[gfodor]

It’s depressing that criticisms of Facebook now seem to entirely be focused on them not shutting down speech.

At some point, the root issue with Facebook (as identified best by Jaron Lanier) has been lost in the political noise: their business model is one that incentivizes and enables the creation of a global scale surveillance and behavior modification empire. Getting angry that they are not removing content you feel is “dangerous” is the opposite of fixing this: it’s smuggling in the idea they ought to be presumed an arbiter of speech - that arbitration being the key lever of their toxic business model.

If we agree Facebook should be in a position to decide who gets to talk to whom in the modern public square, we are forced to agree they get to monetize that capability, which is their current business model.

[ryandrake]

Facebook is not the public square. It’s not even a public square. It’s not a bulletin board or a newspaper or a telephone. There’s no analog analogy. It’s a site run by a private company that you send content to, they analyze it, then they decide what to publish and in what order. The closest analog thing I can think of is Letters To The Editor in a newspaper. They aren't “deciding who gets to talk” or “shutting down speech.” There are plenty of non-Facebook ways to talk that don’t involve sending your message to them and hoping they decide to post it.

[bostik]

> It’s a site run by a private company that you send content to, they analyze it, then they decide what to publish and in what order.

In other words, they are a syndicator.

In the physical world, syndicators remain accountable for what they publish through through their channels. They are not responsible for the material (given they didn't create or commission it), but they sure as hell carry the responsibility for letting the material propagate.

Incidentally, several years back I was talking to FB after they reached out. Visited their office for an informal chat and got to talk to couple of their senior(ish) engineering managers. I asked if they were doing, or planning to do anything like actually educating the users on their platform once they've identified someone having been subjected to propaganda or misinformation campaign. I said that I could imagine working on that type of project.

It's not often that you see a person physically recoil from an idea. "We don't do that!"

As far as I'm concerned, until FB actively fights not only the propaganda being funnelled through their machine, but also its effects on groups and individuals to undo the damage, the company is beyond redemption.

[vinay_ys]

Mobile App Social Media like FB is more like a micro-reality-tv channel in the form of text/image/short-video posts which are co-"produced" (like a tv show producer) by AI algorithms (in ranking) and yourself (in who you friend/follow) and others in your "network" (what everyone comment/like on more vs less).

Just like tv channels optimize their content for TRP ratings and for ad sales, FB does the same – except its engagement optimization cycle is super-micro and super-fast and super-scalable and its ads are super-cheap and super-granular and super-micro.

Its the same business model followed by newspapers/magazines, other forms of content based attention grabbing and holding mechanism which make money through ads. The older business models are more coarse-grain in everything (cost, price, target size, targeting precision, time-cycles etc) and newer tech-enabled business-models are fine-grain everything.

Obviously, the same old social/behavioral/moral rules that worked (or didn't work, but didn't matter) at coarse-grain/slow-cycle/less-massive/more-local won't work (or needs to work better because it matters at scale!) at fine-grain/fast-cycle/huge/global levels. And the answer isn't obvious.

It is obvious same notions/rules/mechanisms won't scale (like content editorialship/moderation etc).

[rvense]

I agree that there is no good analogy for what Facebook is, because it is different. But I think what people really mean when they say this is that Facebook has largely supplanted those things. This might not be true where you are, or for your specific circle, but it is the case in many places.

Facebook penetration in my country is so complete, I would wager there is absolutely no way to, say, successfully run for public office without at least maintaining an active Facebook page. This is why I say that Facebook must be destroyed. It is not acceptable that some company half the world away, based on American morals and American interests, gets to decide who can and cannot realistically get elected here.

[visarga]

And what will stop the next platform from doing even worse? It's not solving the problem, just passing it forward.

[rvense]

There shouldn't be one platform. Openness and interoperability are key.

[smsm42]

Network effects say it would be at least an oligopoly, just as it is now. Unless the whole system would be rebuilt to explicitly disallow this and counter such effects, but who would build such a system and why would they invest in it, knowing in advance they wouldn't profit from it or even able to control it? It would surely face a huge pressure from all the "we can't allow bad people to speak" crowd, and this crowd owns the government, the academia, the banks and the internet infrastructure now. So what exactly the plan for it to happen?

[visarga]

I'm afraid this will be band for privacy - too many hands in the jar.

[aflkunusu]

what else do you think needs to be destroyed/outlawed?

[rvense]

Passive-aggressive, drive-by internet comments from throw-away accounts.

[fstrthnscnd]

Just "Passive-aggressive, drive-by internet comments" would suffice.

[iammisc]

This is technically true but de facto not. It's like arguing that Ukraine controls Crimea because legally (according to themselves and others) they do.

In my experience when this argument is made, I typically follow it up by "well if it's so unimportant, why don't you delete your account?". 99/100 times I've asked this in real life the person responds by saying, "well I don't have anywhere else to say things" (this is during covid).

For the past two years, social media is the only public square allowed by government fiat. Thus it must be regulated as such.

[Dracophoenix]

I think you're putting the cart before horse with your conclusion. The reason that Facebook has been one of the only freely available discussion zone for the majority of the world isn't because of government, but in spite of it. The government didn't "allow" Facebook as though there is some permission system involved for setting up social media sites. The government is an unable to disallow it by the constitutional limits set by the 1st Amendment.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Somehow I don't think the 1st Amendment protects a corporation's right to track and monitor its users for profit, even when they're not using the corporation's site/app. Or to fine-tune its algorithms to support behaviour modification.

Without the promises made on behalf of FB's tracking tech and the behavioural feedback loops they farm, the social features are basically worthless.

FB's problem isn't a 1st Amendment issue. It's the fact that it lies about the effectiveness of its ad tech to its advertisers, while also attempting to hide the toxicity of its behaviour mod techniques.

And there are too many parts of the world where it has monopoly status on both.

[iammisc]

> The government didn't "allow" Facebook as though there is some permission system involved for setting up social media sites

And that's completely irrelevant to my argument which is that, since Facebook is the only public square by government fiat, it ought to be treated as such regardless of how it got there.

When government exercises eminent domain for the public interest, it does not worry about why it is the house it is seizing was placed there. It just notes that the house is there and then takes proper action to secure it's future aims for public benefit.

[jboy55]

Facebook is not the 'only' public square. Please, that's hyperbole, its not even close. Twitter, ticktok, reddit, snap and this very site are all public squares, with tremendous reach. Most of the video content on FB/Instagram come from TikTok, and in case you forgot the previous admin tried to shut them down because users on it organized against them.

[hairofadog]

> since Facebook is the only public square by government fiat

What?

[lelandfe]

…so by the same logic, as COVID wanes and actual real-life public squares exist again, Facebook won’t need to be regulated?

[iammisc]

Is covid waning? Many states have multiple restrictions still on gathering in public and in private.

[lelandfe]

I suppose I could have said "when" in that future tense sentence, but it definitely will wane at some point from it's current intensity.

[iammisc]

Twenty years from now is when I expect the last of the covid restrictions to be lifted, if ever.

[chana_masala]

There doesn't need to be an analog analogy. There was nothing analogous about the telephone either but Bell Labs was still broken up

[gfodor]

I wasn’t making an analogy. Facebook and similarly scaled up communication networks ought to be treated in ways similar to public squares for the purposes of understanding the nature of their effect on speech freedoms, now that we have seen them grown up to cover most of the world.

[visarga]

> Letters To The Editor

No, FB users talk to each other not to FB (the editor).

Quantity has a quality of its own - when size is huge it should be reclassified as public interest, not private. There should be mechanisms for people to ensure their voices matter similar to elections and parliament.

[FormerBandmate]

They’re the modern public square, as are all social media platforms. You could have made the same argument about the telephone or ISPs, both of those are neutral for a reason

[nerdponx]

> criticisms of Facebook now seem to entirely be focused on them not shutting down speech.

Note to readers: the author of the blog post is not espousing this, at least not overtly.

[smsm42]

Mentioning hate speech is a pretty good marker though, I'd give 80% probability the author thinks FB should censor more whoever the author considers haters.

[jwalton]

Everyone wants to break up Facebook back into Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. I don't think that would really solve any of these issues.

I think we're thinking about this the wrong way - we should break up Facebook the same way we broke up Bell into baby Bells. Make "Facebook" a utility. Split Facebook into five different companies, maybe some not even in the US. Each "Facebook" company would have to provide Facebook service to a subset of current users. Allow new people to run Facebook providers.

Unhappy with the customer service from your current Facebook provider, or with the quantity of ads? Don't like the algorithm that's running your timeline? Switch to one of the other providers who may do things differently. Create competition in this market where there simply isn't any.

Some people will point out this forces all these providers to interoperate somehow, so users on one Facebook provider can talk to users on another. This is a really great part of this plan! Our social networks become based on open standards and interoperability instead of being walled gardens.

[arcticbull]

Didn’t the baby bells that came out of AT&T all merge back into the new at&t? Notice the capitalizations there representative of their corporate logotype at the respective times in the narrative arc. How could we avoid that happening in 10-20 years?

[edit] Further, im not sure how you’d slice it up horizontally instead of vertically - that is to say Facebook is Facebook for “millennials,” Instagram is Facebook for gen z“. It feels like each of these vertical slices retain the same incentive structure they have today but targeting different demographics.

What could slicing it horizontally look like? An independent infra AWS? A social graph? Curious your thoughts.

I think the problem is the incentive structure - a company goaled on engagement will focus on the most engaging content. That’s hate, division, fear and anger. Without a fundamental reimagination of incentives I think the same beast will emerge. The new T-1000 of corporations - as Colbert referred to at&t at the time.

[wombatmobile]

AT&T and the baby bells are not analogous to FB. The analogy is too generous to FB and overstates its importance.

FB is not a medium. It may be a de facto platform for social organisations and advertising, but it's still just an app.

Whilst FB made more money than MySpace and lasted for a longer time, its demise is inevitable for the same reason, and we're seeing the slide occur now.

FB, like AOL and MySpace before it, was fashionable when its feature provided new reach for participants. Sooner or later, these apps reach maximum cachet and after that, they are for "old people".

FB is for old people. And that's not even the worst of its problems.

[int_19h]

What's really needed is a legal requirement for open APIs and federation. The only reason why Facebook is so hard to drop once you've been on it for a while, is because they have your social graph locked in - either everybody switches together, or people get "left behind". If they are forced to interoperate with others, that's no longer an issue - and I suspect that this alone would be enough for healthy competition to shrink them down, without any forcible splitting.

[specialist]

For trust busting:

I'd break out FAANG's advertising operations. Prohibit conflicts of interest, fraud.

I sorta expected the online advertising bubble to pop, mooting the need for remedy. But somehow it keeps not popping.

Set some threshold. Reach a certain size and your ops get divided up. Spitballing: $10m annual revenue, 100k monthly visitors, whatever. So indies like daringfireball can continue to do their own thing.

[jboy55]

Lets break up Facebook into Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Reddit and HackerNews.

Lets be serious, the youth market is strongly moving towards TikTok, and its feed algorithm already has created a notion of 'the different sides of TikTok', for conservative vs liberal content.

[bcherny]

In what ways is this different than today’s world, where depending on what you want to do (connect with people with similar interests, talk to friends, look at cat videos) there’s a bunch of options for what service to use?

[function_seven]

The services available today don't federate with one another. I can't reply to an Instagram post from my Reddit account, or send a message from WhatsApp to iMessage.

While I'm not sure parent's suggestion is feasible or would solve anything, it is more like the AT&T breakup in that the system is still cohesive, even if operated by separate entities.

[sammorrowdrums]

Those services don’t, but as a Mastodon user, it doesn’t seem such an unlikely suggestion. I have been impressed with fediverse since I joined about a year back, and love the that the feed isn’t manipulated, and that censorship is often the choice of an individual not wanting to see more from a user they find objectionable or from a community/server level when say your server doesn’t want pornographic posts from some other server on fediverse, which frankly reflects sincere human interaction much more than Facebook moderation and their feed algos, and if you did want to see what your community doesn’t, you can both stay and also create an account on another server if you wish.

