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I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (

I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms a) protect consumers' data b) don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally. But it might be easier to go the competition route.

Spearchucker 8y ago
Promoting the adoption of more than one platform might be done by forcing auditable federation of personal data -- with explicit user control and consent.
- throwawaysea 8y ago
  That's a very interesting idea. And maybe this comes back to the notion of "lock-in" more broadly. That is, not just in the consumer-facing arena but also for enterprise software. Isn't lock-in ultimately working against a competitive market dynamic?
- kodablah 8y ago
  It won't help once you realize the people don't care and you can't make them care. It's not ignorance that's the problem either, it's intentional apathy. Until you can show a regular person how they are literally (i.e. not in some made-up tech way) harmed, they aren't going to concern themselves with it and rightfully so. If you make up harms or posit unproven or inapplicable-to-most harms, you will actually hurt your case by crying wolf instead of help it.
  - Spearchucker 8y ago
    Maybe. Consider something though - In South Africa Twitter is huge. In Germany, Facebook is. Instagram is big in the UK. Now take the possibly not unusual scenario in which a South African lives in London and has family in Germany. Granpappy in Berlin would search for his grandson in London from Facebook but finds him on Instagram. He'd add the grandson as a friend and see the grandson's Instagram photos in his Facebook feed. The South African guy in London searches Instagram for his nephew in South Africa, and finds him on Twitter. And sees that Twitter account's posts in Instagram. If someone on Facebook finds me on Instagram, Instagram could notify me that Mr. X is searching for a profile that matches mine, and ask if I want to allow access to my stuff. If I decline he can't. Federation, with user control and consent. I think it could work. And even if it was useful to a tiny monitory at least there's real choice. Inclusive of all.
    - r_c_a_d 8y ago
      It definitely could work, but who will make it work? I would really like to see my wife's facebook posts without having a facebook account (or just looking at her iPad which is what I currently do...) and she may be interested in my posts elsewhere. I can see how it should be easy to send content from foo#twitter.com to bar#facebook.com as individual messages, format issues not withstanding, if foo and bar have agreed to correspond. But which end would manage the existence of that relationship and push/pull the data? Maybe it needs third-party brokers to do it? Interestingly I can see some parallels here with the current status of banking in the UK. After centuries of operation as "closed systems" there are now rules to force banks to provide APIs so that new entrants can offer inter-operation services. Maybe in a hundred years social-media companies will be forced to do the same? ;-)
      - Spearchucker 8y ago
        In the context of the post's case for regulation - if that were indeed to happen then federation might be an approach.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Kodablah's point is not that it couldn't work technically, only that there's no public pressure to force them to implement it. Also, such federation, if not open to third parties (easy to justify with spam, malicious parties, etc) can actually strengthen the current big platforms against competition.
      - Spearchucker 8y ago
        My suggestion is in the context of regulation. Of course there's no incentive for social networks to do this of their own accord.
        icebraining 8y ago
        There actually is, probably to avoid the regulation in the first place: https://datatransferproject.dev/ https://datatransferproject.dev/
mrlala 8y ago
>anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing. Let's ignore facebook since it wasn't exactly first to market with myspace before it (although it was first to market in "this has your real name attached"), and talk about twitter. Twitter had a fairly unique idea, you can post public messages that are very limited in scope. They were first to market on that- and that's why everyone uses it. What is stopping twitter clones from popping up? Absolutely nothing. Many people who read HN could easily make a suitable twitter clone. But would anyone use it? Pretty much no. Why? Because people like to centralize their technology as much as they can to make it actually useful. What a pain in the ass it would be if you had 4 different twitter equivalents that you were trying to use.. or try to remember "oh friend A is on twitter1, Friend B is on twitter3" etc. Now, yeah people still do this do a degree of course.. some friends might be on facebook, others twitter. So of course this segregation still exists but it's generally for products which are different in scope. Anyway- my point is it's people and the marketplace have decided "1 facebook is OK" "1 twitter is OK". Arbitrarily trying to break them up is not what people even want. Paranoid people might think that's what people want because all they can see is the possibility of censorship and security stuff, but 95% of people just want to use something that works and they can connect with people without everything being a pain in the ass.
- strife25 8y ago
  > So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing. You are correct - monopolies are defined to control the supply of something to manipulate prices and hurt consumers. The problem with these platforms is not that they are anti-consumer, the problem is that they are anti-competitive because they control the entire audience that a product can be sold to. This results in the commoditization of suppliers (eg news, books, etc.) and reduces competition in the distribution space of the economy that targets consumers. It's a different way to think about it because it's a new concept in our modern world, but the mental model that I've seen is that there are three stages of creating something and selling it to a consumer: 1. Supplier / Manufacturer 2. Distributor 3. Consumer In the old days, monopolies controlled supply and distribution, which resulted in consumers being hurt. Now, "aggregators" control distribution and the consumer, which leads to suppliers to drive down their costs or not even participate in the consumer space. I HIGHLY recommend reading about aggregation theory on Stratechery to get a deeper understanding of this as Ben Thompson does a great job in explaining why the FANG companies do what they do: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
