Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

Friction.

> In the example of guns, there are SCREENING (not exactly the same as friction) and education/training that many seem to agree are a good solution. Could the same be applied to social media?

Not really. The analogy between guns and social media is not perfect. Training as a solution has special problems with applied to media access that it doesn't have with guns. Specifically, it would probably amount to some kind of indoctrination program. Gun training is a technical topic, like how to drive a car safely.

>> A somewhat less radical form would be to kneecap the ability to share widely on social media sites: no public posts, sharing limited to direct connections (and a cap the number of those to 1000 or something), no features to easily re-share a post outside of its initial audience, get rid of groups, kick out organizations, etc.

> This is again just letting Facebook dictate the solution - not that much different than the unilateral censorship they do.

Actually, that was me dictating a solution to Facebook that stopped short of shutting them down. I'm pretty sure they'd hate to follow it.

And the important difference is that everything I suggested is content neutral, so it can't accurately be called "censorship."

> Seems like this is happening today, and might be a good approach.

Yes, but if it's happening today, I'd bet money it's mostly people who can handle social media relatively well. The problematic people who probably shouldn't have access to a broadcast megaphone are likely still on Facebook and Twitter and are unlikely to leave.

It's a fair account without a political bent (really hard to find on this topic) and he had a lot of access to FB leadership while writing it. It also gives a lot of historical context.

WRT the specific outreach metrics mentioned in the article - I'd bet the internal discussion is more nuanced. Making that public could make it harder for them to control abuse by making it easier for people to determine how to maximize reach with spammier hacks. This is already a problem without access to the data.

My personal opinion is this is a hard problem at scale and that Zuckerberg genuinely cares about it [0]. That there is some incentive mismatch given the issues around engagement driving ad revenue, but that the speech issues are more complicated and Zuck cares about how they leverage their power around issues of speech. My take on the Trump ban was less that he changed his position and more that the US no longer met the requirements for a hands-off approach after the insurrection.

Rather than rehash the stuff I wrote in the post, here's the relevant bit:

> "If there’s to be policy around political speech and social media, it should not be the responsibility of private companies to determine when to censor or not censor the speech from democratically elected politicians, operating in countries with rule of law and a free press.

> "There are a lot of conditions on that statement, but it’s because the conditions are relevant and important. The same standard cannot be automatically held for politicians in non-democratic countries, countries without rule of law, countries that suppress speech themselves, or countries without a free press."

...

> "It doesn’t mean they’re not doing anything wrong because they’ve long ago abandoned the chronological news feed in favor of an algorithmically sorted news feed focused on engagement. This is decidedly not neutral. Abuse of these engagement algorithms are what allowed spammers to leverage the viral nature of misinformation to enrich themselves. It’s also what gave credibility and reach to the Russian political interference. If Facebook wants to act as a neutral platform for speech, then they should be neutral. If they are elevating certain content algorithmically then they are acting as a publisher. This weakens their argument about being a neutral platform and makes them more responsible for what they choose to elevate on Facebook."

There's probably reasonable policy here - but it's not trivial.

[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...

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