a common bullying tactic from children.
Breakup Facebook rhetoric is so counterproductive. It achieves nothing. It solves no problem. The country has real problems. “I don’t like Facebook” isn’t even remotely one of them. I won’t be voting for her, that’s for sure.
Don't think this is a real issue? How about looking at some of the other "real" problems she's addressed in her platform before outright dismissal? The kind of impulsive, single-issue voting you're implicitly advocating for here is exactly what the country does not need.
This is smart politics. Rather than simply telling people FB is a monopoly, she runs a limited experiment that had it been left alone, would have limited effect since the budget was so small ($100). Now this puts FB in a bind. If they really are a middleman for content, then these ads don't violate any laws and shouldn't be blocked. However, FB as a company with a product should block it just like coffee shop wouldn'…
You or I couldn’t run those ads, this is special treatment for her.
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Dissecting the company along those lines does nothing to curb their cumulative potential effect on controlling what ads a user sees. They all hook into the same ad backend anyways.
Wouldn't the point of breaking those into separate companies be to _prevent_ them from hooking into the same backend?
Breakup Facebook rhetoric is so counterproductive. It achieves nothing. It solves no problem. The country has real problems. “I don’t like Facebook” isn’t even remotely one of them. I won’t be voting for her, that’s for sure.
Have you actually seen the proposal? It's not specifically about Facebook, they just happen to be a good example of market failure that she wants to prevent.
She gives the example of Amazon.com forcing diapers.com to sell diapers at a lower price as a reason for why we need to prevent acquisitions. But getting products for cheaper prices benefits consumers... The small business founders got rich and consumers got cheaper diapers. I'm not seeing any problem with that.
She claims Amazon is anti-competitive because they promote their own products on their own website. Websites aren't railroads. Consumers can choose any website by typing in the address in their web browser. Consumers can switch search engines and shopping websites. That was not the case with railroads or phone networks - because for reasons that should be very obvious you can't have a million different railroad lines and telephone wires. Unlike the web, they were physically mutually exclusive.
If a company provided superior service and prices to Amazon consumers can easily choose to use them.