mc32 8y ago
I have greater issue with Google Search[1] than I do FB and TWTTR, they should provide a politically unbiased index of the surface web, but unlike DDG, Bing or others, they curate theirs to further their world view outside that required by law. Twitter and FBs issue is reliance and optimizing for engagement which leads to clicking and surfacing the most outrageous stuff at the expense of the ordinary. Google search doesn’t have “an gagement problem”. They have black hat SEO problem, which is different, but they go beyond that and tweak some search results for political reasons. Not talking about terrorism or supremacy groups at all, but somewhat controversial social issues, (reproductive) sometimes tame issues (searching for candidates)[1]. The EU has fined them for “re-ranking” SERs and SSE effects. >These data showed that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) in all 10 positions on the first page of search results — enough, perhaps, to have shifted two or three million votes in her direction over time.< Given that, 2-3MM vote swing (vs, what the outside estimate was under 50k votes for Russian bot sway), I’d say Google is the real problem in affecting democratic elections. [1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/google-big-tech-bias-hurts-democracy-not-just-conservatives-column/1265020002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/google-big...
- Ivoirians 8y ago
  Friendly reminder that Robert Epstein (the author of your article) is a moron who's on an anti-Google crusade because they (correctly) flagged his website as containing malware, and he threw a childish tantrum (threatening lawyers, public letters to the CEO). [1][2] Let me summarize the core studies he ran and builds his case on [3][4] [3]: We built a fake search engine and had people look at search results for political candidates they'd never heard of before. It turns out when the top results on the page presented one of these candidates favorably, the subjects were more likely to favor those candidates. Based on this, we think 20% of undecided voters in a nation can be swayed to support a candidate by search engines, who are clearly biasing their results on purpose. (???) [4]: Google search results pages showed more articles favorable to Clinton than Trump. By this, and the conclusion in [3], we estimate 20% of American undecided voters (this is where the 2-3MM comes from) may have been swayed to vote for Clinton by Google. Is it clear why this is absurd? Especially if you realize that, since the general tone of news published about the election is positive to Clinton and negative to Trump, Google is accurately reflecting the news landscape when the articles it shows are positive to Clinton. [1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/one-mans-fight-with-google-over-a-security-warning/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/one-mans-fight-wit... [2] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/readers-and-experts-weigh-in-on-a-site-owner-vs-google/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/readers-and-expert... [3] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with... [4] https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_&_ROBERTSON_2017-A_Method_for_Detecting_Bias_in_Search_Rankings-AIBRT_WP-17-02_6-1-17.pdf https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_&_ROBERTSON_2017-A_Metho...
pexaizix 8y ago
>I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. I definitely want the US, with their strong ideas of free speech, to be the ones controlling those platforms. Because, as they are now, they are severely restricted.
- deleted 8y ago
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- notatoad 8y ago
  The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor. Telling users of their platform to shut up is part of their free speech rights. Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    Where did you come up with the idea that free speech laws give them the right to censor. It doesn't. Ownership and private property rights give them the right to censor.
    - jedmeyers 8y ago
      Ownership and private property makes them liable for what happens on that private property, yet they are somehow exepmted from that liability. So all perks and none of the responsibilities.
      - dnautics 8y ago
        That's a funny view. If someone comes to your bar and pushes another person's into a stool and kills them are you liable?
        samatman 8y ago
        The government will absolutely entertain a lawsuit on those grounds, yes. Whether liability and damages are assigned would depend on the details, but the principle is quite clear here.
kodablah 8y ago
> I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. I have come to the admittedly sad conclusion that you can't reside in the middle here. I mean, you can idealistically, but slope will slide to one side or the other in practice. At least at this time I think you can ask for government interference or not. I would like to think that you could trust each side to know its boundaries, as we see in other regulated industries, but time has shown either side cannot. Which side would you want to give an inch to, because a mile will be taken (or according to some doomsayers it already has)?
- kokokokoko 8y ago
  The US government has censored the broadcast media(tv, radio) since their formation. So we do have some fairly solid evidence that the US government has not wildly abused that power. I'm not sure this has to be an all or nothing thing. We have some reasonable protections built into the Constitution and case law that back that up. I understand your hesitation about having the government involved as there are plenty of examples of government influence on the media around the world. I share the same fears. With that said, do we really have any real world proof that the US government in recent years has over stepped its boundaries in regards to media restrictions?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kodablah 8y ago
    We don't all publish TV content. We can see from retransmission fees for over-the-air content to the decimation of business models like Aereo what happens when content is governed. I see the Aereo business model as very similar to what's happening w/ article 13 in the EU right now. But in general I don't think you can compare broadcast mediums to bidirectional ones (e.g. words on the telephone or text on the internet).
    - 8y ago
gammateam 8y ago
