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by annadane 1380 days ago
Take down some of the most egregious pages and disinformation? No, we (Facebook/Meta) will waste our time shutting down anything remotely challenging to our monstrosity we're trying to conquer the world with (see also: shutting down the NYU Ad Observatory, or any countless other examples)
1 comments
Bakary 1380 days ago
What incentive have we given them to stop?
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annadane 1380 days ago
Incentive? How about "don't be monopolistic assholes"?
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Bakary 1380 days ago
I don't really see the point of appealing to morality or to what ought to happen. They're not going to relinquish power willingly. Few individual do, and for groups it's vanishingly rare.
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lapinot 1380 days ago
"don't be monopolistic assholes" is in the constitution and laws of several countries, it should not be an appeal to morality. The real problem is that at any point anybody does a move constraining internet corps, they get mocked by everyone as "regulating things to death". Yes that's the goal. Their death, in their current form at least.
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pessimizer 1380 days ago
> "don't be monopolistic assholes" is in the constitution and laws of several countries,

No it's not. People who formulate laws are specific, unless they're either creating a law that is intended to be ignored, or if they're creating a law meant for selective enforcement.

You can check every constitution and law code all day, you're never going to find anything telling anyone not to impede the attempts of an application not to constantly scrape their webpage. This kind of talk is purposeless.

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Bakary 1380 days ago
That might be true in the anglophone world, but plenty of other populations aren't hostile to the idea of regulating the internet, and I don't mean the totalitarian countries. The GDPR is a ray of hope in this regard.

What prompted me to mention incentives in the first place is that the GP's framing of the problem is a common narcotic. Online is/ought-type complaining reduces the potential for action since the emotional need for signaling is already fulfilled. It's a trap I've fallen into many times myself. In itself, it's more dangerous at scale than any public mockery of regulation.

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austinjp 1380 days ago
That's more of a suggestion than an incentive, though.
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