[FabHK]

> “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend,” Zuckerberg writes.

Excuse me, what? As an advertising company, you don't ensure the integrity of a sovereign nation's election. You can at most abstain from unduly interfering with it (and of course you should, it's not particularly laudable or supererogatory).

[mortenjorck]

  Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we 
  can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional 
  object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the 
  three-dimensional world we recognize.

This is an incredible bit of prose. It reads like a description of some kind of future mega-corporation from a Gibson novel, and it's mind-bending to contemplate that we really do live in that universe.

[Stratoscope]

Mobile friendly:

> Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.

[bobwaycott]

> Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.

Formatted for mobile readers.

[xkcd-sucks]

Global companies have operated outside the bounds of meaningful communication for hundreds of hears at least. For example, the owners of the East India company or the Hudson's bay company didn't really know what was going on in the colonies

[__MatrixMan__]

He elaborates a bit later on the properties of this object. What a sentence:

    But what had been presented as a democratic town hall was
    revealed to be a densely interwoven collection of parallel
    media ecosystems and political infrastructures outside the
    control of mainstream media outlets and major political 
    parties and moving like a wrecking ball through both.

[Stratoscope]

Oh my, do I have to do yet another "mobile friendly" reply? Maybe I should write a Mobile Quote Bot. :-)

> But what had been presented as a democratic town hall was revealed to be a densely interwoven collection of parallel media ecosystems and political infrastructures outside the control of mainstream media outlets and major political parties and moving like a wrecking ball through both.

Tip to HN commenters: don't indent block quotes and break them up into lines. That is for code formatting, and it makes the quote hard to read on a mobile device.

Instead, put the quote all on one line in this format without indenting it:

  > *Quote here.*

Or the quote can be on multiple lines (newlines and spaces are interchangeable), as long as the lines are not indented. Just add the > and * at the beginning, and another * at the end. This will put the quote in a reasonable format that works both on desktop and mobile browsers.

If the quote consists of multiple paragraphs, I like to follow the above formatting for each paragraph separately. Put a blank line between each paragraph so they don't run together.

And then be sure to check the format after commenting. It should look like the quote near the beginning of this comment. If it doesn't look right, edit to fix it. And no, you do not need to add an "Edit: fixed formatting" note. That would be silly, just fix the thing.

HN's comment formatting options are rather meager, so this is about the best we can do.

Thanks!

[dredmorbius]

I've just requested that HN formalise this as a specific guideline.

I'd rather see either the CSS fixed (to pre-wrap or whatever the directive is), or actually have real motherlovin' blockquote support. But I'm not holding my breath.

(Lists would be another nice add. Markdown...)

[__MatrixMan__]

Sorry about that. I figured that the post I was replying to had done it for a reason that I didn't understand, so I mimicked it. I'll keep your advice in mind in the future.

[Stratoscope]

No worries, and no apology needed! It gave me an excuse to post some general advice on quoting, so that's all good.

[panarky]

This is one of the best articles I've read recently.

Another recent article that I can't stop thinking about also covered the malign naïveté of Facebook -- "Zuckerberg's Preposterous Defense of Facebook" by Zeynep Tufecki [0].

The entire thing is so well reasoned it's hard to choose just one snip, but here's one:

For those of us who are tolerant of a wide range of ideas and arguments, but would still like deception and misinformation to not have such an easy foothold in society, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments do not inspire hope...

Since Facebook has no effective competition, we can look forward only to being lectured on being more tolerant of "ideas" we don’t like, and to smug talk of the false equivalency of "both sides."

By the way, thank you for "supererogatory", I didn't know there was a word for "good but not morally required to be done".

[0] http://archive.is/PGt1E

[FabHK]

There was an episode of Sam Harris' Waking Up podcast with Zeynep, good introduction to her thinking:

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and-contro...

(BTW, regarding "supererogatory" = "good even beyond what's required" - awesome word, isn't it, and I've been looking for an opportunity to drop it into a sentence :-)

[odiroot]

You may be right here.

At most he/they took sides and interfered.

On the other hand it's hard to enforce election silence on social networks.