A more robust id solution which is applicable to entities with revenue over X would be a constitutional way to solve the issues discussed in the article The governments most successful crackdowns regulate the intermediaries So in graph theory, you look at the node you want to control and then take the complement and restrict the nodes in the complement, while prohibiting the target node from interaction with non-restricted nodes there is no sanction on non-restricted nodes and no sanction on the behavior of the target node, with voluntary compliance entered into by the restricted nodes Examples of this approach: Accredited investor regulation (non-accredited citizens not prohibited from investing, businesses risk consequences) Online gambling prohibition (citizens and online casinos not prohibited, voluntarily licensed financial institutions are prohibited from processing transactions)
ep103 8y ago
I'm increasingly of the position that without regulating these platforms, we don't ensure that they stay open and free, we ensure that they are controlled by foreign governments the occasional well-backed PR firm.
- pixl97 8y ago
  As for your end statement I'd say it's the other way around. They are commonly controlled by your well backed PR firm and occasionally controlled by governments.
burtonator 8y ago
One major issue is discriminatory access. They shouldn't be able to pick and choose who gets access to what APIs and under what terms. Everyone gets the same terms or no one does.
thisisweirdok 8y ago
>Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. If you're operating a business you fundamentally need that control. The platform you're talking about it the internet. It already exists. You can use it to say whatever you want within law. If you use someone else's servers to do so they can boot you, just like I can kick someone out of my house.
- chii 8y ago
  What's needed is not antitrust laws, but interoperability laws (or, construe them as antitrust laws). If there's interoperability between networks, then no one network can become dominant via momentum only, and has to actually provide value to users, and prevents lock-in.
- chrischen 8y ago
  what's the point of the internet if, due to network effects, everyone is using the facebook app?
  - thisisweirdok 8y ago
    Which network effects are locking you in to using Facebook and not self-publishing, or using Twitter, reddit, hackernews, Medium, Tumblr, or any other website?
    - chrischen 8y ago
      Nobody is going to do the rounds to manually check their friends’ mediums, tumblrs, hacker news, reddit posts, for every friend.
knowThySelfx 8y ago
The problem is that FB and Twitter has become a regulating entity in themselves - often with a political slant.
- pixl97 8y ago
  I would add Google to that list, but they are generally quieter about their actions.
intended 8y ago
How will this solve any problems ? There’s several assumptions here (for example: more platforms will mean better ‘X’), but how would that link with the actual issues being faced by society vis-a-vis social media?
golemiprague 8y ago
How about the first amendment? Facebook and twitter are the de facto town square of the last decade, they should adopt free speech and stop censoring anything. Let the public decide what they want to consume and what not.
cabalamat 8y ago
> What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. One way to achieve that would be to require that platforms for user-generated content make that content available on open protocols, such as ActivityPub and RSS. > I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms [...] don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally Then they wouldn't be allowed to ban spam, which would be a regressive step.
ericd 8y ago
I think in order to have any effective antitrust action, interoperability needs to be mandated, with data being easily exportable/visible to other companies.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  that's far easier said than done. Simple example a basic chat who's only info is userId+message. Then service A decides they want userId+message+timeSent and service B decides to they want userId+message+userStatus(happy/sad/busy/away) and on and on. Basically forcing interoperability means a huge slowdown on innovation as you can't add anything without a committee and years of negociation
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Heh, because Facebook has been so highly innovative lately. Just exempt 'small' services from the rule. Maybe this will kick some of the get big at all cost behavior that's permeated tech companies recently in the teeth.
  - ericd 8y ago
    It’s really not that hard. I ran a site for many years that interfaced with hundreds of different sites. It could be as simple as not actively thwarting crawlers. Or in your example, they provide everything they have as an API and it’s up to the competitors to adapt to whatever features they provide. In which case, other companies can focus on the lowest common denominator and making that interoperable. It’s not perfect or seamless, but the baseline isn’t that hard, and that’s good enough for most people. And it’s funny you bring up messaging, for many years it was interoperable across many services via XMPP and it worked pretty well, until everyone decided it was in their competitive best interest to silo it. We really haven’t gained much in terms of innovation in that space since then, in many ways it’s much worse.
treis 8y ago
>What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. There are a lot of platforms out there today. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and Whatsapp are all huge. Plus there are smaller players like Tumblr, Viber, Telegram and plenty of regional players. The only anti-trust error was allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. But that was a result of poorly enforcing existing laws not a regulatory gap.
ace_of_spades 8y ago
Find I find interesting is that there is little talk about actual attempts to provide solutions for this situation: Thee feediverse with mastodon, etc. or matrix.org. To bring it down to a populist formula: Why not make a law that requires the interoperability/federation of social networks? We have laws that set requirements for restaurants... why not for social networks?
sl1ck731 8y ago
How does anti-trust legislation work for these kind of sites? If Facebook was split up then what would stop a single identical entity from popping up in some other country that fills the niche for the entire world? I've seen it mentioned in various places on this site but I can't understand how it would work in practice.

