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I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It wasn’t that long ago the right was championing a companies right to not bake a cake for a gay couple. It seems a b

I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It wasn’t that long ago the right was championing a companies right to not bake a cake for a gay couple. It seems a bit hypocritical that they support a companies right unless that company is left leaning.

waterhouse 8y ago
Sometimes a company appears to hold itself neutral for a long time, and people get used to it and expect it to remain that way. When this suddenly changes, especially after the company has developed a dominant position in its niche, people tend to start complaining. Then some other people will often say, "Well, they never said they were neutral or that they upheld principles of free speech". Sometimes this is, upon further research, demonstrably wrong. In one case of this, one of the founders of Reddit, after some redditors complained about some admin intervention, said "Reddit was never meant to be a bastion of free speech". Some users then started collecting places where representatives of Reddit (including founders and CEOs) had said just that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS In the case of Facebook specifically, I find a bunch of stories from just this July, with an example headline "Mark Zuckerberg stands up for free speech on Facebook, even for Holocaust deniers". Is it illegal to break implicit (or even explicit) promises to users? If money hasn't changed hands and there isn't any legal contract, then maybe not. (I've heard of laws about "common carrier" status, but don't know if that applies.) But users are quite within their rights to consider it a betrayal and to complain loudly.
gaius 8y ago
I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It’s totally OK for a company to be biased, absolutely. But that company cannot reasonably expect to benefit from the privileges of common carrier status. Facebook wants to play both sides. It must be made to choose one or the other. Example: it's OK for a newspaper to take an editorial position because the editor and ultimately the owners of the paper take responsibility for whatever they publish and can be held responsible by the courts if they don't. Facebook does not want to take responsibility for what it publishes, it wants to be protected like the postal service - but still take a position.
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
The bakery did not have monopolistic market dominance.
adventured 8y ago
Facebook is a monopolist platform with billions of users. They share little in common with a tiny physical bakery in Colorado. The problem with Facebook is precisely that they have an extremely powerful monopoly, as is the case with Google. The Colorado bakery has no monopoly on baking cakes, it's trivial to find alternative service offerings. If they did have a monopoly on baking cakes, then it would be reasonable to require that they bake cakes for everyone (or no one). This is why Republicans don't widely expect or demand the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, etc. to not lean left. The NY Times for example has basically been left leaning for its entire history. They don't have monopolies on news, or monopolies in newspapers. When the three broadcast networks held their co-monopoly over TV, imagine them deciding they were only going to allow right or left views on television and strictly exclude all others. Now magnify that by several fold in terms of the reach, financial success and influence that Facebook has today. And since Facebook is a large communication platform, with WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and the core FB service, a telecom common carrier is perhaps an even more apt example: imagine the AT&T monopoly deciding to remove all left or right leaning persons from their telecom service. Oh you want phone service? How did you vote in the last election? It becomes very obvious very quickly why it's going to be necessary to regulate the tech platform monopolies as common carriers and treat them as something closer to public utilities.
keketi 8y ago
It's ok for a company to be biased as long as they don't claim to be neutral. Zuckerberg to US congress: > Congressman, I do agree that we should work to give people the fullest free expression that is possible. That's what — when I talk about giving people a voice, that's what I care about. > [...] And I think that that — it — our general responsibility is to — is to allow the broadest spectrum of free expression as we can ... In the same hearing: > I'll ask — my — my question is, on this, do you agree that Facebook and other technology platforms should be ideologically neutral? > ZUCKERBERG: Congressman, I — I agree that we should be a platform for all ideas, and that we should focus on that. Transcript of the hearing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/transcript-of-zuckerbergs-appearance-before-house-committee/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11...
- dawnerd 8y ago
  Yeah I agree that’s pretty dumb to tell Congress one thing but do another. I wish they’d just be honest about it. My comment was more of a general sense of any company, not necessarily just Facebook.

waterhouse 8y ago

Sometimes a company appears to hold itself neutral for a long time, and people get used to it and expect it to remain that way. When this suddenly changes, especially after the company has developed a dominant position in its niche, people tend to start complaining. Then some other people will often say, "Well, they never said they were neutral or that they upheld principles of free speech". Sometimes this is, upon further research, demonstrably wrong. In one case of this, one of the founders of Reddit, after some redditors complained about some admin intervention, said "Reddit was never meant to be a bastion of free speech". Some users then started collecting places where representatives of Reddit (including founders and CEOs) had said just that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS In the case of Facebook specifically, I find a bunch of stories from just this July, with an example headline "Mark Zuckerberg stands up for free speech on Facebook, even for Holocaust deniers". Is it illegal to break implicit (or even explicit) promises to users? If money hasn't changed hands and there isn't any legal contract, then maybe not. (I've heard of laws about "common carrier" status, but don't know if that applies.) But users are quite within their rights to consider it a betrayal and to complain loudly.

gaius 8y ago

I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It’s totally OK for a company to be biased, absolutely. But that company cannot reasonably expect to benefit from the privileges of common carrier status. Facebook wants to play both sides. It must be made to choose one or the other. Example: it's OK for a newspaper to take an editorial position because the editor and ultimately the owners of the paper take responsibility for whatever they publish and can be held responsible by the courts if they don't. Facebook does not want to take responsibility for what it publishes, it wants to be protected like the postal service - but still take a position.

Chris_Chambers 8y ago

The bakery did not have monopolistic market dominance.

adventured 8y ago

Facebook is a monopolist platform with billions of users. They share little in common with a tiny physical bakery in Colorado. The problem with Facebook is precisely that they have an extremely powerful monopoly, as is the case with Google. The Colorado bakery has no monopoly on baking cakes, it's trivial to find alternative service offerings. If they did have a monopoly on baking cakes, then it would be reasonable to require that they bake cakes for everyone (or no one). This is why Republicans don't widely expect or demand the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, etc. to not lean left. The NY Times for example has basically been left leaning for its entire history. They don't have monopolies on news, or monopolies in newspapers. When the three broadcast networks held their co-monopoly over TV, imagine them deciding they were only going to allow right or left views on television and strictly exclude all others. Now magnify that by several fold in terms of the reach, financial success and influence that Facebook has today. And since Facebook is a large communication platform, with WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and the core FB service, a telecom common carrier is perhaps an even more apt example: imagine the AT&T monopoly deciding to remove all left or right leaning persons from their telecom service. Oh you want phone service? How did you vote in the last election? It becomes very obvious very quickly why it's going to be necessary to regulate the tech platform monopolies as common carriers and treat them as something closer to public utilities.

keketi 8y ago

It's ok for a company to be biased as long as they don't claim to be neutral. Zuckerberg to US congress: > Congressman, I do agree that we should work to give people the fullest free expression that is possible. That's what — when I talk about giving people a voice, that's what I care about. > [...] And I think that that — it — our general responsibility is to — is to allow the broadest spectrum of free expression as we can ... In the same hearing: > I'll ask — my — my question is, on this, do you agree that Facebook and other technology platforms should be ideologically neutral? > ZUCKERBERG: Congressman, I — I agree that we should be a platform for all ideas, and that we should focus on that. Transcript of the hearing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/transcript-of-zuckerbergs-appearance-before-house-committee/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11...

dawnerd 8y ago
Yeah I agree that’s pretty dumb to tell Congress one thing but do another. I wish they’d just be honest about it. My comment was more of a general sense of any company, not necessarily just Facebook.