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I'm having a tough time understanding what you're saying. You're saying that the decisions of a company are made due to cultural norms, and not individual consc

I'm having a tough time understanding what you're saying. You're saying that the decisions of a company are made due to cultural norms, and not individual consciences? And that Zuckerberg doesn't actually have any power, because the shareholders would out-vote them? And the shareholders make their decisions based on cultural norms? Then where do those norms come from? What leads those cultural norms? I legitimately don't understand what you're saying.

norea-armozel 10y ago
I'm saying that there's more at work which is beyond the individual choices of each person on the board at Facebook. They have legal obligations to their shareholders, nebulous legal obligations to users, and many other concerns I couldn't list here since I don't know them all. But just of the tension between the legal obligations to their shareholders and that of their users which results in the shareholders having the advantage here. There's little in the way of US law that prevents Facebook from doing what they do since Facebook isn't like a broadcast company or a utility (as per the legal definitions). So the default mode for Facebook's board is to side with investors and protect the value of their stocks, not to protect the privacy of users nor to protect their other civil liberties. You can't just throw away the law whenever you like. At some point, the law has to trump our feelings on an issue like this. And when it's inadequate to handle these edge cases we should take action to reform the law. But that takes time. You can't expect an individual CEO, President, or regulatory chief to make that choice alone if the law doesn't grant them that authority.