Spearchucker 8y ago

Promoting the adoption of more than one platform might be done by forcing auditable federation of personal data -- with explicit user control and consent.

throwawaysea 8y ago
That's a very interesting idea. And maybe this comes back to the notion of "lock-in" more broadly. That is, not just in the consumer-facing arena but also for enterprise software. Isn't lock-in ultimately working against a competitive market dynamic?
kodablah 8y ago
It won't help once you realize the people don't care and you can't make them care. It's not ignorance that's the problem either, it's intentional apathy. Until you can show a regular person how they are literally (i.e. not in some made-up tech way) harmed, they aren't going to concern themselves with it and rightfully so. If you make up harms or posit unproven or inapplicable-to-most harms, you will actually hurt your case by crying wolf instead of help it.
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  Maybe. Consider something though - In South Africa Twitter is huge. In Germany, Facebook is. Instagram is big in the UK. Now take the possibly not unusual scenario in which a South African lives in London and has family in Germany. Granpappy in Berlin would search for his grandson in London from Facebook but finds him on Instagram. He'd add the grandson as a friend and see the grandson's Instagram photos in his Facebook feed. The South African guy in London searches Instagram for his nephew in South Africa, and finds him on Twitter. And sees that Twitter account's posts in Instagram. If someone on Facebook finds me on Instagram, Instagram could notify me that Mr. X is searching for a profile that matches mine, and ask if I want to allow access to my stuff. If I decline he can't. Federation, with user control and consent. I think it could work. And even if it was useful to a tiny monitory at least there's real choice. Inclusive of all.
  - r_c_a_d 8y ago
    It definitely could work, but who will make it work? I would really like to see my wife's facebook posts without having a facebook account (or just looking at her iPad which is what I currently do...) and she may be interested in my posts elsewhere. I can see how it should be easy to send content from foo#twitter.com to bar#facebook.com as individual messages, format issues not withstanding, if foo and bar have agreed to correspond. But which end would manage the existence of that relationship and push/pull the data? Maybe it needs third-party brokers to do it? Interestingly I can see some parallels here with the current status of banking in the UK. After centuries of operation as "closed systems" there are now rules to force banks to provide APIs so that new entrants can offer inter-operation services. Maybe in a hundred years social-media companies will be forced to do the same? ;-)
    - Spearchucker 8y ago
      In the context of the post's case for regulation - if that were indeed to happen then federation might be an approach.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Kodablah's point is not that it couldn't work technically, only that there's no public pressure to force them to implement it. Also, such federation, if not open to third parties (easy to justify with spam, malicious parties, etc) can actually strengthen the current big platforms against competition.
    - Spearchucker 8y ago
      My suggestion is in the context of regulation. Of course there's no incentive for social networks to do this of their own accord.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        There actually is, probably to avoid the regulation in the first place: https://datatransferproject.dev/ https://datatransferproject.dev/

