Facebook's PR feels broken

>> Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.?

> I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific policies proactively so that it doesn't find itself in the same position it found itself in 2016, as it reacted to candidates and third parties using the platform in ways that hadn't been anticipated.

> If Bosworth is calling for an "internal debate over whether we should have a free and fair election in the U.S.", it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms, radio and television studios all across the country.

This seems a bit illogical to me. Facebook is a platform that enables sophisticated communication, for anyone who chooses to to use it. I don't see how the opinion that Trump "got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser" in any way implies that the election wasn't either free or fair.

Let's rewind to 2008:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...

>>> Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

>>> As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition.

>>> The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office.

Obama seems to have had an advantage in 2008 - was that "unfair"?

If the capabilities within the Facebook platform, that are available to everyone, are deemed to be harmful to democracy, then so be it, but claims that it is unfair, or should somehow have no effect, seem way off the mark to me.

It's one of the simplest rule of a State hostile to its citizens: the more you control information, the stronger the leash. The tighter your hold. And if cruelty is on the menu, the worse it can get with more, better, faster information.

So I thought, when Facebook really took off, "people do this now because there's this fad, this dopamine of novelty, but surely soon enough it'll recede" and I was damn wrong.

I also thought, "oh but governments with half-decent minds will undoubtedly choose to increase protection for citizens, enact "digital rights" to further the reach of the sanctity of one's "home territory" to internet, a "digital democracy" in terms of infrastructure rules so to speak, and again I was dead wrong — they're doing it the exact opposite direction, proving that the concepts were not lunatic and very much implementable, but as it turns out in the form of "digital authoritarianism".

So yeah, I'm the usual optimistic about most things, even the worst like climate change; but in this case, I know no example in history to disprove this assumption: in the current context, if any major western country falls into dictatorship / totalitarianism / etc, it may get very dark very fast. The powers of such a modern incarnation of extreme regimes would be, well, unprecendented, and that's kind of understating orders of magnitude in scale.