[31reasons]

I think Facebook should not be allowed to advertise anything other than commercial products/services. It should not be a platform for propaganda.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Where do you draw the line? If I share something political, am I advertising? If I can't share it, which topics am I forbidden from discussing exactly?

What if I only saw this political article because someone else promoted it? What if was one-sided or even false? How does Facebook detect that?

There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook" or twitter, while allowing people to talk politics.

[zzalpha]

This is a perfect example of the nirvana fallacy.

Advertising on Facebook is a specific, paid mechanism for delivering messages to an identified target audience segment, that is completely distinct from their social content sharing features. Heck, you might not remember it, but there was a time when there was no advertising on Facebook at all.

Regulating that specific mechanism is well within the purview of the FEC, and can be done without interfering with the ability of Facebook users to share content with their own network of connections.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Well, that would _slow down_ fake news a bit. That's all.

[zzalpha]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Do I need to mention the nirvana fallacy again? ;)

Maybe I'll phrase it differently: don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Slowing down fake news is a good thing, and nothing is perfect, which was rather my point too. The grandparent poster states that "(facebook) should not be a platform for propaganda", an absolute statement implying that it is desirable to keep _all_ "propaganda" off facebook (it might be, assuming you can define propaganda) and that it is also reasonably possible to do so (a lot less likely).

I take the point about paid ads, but that does not cover all of "propaganda" any more.

[27182818284]

The grandparent's reaction is a bit unkempt.

I suggest that it is very possible that Facebook, with its access to something like 1 billion MAUs, needs to be regulated, and regulated possibly differently than companies before it. The FEC has some rules for political ads with respect to the Internet, but I am in favor of revisiting those to see what rules need to be established for the greater good of the public

>There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook"

It appears that Russians bought $100,000 worth of ads, so that is some place to start looking that is wholly different than a discussion on politics of users.

[walru]

So is $100,000 worth of ads enough to sway an election? Because I have stats claiming nobody clicks on ads.

[27182818284]

Indeed it does seem cheap. They don't have to click on them, though. They don't have to log in and take out their CC to be effective. Neither do political TV ads and other older media. It wasn't enough to win the popular vote, but could it have been enough to change some folks' minds in swing states where the EC gives them more weight? Maybe yeah. Maybe enough that the feds are looking at the Facebook ad buys.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Fake news does not look like ads, and if targeted to receptive individuals, it gets retweeted/fb-shared to a like-minded audience. The comparison with "nobody clicks on ads" is not apt.

[Crespyl]

The things election ads are selling don't need clicks to recoup the investment.

[orevidence]

or evidence showing what their impact is, apparently. let’s just intuit it!

[davesque]

I can imagine a lot of ways this could be done ethically. Maybe they tried to keep the bot activity to a minimum. Maybe they kept a lookout for non-German (and especially Russian) accounts trying to buy political ads. Either way, I think it ought to be pretty clear that the free market, hands off approach doesn't work.

[owebmaster]

> Maybe they kept a lookout for non-German (and especially Russian) accounts trying to buy political ads

This is HEAVY intervention. Specially if it is more specifically to "russian".

[davesque]

I don't think we can have much of a conversation here. I simply believe that foreign nationals shouldn't take out ads to influence the elections of countries in which they're not a citizen. If we can't agree on this, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. And, just in case anyone tries to counter with a "pot calling the kettle" argument, I don't care if the US government has ever tried to influence the elections of other countries. I don't think that's ethical either.

So, just to restate my position, if what Facebook meant by upholding the integrity of elections amounted to preventing foreign nationals (non-Germans) from buying political ads on their platform, I'm all for it.

[owebmaster]

> I simply believe that foreign nationals shouldn't take out ads to influence the elections of countries in which they're not a citizen. If we can't agree on this, then we'll just have to agree to disagree

I totally agree with it! Now I ask you, do you agree? Because US institutions bought a lot of political ads in the past years when the Brazilian government was overthrow. Now guess which side did these institutions support? :)

[davesque]

Read my previous comment.

[Larrikin]

Good?