Zuckerberg is a safe pair of hands. We can trust him with our data.
Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
41–50 of 101 posts
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but I don't see how that's a good thing. Many groups near me have moved exclusively to Facebook meaning I'm essentially locked out from participating in them. Previously stuff like this would have been organized through a mailing list or maybe a BBS. Facebook taking this over means that you have to allow them spying on you to take part in basic social activities.
But that is the point. It's a feature, not a bug, to filter out anyone who is not willing to click through a license agreement for the sake of participating in the community. Such an individual is antisocial.
Before HIV and AIDS, heroin addicts who didn't fancy the ideas to share a needle were also considered antisocial.
Anywho, I'm still waiting for their Lifepoint feature to be implemented
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#43We might disagree with Zuckerberg about the specific consequences, but as far as the headline goes he's mostly right. Social media is a new thing, and trying to use existing regulatory frameworks for it, like those for telcos and newspapers, will lead to us all having a bad time. Where I disagree, or at least am uncertain, is that the right regulatory framework for social media lies on some kind of straight line betw…
Can you elaborate a bit on how anyone "but" Facebook has a bad time by applying the existing regulatory frameworks? You mention itsy-bitsy start-up boards, but really none of the concerns being address in courts world wide have anything to do with minor boards and everything to do with Facebook's lack of control over their advertisers, the amount of information being shared out to said advertisers, their position as…
I feel that I should not have to justify the idea that applying laws designed around a certain set of assumptions, in a situation that violates those assumptions, is likely to produce bad outcomes. I feel that this should be the default belief. But since you asked so nicely...
The case of treating FB as a telco is obvious: no accountability. I think we're agreed that this is no good.
A news outlet (a) explicitly has their credibility on the line with regard to their output and (b) is very selective in what they publish (for better or worse). Neither of these is really the case for Facebook. For a given link, only the poster's and linkee's credibility is on the line. Facebook defaults to allowing posts, and is only somewhat selective in what it allows and promotes. If this means Facebook is legally equivalent to the New York Times, then so are HN, reddit, Pinterest, etc. Treating FB as a new agency requires all of these sites to take responsibility for the opinions of all of their users. This will discourage medium-sized sites where hand-moderation (doable for small forums) is just becoming infeasible, and more importantly have a chilling effect on people's online activity, because you'll never quite know when the admins of the site you're posting on, or their robotic minions, will panic about your controversial link. Better for them to delete your post just in case they get in trouble with the law, and maybe better for you to not bother and stay silent. This is also no good.
Of course that's just one scenario. Details may differ across the multiverse. But one thing that doesn't change is that basing policy on something other than reality always finds a way to go wrong.
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#44Treat Facebook like a website. It's just a website. It's not so important that it needs a special designation. I think it makes sense to come up with data and privacy laws that apply to all companies, not just Facebook.
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think Facebook wants to control content, it’s hard, expensive, and hurts their reputation. It’s users and governments complaining that forces them into that game.
Of course FB wants to control content. It helps them increase engagement and also monetise.
There are couple different kinds of "controlling the content". Facebook does want to promote certain things, i.e. make them easier to find, but it doesn't really want to delete or block things entirely, which is what I think GP was talking about.
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#46Isn’t that the very problem with Facebook, that it wants to impartially serve content like a telco, but partially control the content like a newspaper?
I don’t think Facebook wants to control content, it’s hard, expensive, and hurts their reputation. It’s users and governments complaining that forces them into that game.
I think data and metadata is a good analogy. They don't want to control the end content (the data), but want to route users to the content that is engaging (the metadata, aka knowing the users prefs and knowing what content meets those prefs).
Argued to the extreme, there could be infinite variations of content that you could route users to, and the routing algorithm is so good that it effectively 'controls the content' by selecting which exact content to route to, even though technically speaking they are not controlling the content.
This kind of hairsplitting is basically the 'have cake, eat it too' situation.
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#47Im going to treat them like the yellow pages, i.e. never use one again and explain what it was to my kids.
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#48wondering if this could pave the road for treating internet service as a utility too
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#49Newspapers have now accountability.
Re: Treat Facebook like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Zuckerberg
#50Isn’t that the very problem with Facebook, that it wants to impartially serve content like a telco, but partially control the content like a newspaper?
I don’t think Facebook wants to control content, it’s hard, expensive, and hurts their reputation. It’s users and governments complaining that forces them into that game.
I don't think Facebook wants anything, as it is simply an abstract legal concept. Employees and shareholders of Facebook are the ones to watch. They were the first movers on the totally not coordinated Alex Jones shunning. Youtube had previously struck a video or two, but Facebook was the first to bring down the ban hammer. Days later Jones was banned from every other major platform - with Twitter being the single exception.