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

Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

doctorow.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#51

Post by dcow »

simonh wrote: post #49
dcow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don’t ban by name like that. A start might be to say: it is illegal both run a content platform and also to profit from the sale of targeted ads on your platform. Or simply but more radically: you cannot use user data collected in the operation of a software platform in order to target advertisements to your users. The goal would be to ban the bad incentives by eliminating the ability to profit. Yes that kills…

I'm not suggesting by name, I just had no idea which platforms you think your law would target. Banning using user data to target adds is a lot more specific and actionable. That would hurt facebook and Twitter's revenue quite badly, but it would do nothing at all to stop the toxic effects of facebook particularly. My main problem with facebook isn't targeted adds, yes I'm against their toxic attitude to privacy but…

I guess the hypothesis is that they engage in that behavior exactly because their business depends on driving up engagement so they’ll go as far as to, as you say, show people content that pisses them off so they’ll spend an extra hour as a keyboard warrior and hopefully see an ad in there. I don’t think those incentives exist for e.g a paid phonebook.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#52

Post by shukantpal »

echelon wrote: post #13
Qi_ wrote: post #4

The author seems to be filled with a sense of “knight-in-shining-armor-ism.” If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it. He calls Zuckerberg a "pope-emperor" of Facebook's users, but that's because the users choose to give him power. If the users stop choosing to give him power, he loses it.

> If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it. Just like sugary soda, loot crates, cigarettes, and opium then? Companies design products that are bad for people all the time. > Zuck: they “trust me” > Zuck: dumb fucks This was said after his AOL hacking days [1], so he already had a certain predisposition towards "ordinary people". Given that his history and his pre…

I don’t see your counter argument. People eat sugar because they want to. If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t eat sugar and no one is forcing them to.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#53

Post by livueta »

dasil003 wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

> Regulating tech is a great idea (assuming the regulations are thoughtful and productive, of course), I’m not nearly as enthusiastic for these calls to bring heavy regulation on to the tech industry. Articles like this have a hypothetical ideal mental image of regulations that will punish only the bad guys while protecting themselves and the content they like. There’s also an implicit assumption that regulation will…

Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create unintended distortions at best, and new innovation-killing moats at worst. But we have to try. As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. Existing regulation and agency structure is completely unsuitable for the world we live in today. So far tech ha…

> As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations.

I don't think this is exactly true. There have been many words written about the effectiveness of technological countermeasures vs. regulation, but I think the proof is in the pudding: Facebook wouldn't go nuclear against Unfollow Everything if it didn't work (i.e. tilt the balance of power back towards the end-user). Google wouldn't be trying the whole manifest v3 shenanigans if they weren't concerned about content blockers.

But here, as Doctorow points out, _regulation_ stands in the way of these effective technological countermeasures. I think that the apparent slowdown of technological disruption and creative destruction you reference has at least some grounding in the increasing use and chilling effect of applying IP law against adversarial interop, rather than some inherent limit of attention or hardware.

So, I agree with the parent in bring surprised by the combo of Doctorow's insightful analysis around the Unfollow Everything debacle and a call for additional regulation via existing agencies. I'm not as hopeful as you that younger staffers will bring some kind of renaissance of enlightened regulation - consider how popular the "let's make Facebook ban the nazis" take appears to be across generational divides.

To sum up, I'm afraid that anything we pass now is going to be a lot closer to the DMCA, in terms of how it protects corporate interests over individual rights, than the sort of utopian wishlist that is usually quoted as an ideal.

On a positive note: I've recently been interested by some of the electoral successes of the Czech Pirate Party (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party) and wonder if the way forward for internet rights is to tie the idea to a broader campaign for transparent, effective, and highly democratic governance.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#54

Post by to1y »

cute_boi wrote: post #18
joshgel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like cigarettes? I have no sense of whether FB is physically addictive like smoking. But, if a company directly contributes to decline in civil discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users, then isn't it a government role to step in? And isn't this the governments role even if users can't see the harm at the micro-level of their daily interactions with the company? I guess that is the argument at least.…

Facebook is addictive tbh. I heard they hired some prominent psychologist to make it more addictive. My mother is surely addicted to facebook. She knows all data implications but she enjoys getting likes/shares etc. And fake news etc which is intentionally specious make the platform even more enjoyable. I can't tell her to stop facebook and I am sure it is harming her right? Yes this is government role but as with ev…

>I heard they hired some prominent psychologist to make it more addictive.

This is basically what the argument to ban it amounts to whenever this discussion comes up.

Facebook is a simple site, there's nothing to it really. It's just an endless mediocre content website that happens to have your friends on it.

Good user experience = "designed to be addictive by army of ill-wishing psychologists."

The only reason id like to see it banned just so something better can finally take it's place

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#55

Post by 8note »

sokoloff wrote: post #46
erentz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to mean giving anyone power? We could for example enact privacy laws that make it illegal to share personal data. That gives no one power, and takes away power from corporations. We could enact laws that prevent targeted advertising, which would make it pointless to gather a lot of the data they gather in the first place. That doesn’t make the bad politician any more powerful. So on.

I estimate that laws to prevent all forms of targeting advertising serve to protect incumbents (both corporate and political incumbents). That makes incumbent politicians more powerful (in relative terms).

