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by saulpw 1712 days ago
Scale matters. Each power of 10 is a whole other level. A niche horse girl forum might have thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of users? FB has billions. That's 6 orders of magnitude more relevance and impact, which is planet-wide. That's why we should care.
1 comments
narcraft 1712 days ago
I think scale is a reasonable distinction to focus on. It could be argued that due to network effects that Facebook enjoys a sort of natural monopoly of being "the" social network. Nonetheless, it still has big competition in the ad space with Google and traditional media, and though much smaller and with different emphasis, Linkedin is a viable large social network that can survive alongside Facebook. I think it's hard to define at what scale a company should be subject to public scrutiny/control in part because it's hard to clearly define the market in which it competes. I think the negative impact that Facebook has on society is largely overstated and would like to see more testimony from users who believe that they have been personally harmed by Facebook's practices.
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saulpw 1711 days ago
> it's hard to define at what scale a company should be subject to public scrutiny/control

FB is one of the largest companies on the planet with worldwide effects. There isn't another 10x for it to grow. If it's not subject to scrutiny/control at this scale, then it will never be subject to it.

> would like to see more testimony from users who believe that they have been personally harmed

Victims of genocide are notoriously unable to testify.

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narcraft 1711 days ago
> If [Facebook]'s not subject to scrutiny/control at this scale, then it will never be subject to it Yes, exactly, cat's out of the bag. I generally don't think we should use federal democratic decision-making bodies to decide how a company should be run.

> Victims of genocide are notoriously unable to testify Noted, but I also do not believe that Facebook's policies either equate to genocide or indirectly result in increased genocide as understood in the most obvious/severe definition of the word 'genocide'.

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