[flexie]

Facebook has "no clue what kind of stuff gets posted" because they conveniently have decided to have no clue.

Facebook enjoys the protection of its IPR and the right to sell advertisement overseas in places like New Zealand or Europe. Why should New Zealand or Europe allow their business model of close to zero oversight of content? Facebook is not a startup. It's a huge company making billions showing ads to billions.

[timomax]

Exactly. There is no cult of "free speech" in Europe. We will just block such sites if they don't reform.

[raxxorrax]

Mabe this is a reason it isn't popular?

Edit: nor competative. For that matter.

[orf]

Europe as a whole is neither competitive nor popular (?) because they don't ascribe to the USA's view on free speech?

[raxxorrax]

In the market of digital services, Europe is as good as non-existent. Maybe I can come up with one or two names in the top 20 of the most successful software enterprises.

And those are probably already dinosaurs compared to most recent developments on that market.

Europe is exceptionally bad at creating their own services. Maybe because it is just too convenient to use American ones or that there isn't really any venture capital available here. But the fact remains.

Subjectively, it seems we often also lack the openness for new ideas compared to America, especially around older generations.

Europe doesn't even know the significance of freedom right know. Not taking the right decision is often less important than owning it yourself. Americans seem to get that. Most of the time at least.

[thefounder]

You forget that Europe has been ruined by WW2. It's dependence of US(military and technologically) has always been part of the plan.

Europe is also very fragmented and there was hope the EU could fix that but Brexit and other internal and external factors(i.e Russia, China, Tump's policy etc) seem oppose a cohesive, united Europe for obvious reasons.

It has little to nothing to do with "openness" for new ideas. It's more about a chain of unfortunate events.

What does Huawei dominance in 5G and its ban has to do with "openness" or new ideas?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/15/trump-nat...

[robbick]

*Or more likely, heavily fine

[Meekro]

New Zealand has a senior government position non-ironically named "Chief Censor." They don't even pretend to have free speech, and certainly don't get to lecture anyone on moral bankruptcy.

[stale2002]

Well hopefully other internet services will engage in the same behavior against Europe.

I wonder how many billions of dollars in damages would be done to them, if Google, or Wikipedia, or GitHub started blocking traffic to their.

[factsaresacred]

How do you reform a billion-person platform to detect a suicide attempt in real-time?

There's much wrong with Facebook but blaming them for not preventing the actions of their users at the moment those actions take place is moronic.

[boomlinde]

Frankly, that should be their problem. Maybe billion-person platforms are altogether not morally scalable?

[ivanhoe]

If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment. You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today. And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?

[boomlinde]

> If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment.

Should we let the technical infeasibility of them profitably solving a problem that they themselves have created be our moral compass?

> You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today.

The point IMO is not to assign blame. It's to create legislation for the betterment of society. You can agree or disagree that it would be better, but don't reduce it to a blame game.

> And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?

As I said, as far as I'm concerned, that's their problem. You implement the legal framework necessary to uphold a desirable moral standard and let that have its effect on the market. In those terms it's irrelevant how Facebook fares.

And no, this is not fundamentally a problem of human nature. Millions-to-billion user social networks have only been a problem for a brief moment of human history. Much like other problems throughout history it might go away some day. Not by itself, but by systematically working on improving the human condition.

[drderidder]

Exactly. At the very least, they shouldn't be monetizing content they haven't vetted.