Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

Might blacklist their site with a content blocker if they are indeed hijacking the back button.

If you'll allow, I'll use a political example from 15+ years ago.

When young Bush was running for president, you'd see commentators on TV talking about which candidate had some demographic. Such-and-such had the 50+ white male vote, so-and-so had the hispanic vote, and so on.

These people did not know what they were talking about, but it made for good TV. The people who knew what they were talking about, the folks like Karl Rove, knew that today they were looking to talk about subject X in context Y to a certain type of voter described by several adjectives in precinct 7 of the south side of Columbia, SC.

Pick a word that describes a social problem, say homelessness. There's not one homelessness, there's a dozen or more, each with their own qualities. There's people who are the victim of a disaster, people who have medical bills, people with addiction problems, people living in poverty on purpose for religious reasons, etc. Not only do the reasons vary, the possible solutions vary by personality, demographic, geographic location and resources, and so on.

Your response to my point demonstrates the problem. We talk about social problems in grand and expansive terms because we have to. Otherwise we'd spend forever in analysis. Politicians get elected based on grand visions for social problems expressed in expansive terms. But the actual problems themselves are highly nuanced. So what you're suggesting is that we throw everybody worldwide into one bucket, stick a label on them, and attempt to help them. That's only going to be a workable solution in only the most simple cases. In fact it's not workable. I'm being kind.

Worse, for all of the cases where it doesn't help, you've just given over a monopoly of ideas, labels, and solutions to some company that's beholden to nobody, Facebook. So what will happen, what is happening now, is that people looking to exploit problems are working at the very detailed level. Right now there's probably some scammer looking to target 70+ white females in Sioux City Iowa who voted for Bernie last time. That guy is going to exploit the hell out of his target. There are thousands of targets like this. But when we identify the problem, all we get is how great it is to have some universal solution to addiction or something.

Yes, in grand terms wouldn't it be great to have some solution to X? I'd love it. But that's not how these kinds of solutions work. What we're doing is enabling the people with bad intent to have their way while justifying it all with promises of how huge categories of people might be helped. That's bullshit, and it's the kind of bullshit we've put up with for far too long from SV, making money with one hand while giving out platitudes with another, trusting on the complexity of the application to hide what's really happening from the average voter. It's only continuing. Now, however, we're going to take it to the next level, regulatory capture.