Specifically they serve to protect consumers. They might also protect incumbents, at least ones that don't have targetted advertising, but they're still in service of the consumer

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#56

Post by 8note »

sokoloff wrote: post #8
jboy55 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control of the regulations. I think the real issue is that people live in black holes of misinformation on the internet because that is where they want to be. When I look at the many Herman Cain Award threads on reddit, it seems the predominate original source of most posts is groups that the user signed up for. This isn't new, before Facebook, there were usenet…

> Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control of the regulations. Exactly this! Every time I see someone proposing some new expansion of government reach and power, it seems to be considered only from the angle of “just think of what the (people I think of as the) good guys could do with this increased authority!” “Yeah, but what could the bad guys do with this increased authority? Because as sure…

I don't think the bad guys would respect the law's limit anyways.

The not-very-bad bad guy seems like a werid group to optimize for.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#57

Post by sershe »

dcow wrote: post #29
Qi_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean? Facebook is a company and therefore its success and failure is dependent on its customers/users, right?

It seem you don’t understand the economics of this situation. Facebook makes money from ad partners not users. Users are not paying Facebook for the software. People who want to run ads are. There is no market for newsfeed software here. Only a market for user attention. Because FB made a creepy tool 15 years ago they won some users and have an established base they can market to. People using it these days do so bec…

The gp does say users-slash-customers, usually meaning "or".

There were social media platforms before them that lost despite the network effects, and there are platforms that have appeared after them that gained a ton of users despite the lock-in (some of which they have bought, which is in my view the only thing about them that should be amenable to regulation). EDIT: based on TFA and only tangentially relevant to this thread/the moral crusade, making sure online tools can be modified/scraped/etc. in any normal way is something else I would regulate. EDIT2: based on the rabbit hole of anti-FB articles, what is needed is more of a DE-regulation, removing or significantly narrowing the scope the of the laws FB uses to threaten developers. It's not that modifying a webpage is not protected, it's that it can explicitly be construed as illegal, in part because of the previous moral crusades.

The users derive some value from Facebook. I'd rather we didn't have holier-than-thou people regulate every pastime they don't like... reminds me of moral panics over everything from video games to weed.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#58

Post by jboy55 »

erentz wrote: post #45
sokoloff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control of the regulations. Exactly this! Every time I see someone proposing some new expansion of government reach and power, it seems to be considered only from the angle of “just think of what the (people I think of as the) good guys could do with this increased authority!” “Yeah, but what could the bad guys do with this increased authority? Because as sure…

Why does it have to mean giving anyone power? We could for example enact privacy laws that make it illegal to share personal data. That gives no one power, and takes away power from corporations. We could enact laws that prevent targeted advertising, which would make it pointless to gather a lot of the data they gather in the first place. That doesn’t make the bad politician any more powerful. So on.

That is saying the misinformation comes from companies gaming the news feeds and not the people choosing friends, influencers or groups of the former that re-enforce their feelings of victimhood?

I mean are we upset at targeted ads, or the sea of misinformation and biases that are fostered by social media? The seeds of which are often political AM radio and TV news networks.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#59

Post by dcow »

sershe wrote: post #57
dcow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seem you don’t understand the economics of this situation. Facebook makes money from ad partners not users. Users are not paying Facebook for the software. People who want to run ads are. There is no market for newsfeed software here. Only a market for user attention. Because FB made a creepy tool 15 years ago they won some users and have an established base they can market to. People using it these days do so bec…

The gp does say users- slash -customers, usually meaning "or". There were social media platforms before them that lost despite the network effects, and there are platforms that have appeared after them that gained a ton of users despite the lock-in (some of which they have bought, which is in my view the only thing about them that should be amenable to regulation). EDIT: based on TFA and only tangentially relevant to…

It is illegal in most of the rest of the world to advertise/market prescription drugs specifically because it causes undesirable outcomes where patients are telling their doctors what to prescribe, which is backwards. And drugs still exist in those countries. I don’t think anybody is saying “make Facebook illegal”. The ask is to deeply explore our understanding of ad-based social media and consider whether such machines have any place in a healthy society. Facebook or some equivalent would still exist if you curtailed ad-profits, I don’t really understand the scare/worry that all our good internet things would just vanish if we clamped down on the harmful business model… Every law is a moral value judgement on the type of society we want to participate in (unless you’re an absolutist). I think your moral panic examples are generally unfounded concerns. I would have agreed with you 10 years ago that Facebook panic is also FUD. However I think we have clear a history of examples of harm to go off of now with FB. We clamped down on the Tobacco industry and it wasn't just holier than thou zealots having a field day as fun ruiners. Real harm lead to real legislation. We just need to realize things as they are and stop pretending that FB newsfeed style social machines are benign especially in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. I totally agree with your “I would rather” in the general sense. I simply think there’s a specific case here that warrants scrutiny.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#60

Post by proc0 »

> That’s how you distinguish between good mods and bad mods — by passing democratically accountable laws that tell us what we are and are not entitled to.

Government involvement would worsen the problem by a million. I'm also tired of tip-toeing around what is probably a real conspiracy. That whistleblower could easily be a plant by the government. We already know there isn't balanced political moderation with big tech (they censored the former president), so there's nothing stopping them from trying to expand that control and do so in a transparent, legal way now. They just need an excuse as always.

I'm all for regulating big tech, but if anything it should be other tech companies. Why not have private businesses specializing in content moderation do the regulating? I think there are many solutions that don't involve government, but I suspect they are salivating at the prospect of having full control without the need to pretend they don't. Then these laws will become permanent and it's only two steps away from requiring this as some national profile, but that's another thread.

Post reply on HN