Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 266 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#241

Post by intended »

austincheney wrote: post #51
marcrosoft wrote: post #17

The four points being: * harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your acc…

The problem is even more simple than that. Simply, is the web public or private? The answer in practice is that the web is what ever the service provider needs it to be, which is a shitty answer and why these kinds of problems are present in the first place. The answer to these problems is also simple, but likely more aggressive than Facebook would prefer.

Bingo.

This is fundamentally an issue of what rules apply to modern spaces where the masses congregate and interact.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#242

Post by intended »

rocqua wrote: post #212
morley wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In a…

The loss of privacy is needed for the microtargeting used in misinformation campaigns. It is exactly FBs profiles that allowed targeted ads for fear mongering, conspiracy theories, perhaps even school shooting victims. Similarly, Google's profiles help push people to 'engaging' content on YouTube. It just so happens that extreme claims (anorexia is good, x was a conspiracy, group y is inferior) happen to be very enga…

Playing devils advocate here, i want to build my understanding out further.

My question is: So what?

If we have good privacy laws tomorrow (assume temporary magic), how does that do anything but change the modus operandi of manipulation?

wait for a large event, and then flash your ads. Similar to pre internet behavior, true. But it’s still at internet scale, and you could target via groups right?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#243

Post by rjf72 »

morley wrote: post #49
marcrosoft wrote: post #17

The four points being: * harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your acc…

I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In a…

The ability to generate echo chambers at scale is a direct product of the loss of privacy, even if generally voluntary in this case. Now regardless of how extreme your personal views may be, you can find a group to affiliate with where you'll probably be pretty much a moderate. This in turn drives further extremism as people fall out of touch with reality and slide further down their own distorted world view - left, right, white, black, man, woman -- it's happening to people of all persuasions.

The problem is that most people are more comfortable around people that they identify with. This naturally trends towards echo chambers as people gravitate towards 'similar' others. And this is probably unstoppable. Companies rapidly accelerated the process of it by doing everything they possibly could to drive "engagement" but in the digital age you're not going to be able to stop people from forming 'like minded' groups, regardless of whatever rules and regulations somebody might try to dream up.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#244

Post by C14L »

marcrosoft wrote: post #17

The four points being: * harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your acc…

> data portability

This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them.

They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else.

Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like.

Real competition.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#246

Post by ravenstine »

cjhopman wrote: post #226
ravenstine wrote: post #110

The internet doesn't need more rules, it needs less centralization. Mark Zuckerberg wants more rules because his product doesn't scale in the free market. Such a centralized form of communication can only regulate its content via draconian policy or overzealous algorithms, which ironically turn it into a platform that is hardly worth using. People liked Facebook because it had fun stuff on it. When you make your plat…

> it needs less centralization That's a nice sounding platitude. It'd be fucking terrible for privacy and data protection, though.

I didn't say complete decentralization, just less centralization than where we are heading. I am not even talking decentralized servers here, just a greater variety of choices with more anonymity. I don't see how that is any less secure than trusting Zuckerberg or Google.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#247

Post by quadrangle »

in_hindsight wrote: post #186
quadrangle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a rational actor who also somehow doesn't actually get it in a broad sense. Consider Kara Swisher's interview with him on Recode Decode… or Doug Rushkoff (Team Human book/podcast etc) wondered publicly if part of the problem was how Zuck dropped out of college. Rushkoff speculated about all these deeper philosophical, economic, political, humanism, etc. courses that might have got Zuck to actually get a more mat…

Zuck may not be the role model when for tech theorists, but Rushkoff is just empty - that’s coming from hearing him talk and answer questions live

or maybe you just didn't get what Rushkoff was saying, the way I'm describing Zuck not really getting what Kara Swisher was saying.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#248

Post by quadrangle »

_mog1 wrote: post #215
quadrangle wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Roger McNamee is now excellently describing, the solution might be the sort of regulation Zuck does not want: regulation that makes it illegal to even get/gather/have a huge portion of all the data they amass. Do note: Facebook doesn't sell data directly, they use it to sell ads. They actually buy data so that they can get more insights than what they get from only their own direct tracking.

> regulation that makes it illegal to even get/gather/have a huge portion of all the data they amass. Like gdpr on steroids? I think this would ruin a lot of companies and make a lot of really interesting and useful services no longer possible... but I'm rather curious what it would really mean. I've never seen it proposed by someone who actually recognized what it would mean, though.

It would make entire classes of dangerous but also potentially useful companies illegal. The same way that we don't currently get to experience all the potential that is blocked because of privacy rules around medical records.

At the very least, there's been no societal consensus that we want the trade-offs that come from allowing every click, view, email, and contact to be scanned and used for profit in whatever ways companies want. It happened by pure assertion: the companies just did it and did all they could to avoid even letting people actually know so they wouldn't have to ask.

Maybe we overall would rather lose all the benefits in order to block the harms and dangers.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#249

Post by bryan_w »

sixothree wrote: post #103
Angostura wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important. Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?

> Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. Persuasion works and can be bought with money. It would be naive to think any of us in this thread are immune to persuasion.

This reply doesn't persuade me to belive that persuasion works, thus proving that people can't be arbitrary persuaded into ideas that they don't agree with.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

#250

Post by [deleted] »

kacamak wrote: post #231
simonjgreen wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't? Please elaborate.

Not the original comment poster, but control over people is probably becoming if not already worth more than the ad business. Facebook is not a small entity, they have overthrown governments and caused civil wars in third countries already.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN