[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