Federated social media for me has been much less toxic in terms of discussion quality and is much less addictive, I love checking it but I don’t doom-scroll to oblivion…

But server doesn’t get payed to make me doom scroll to oblivion so incentives are much more aligned.

[bmarquez]

Currently, I'd have to recreate my social graph if I move to a different service. With the proposed interoperability, I wouldn't have to.

[jboy55]

If you maintained the same social graph on each service, you'd still have all the misinformation being shared amongst the same graph members.

Its one thing if the content being served is what some nefarious actor wants a group to consume, for influence sake. Its another when its the content produces and consumes themselves. The current misinformation discourse on FB is the current culture, especially the culture of a large group of people. It originates both on and off FB. 'Q' didn't originate on FB, it originated on 8chan, let that sink in.

[smsm42]

Well, there's another option - they are allowed to arbiter, but aren't allowed to control the rules on the arbitration, at least not directly - instead, an overriding entity would do that. The entity would be, most likely, the government, but as a window dressing, an "independent body" whose members are selected by the politicians can be established to give it a veneer of being removed from everyday politics (protip: it never is). While not a lot of people would admit to preferring this model now, I suspect, a lot of them are pushing in the direction that can't lead anywhere but there. Of course, once such body is established, its natural evolution would be first to control all large public speech platforms, and then to attempt to control all speech in general.

[blondin]

> their business model is one that incentivizes and enables the creation of a global scale surveillance and behavior modification empire.

huh, that's the first time i have read this one. the one i read about recently has to do with connecting the world.

now this is making me realize that maybe, just maybe, nobody knows what their true business model is?

[dcow]

No their business model is very clear: leverage their user attention machine to sell advertising opportunities to buyers.

[gfodor]

It’s not hard to ascertain someone’s business model when they are a public company, nevermind one that you literally can start spending money with in about 5 minutes.

[gorgoiler]

Many alternatives to the Facebook Public Square exist: Discord, Diaspora, Mastodon, er... Ello, erm, Voat.

I’m joking of course. None of those make as much money as Facebook, and I think we can all agree it’s the fact that they are so rich that bothers us most. Far more than any public square argument. Where’s my yacht?!

[alexandre_m]

I don't care that they're rich.

I care that they have a monopoly and consolidate so much power that they can shift the balance for the interest of their stakeholders or lobbyists.

[epinephrinios]

What's going with the "western" world? Look at Australia, UK and now USA. Citizens are voluntarily giving up on hard-won rights like free speech in favor of what? A false sense of security? Saddens me deeply.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

If we choose to go with a real world analogy, the "public square", then why are people sharing messages and photos with friends and family via a "public square". That is not what we do in the real world.

[bashinator]

IMO, Facebook (or YT, or any big media company) even being in a position to “shut down free speech” is a predictable outcome of the total failure of net neutrality in the U.S.

If everyone had sufficient bandwidth to host their own content from their home Internet, and ISPs were prohibited from also being media companies, free speech would be much stronger.

[sofixa]

Maybe you missed the genocide that happened thanks to a rampant disinformation campaign on Facebook? Or the other more benign cases, like antivaxers (the classical ones, not vaccinating their kids against polio and measles) and co.

Can anyone seriously argue that disinformation on Facebook isn't dangerous? The only possible question should be what can we do about it to preserve debate, free speech, etc. while stoping the literally deadly parts.

[gfodor]

We already have done this over the last several centuries by defining the line between legal and non-legal speech. The point is the line is chosen to trade off these risks. There is no silver bullet but acting like there is, and that this debate is just beginning now, is fallacious.

[jboy55]

I think one of the key things is what happened in 2016, isn't the same thing that's happening now. Then, actors were able to pay and market content directly to audiences they felt were exploitable. The current deluge of misinformation, especially regarding vaccine, is shared directly with friends or within groups that people explicitly join. If you browse the 'Herman Cain Awards' on reddit, you'll see things like,

- "I'll probably get put in facebook jail for this..."

