[pixelgeek]

What can be done to rein in Facebook?

Nothing.

Either shut it down or live with the impact but the time to 'do something' about Facebook was a long time ago. Before legislators in the US let it become this surveillance behemoth. Before it became a massive ad network.

Reining it in also presumes that legislative methods will work. I think it is already clear that they don't.

Shut it down.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Reining it in also presumes that legislative methods will work. I think it is already clear that they don't.

How is it clear? What legislation has been attempted?

The simplest legislation--I could fit it on a page--would be to ban M&A by social media companies over a certain size and force break-ups of past mergers that would have violated that restriction had it been in place since, I don't know, February 4, 2004.

[pixelgeek]

They are still operating under an FTC order that they effectively ignore.

They were fined and they deliberately took a bigger fine to protect their CEO.

They ignored calls for their CEO to appear before parliament in the UK and Canada. Ignored.

I am not fully aware of the state of legislative action in the UK from the Cambridge/Brexit issue but that hasn't gone anywhere.

They are far too large to be legislated. They have too much money to fine. What possible options other than shutting the company down exist that Facebook wouldn't either pay with their 'spare change' fund or bury with lobbyists?

[Clubber]

They donated $8M to US political campaigns in 2020. Everything else is just theater.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/facebook-inc/totals?id=D000...

[judge2020]

> They ignored calls for their CEO to appear before parliament in the UK and Canada. Ignored.

They're playing hardball. They know the only way these other countries can do anything, even with legislation that FB would ignore, is by either blocking the website (which would encourage the silent majority to suddenly speak up and would hurt the decision maker's chances of re-election) or sanctioning the US, which nobody is going to do.

[phone[phone]]

They could "extraordinarily rendition" the everloving shit out of Zuck - that might change Facebook's tune.

[JumpCrisscross]

> too large to be legislated

You haven't cited any legislation.

The FTC is not powerful enough to regulate Facebook; the U.K. and Canada were snubbed by them--agreed. But none of that is legislation.

(To be clear, Facebook is more powerful than some legislatures. But not the Congress. Not by a long shot.)

[pixelgeek]

> You haven't cited any legislation.

Because I didn't reference any. I mentioned 'legislators' and not legislation.

[missedthecue]

What about Facebook is made better if they spin off Instagram and WhatsApp? What changes about them? They still have 2B monthly active users. Instagram and WhatsApp will be run by the same people with the same goals, the W2s will just say Instagram Inc. instead of Facebook Inc.

I don't think your problem with Facebook is that they bought a few companies.

[zo1]

I think we let them get too big and now the discussion will very much revolve around the capital, value, industries and "jobs" that will be affected by a FB or social media ban or some other legislation.

You can't even effectively "mobilize" the populace for some sort of popular movement against social media because most of that sort of thing these days can only happen on social media. It's not even like we can have a revolution with 50k people and storm FB headquarters and "physically" stop the behemoth. It's headless for the most part. And good luck getting 50k people even. Pretty much All the platforms will stop you before you get anywhere because of "threats of violence".

[psychlops]

> Let it become this surveillance behemoth

I would point out that businesses should not be a privilege allowed to exist by legislators or allowed to grow to a certain size by the same.

Second, I'd suggest that having large centralized organizations can only benefit legislatures as they have few sources to work with when either requesting data or bringing them to speak in front of Congress for yet another show trial.