- A misinformation label attached to the bottom of the post.

- The post completely blanked out, with a statement that this is misinformation.

This seems to indicate some moderation being done. What I don't see from the "facebook should stop' this group, is any attempt to get cable companies to do the same with "news" stations that broadcast misinformation. An attempt to have the FCC take AM radio station's licenses for broadcasting propaganda.

The underlying fact is, what we label misinformation is just what a large group of people wrongly believe, and they really like sharing it with each other.

[gfodor]

Social media data science wizardry for targeting likely swing voters was applauded by the likes of the NYT when the Obama campaign did it. It was only when the cold water was poured on the left realizing the same methodology could be used to win campaigns regardless of what team deployed it. You can argue if one side acted more ethical than the other in the lines they were willing and unwilling to cross, but it’s Facebook’s business model and platform that made it inevitable that sophisticated actors would be in a perpetual arms race to try to best position themselves to leverage it to gain power, change minds, etc.

All of this was evident many years ago, based on the ad delivery system Facebook built, and the kinds of information their early APIs were exposing to people. It didn’t take a genius to realize having people building more and more sophisticated systems to spy on people to get data to drive the development of products to persuade people was a dangerous flywheel, and one that was held up by good intentions (making services “free”), so it was likely to be sustainable via an “ends justify the means” rationalization.

[jboy55]

Yes, that was my point, that in 2016, actors were using the feed and ad algorithms to influence the elections. The point I'm trying to make is that isn't what is happening now.

Now we are seeing a large group of people freely sharing misinformation amongst themselves. The fueling of this, I would argue, is outside of facebook and is being brought there by the people themselves.

It was really easy to blame the lowering of the level of discourse to social media. However, the "our side at any cost" has its modern seeds in the advent of right wing radio with Rush Limbaugh, followed by the rise of fox news. With the internet, the public has learned that they too can be players in the political landscape by commenting on news articles. All of which predates the rise of social media to a large extent. In the early 2000s, Yahoo News political articles would have 10s of thousands of comments, even now, the 2020 election market on predictit had 300k comments on it, of people posting memes and s*t talking to each other.

This is the culture now. To change this, you can't go and regulate a social media company, you have to change the culture.

[staticautomatic]

Both are still occurring. Either way there are lots of things to dislike about FB but enabling speech isn’t one of them. Mis- and Disinformation are political problems to which democracies are highly susceptible, by design. They’re features, not bugs.

[koboll]

The arguments that Facebook is evil are really dumb and I'm kind of tired of them.

The core mechanism of political polarization is that the internet inexorably pulled society out of its temporary state of mass media consolidation. For a couple decades, we had an unusual situation where a few companies ran mass media, and those companies all sort of agreed to toe the centrist consensus line politically. Now, we've reverted to something like what we had before radio, which was that socialists read the socialist newspaper, right-wing folks read the right-wing newspaper, etc., if not even worse -- some folks just got their news from the loudest partisans at the bar.

We've gone from an era where news distribution was fragmented because it was very difficult, to an era where it was consolidated because it was easy for large corporations only, to an era where it's so dead simple that anyone can do it, so it's fragmented again.

Legacy media folks hate this. They blame the biggest players helping people share fragmented media sources with one another, rather than recognizing the inevitability of this fragmentation, no matter what products people use to share news over the internet. They demand a return to elite consensus blocking extreme viewpoints. It is simply not gonna happen. That barn was always temporary, and it has collapsed around the horse.

[gfodor]

The argument isn’t about Facebook per se, and especially not the people at Facebook. It’s that providing Internet services for “free” on the back of advertising was an obviously great idea when such “ads” were cute product pitches and led to positive cash flow.

But when it became obvious that “ads” was the wrong mental model, and that the products being created were ultimately about the general problem of persuading people by using data collected by spying on them, it should have been realized this was an incentive structure that any sane code of engineering ethics should abandon. Facebook ended up being the best and most successful example of an organization taking this system to its most logical endpoint, but someone always would have unless a code of ethics managed to materialize upon seeing the damage it was causing before it got too far.

I don’t judge people who work at Facebook generally, but do think every one of them at this point should resign on ethical grounds. The situation could be fixed if the company (even just internally) owned up to the malincentives they have fallen into and committed to exiting it and leading on forming a code of ethics on when these kinds of system ought not be built.

[lugged]

I stopped using Facebook when they stopped showing you everything in chronological order and started implementing boosted posts and advertising in your feed.

I really don't understand why it's taken almost a decade for you idiots to figure out what that would result in.

"At this point"

What point? The point they started hiding your friends "boring" posts in order to serve up the most clickbait shit possible?

Or the point they allowed political parties to ram Obama and then trump down your throat.

Or the point they decided to become arbitors of truth?

Or the point they decided to censor you over your beliefs?

[gfodor]

I deleted my Facebook account many years ago so I would say the obligation to resign, to me, probably goes back pretty far. But overall I understand this wasn’t self evident for many for a long time and for many it still isn’t. I wouldn’t peg it at their feed engagement algorithm changes, but I think once people started seeing them creating creepy targeting buckets in their ad system, like “target parents who just had their first child” (how would they know this?) it started to be pretty obvious how fucked up the logical endpoint of that was going to be.

[lugged]

> I understand this wasn’t self evident for many for a long time and for many it still isn’t.

Nah, it was made very clear by very many back when, all of my friends understood my concerns clearly, I made sure they knew what was happening.

They chose not to care. I don't blame them, but I have no sympathy for them either.

I don't really have many regrets either, my life improved a lot since distancing myself from the online world.

[cowpig]

Your reply, like the other below it, both completely ignored the article and the comment they are replying to.

Sure, media is more fragmented now. But that doesn't address any of the criticisms in question.

[gigatexal]

Koboll, might you work at 1 hacker way and be one of the folks on the “inside”?

[iammisc]

Facebook is evil because it censors not because people engage in "wrongthink". That Americans can have any other take on this is frankly shocking.

[sieabahlpark]

They're a damn American company, free speech should be a major component.

The surveilance is going to happen no matter what country. Thinking any other country would actually respect privacy is truly delusional.

[arcticbull]

I think it’s important to remember the issue with Facebook isn’t speech it’s amplification. Algorithmic amplification of content that drives engagement. This is what folks have an issue with.

Further bear in mind that “free speech” refers to the government not precluding your speech and Facebook ain’t government. Unless you’re proposing nationalizing it.

[worrycue]

It’s a positive feedback loop. Introduce people to outrage. Spur them into “action” where they create more “outrage content” (comments, posts, … etc.) for you in return for attention and praise (Likes, upvotes, … etc.). Outrage content grows exponentially like the spread of an infectious disease or a nuclear chain reaction … as does the “engagement” of the site. The job of the site is just to get the outrage content in front of the viewers and keep the chain reaction going.

Basically the modern version of riling up a lynch mob … for profit.

To some extend, all social media use this feedback loop, even this site.

P.S. Yes, I realize the irony of this comment.

[jboy55]

The introduction to outrage can happen off Facebook, I would argue the 'outrage victim culture' started with daytime AM radio in the US in the early 80s, when people realized that people would argue for days over their sports teams. Then people realized that political parties are just basically sports teams that play all the time.

[fstrthnscnd]

In essence, it works like a catalyst?

[azov]

> bear in mind that “free speech” refers to the government ...

First amendment refers to the government not precluding your speech. "Free speech" is a much broader concept.

[arcticbull]

How so? I think you'll find that pretty quickly it rolls back up into the First Amendment.

[kcartlidge]

> They're a damn American company, free speech should be a major component.

Given the constitutional safeguards you may be right on this one.

> Thinking any other country would actually respect privacy is truly delusional.

This, however, I had to read several times to be sure you were saying what I thought you were saying. At which point I just shook my head in amazement.