mrlala 8y ago

>anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing. Let's ignore facebook since it wasn't exactly first to market with myspace before it (although it was first to market in "this has your real name attached"), and talk about twitter. Twitter had a fairly unique idea, you can post public messages that are very limited in scope. They were first to market on that- and that's why everyone uses it. What is stopping twitter clones from popping up? Absolutely nothing. Many people who read HN could easily make a suitable twitter clone. But would anyone use it? Pretty much no. Why? Because people like to centralize their technology as much as they can to make it actually useful. What a pain in the ass it would be if you had 4 different twitter equivalents that you were trying to use.. or try to remember "oh friend A is on twitter1, Friend B is on twitter3" etc. Now, yeah people still do this do a degree of course.. some friends might be on facebook, others twitter. So of course this segregation still exists but it's generally for products which are different in scope. Anyway- my point is it's people and the marketplace have decided "1 facebook is OK" "1 twitter is OK". Arbitrarily trying to break them up is not what people even want. Paranoid people might think that's what people want because all they can see is the possibility of censorship and security stuff, but 95% of people just want to use something that works and they can connect with people without everything being a pain in the ass.

strife25 8y ago
> So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing. You are correct - monopolies are defined to control the supply of something to manipulate prices and hurt consumers. The problem with these platforms is not that they are anti-consumer, the problem is that they are anti-competitive because they control the entire audience that a product can be sold to. This results in the commoditization of suppliers (eg news, books, etc.) and reduces competition in the distribution space of the economy that targets consumers. It's a different way to think about it because it's a new concept in our modern world, but the mental model that I've seen is that there are three stages of creating something and selling it to a consumer: 1. Supplier / Manufacturer 2. Distributor 3. Consumer In the old days, monopolies controlled supply and distribution, which resulted in consumers being hurt. Now, "aggregators" control distribution and the consumer, which leads to suppliers to drive down their costs or not even participate in the consumer space. I HIGHLY recommend reading about aggregation theory on Stratechery to get a deeper understanding of this as Ben Thompson does a great job in explaining why the FANG companies do what they do: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

mc32 8y ago

I have greater issue with Google Search[1] than I do FB and TWTTR, they should provide a politically unbiased index of the surface web, but unlike DDG, Bing or others, they curate theirs to further their world view outside that required by law. Twitter and FBs issue is reliance and optimizing for engagement which leads to clicking and surfacing the most outrageous stuff at the expense of the ordinary. Google search doesn’t have “an gagement problem”. They have black hat SEO problem, which is different, but they go beyond that and tweak some search results for political reasons. Not talking about terrorism or supremacy groups at all, but somewhat controversial social issues, (reproductive) sometimes tame issues (searching for candidates)[1]. The EU has fined them for “re-ranking” SERs and SSE effects. >These data showed that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) in all 10 positions on the first page of search results — enough, perhaps, to have shifted two or three million votes in her direction over time.< Given that, 2-3MM vote swing (vs, what the outside estimate was under 50k votes for Russian bot sway), I’d say Google is the real problem in affecting democratic elections. [1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/google-big-tech-bias-hurts-democracy-not-just-conservatives-column/1265020002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/google-big...

Ivoirians 8y ago
Friendly reminder that Robert Epstein (the author of your article) is a moron who's on an anti-Google crusade because they (correctly) flagged his website as containing malware, and he threw a childish tantrum (threatening lawyers, public letters to the CEO). [1][2] Let me summarize the core studies he ran and builds his case on [3][4] [3]: We built a fake search engine and had people look at search results for political candidates they'd never heard of before. It turns out when the top results on the page presented one of these candidates favorably, the subjects were more likely to favor those candidates. Based on this, we think 20% of undecided voters in a nation can be swayed to support a candidate by search engines, who are clearly biasing their results on purpose. (???) [4]: Google search results pages showed more articles favorable to Clinton than Trump. By this, and the conclusion in [3], we estimate 20% of American undecided voters (this is where the 2-3MM comes from) may have been swayed to vote for Clinton by Google. Is it clear why this is absurd? Especially if you realize that, since the general tone of news published about the election is positive to Clinton and negative to Trump, Google is accurately reflecting the news landscape when the articles it shows are positive to Clinton. [1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/one-mans-fight-with-google-over-a-security-warning/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/one-mans-fight-wit... [2] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/readers-and-experts-weigh-in-on-a-site-owner-vs-google/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/readers-and-expert... [3] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with... [4] https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_&_ROBERTSON_2017-A_Method_for_Detecting_Bias_in_Search_Rankings-AIBRT_WP-17-02_6-1-17.pdf https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_&_ROBERTSON_2017-A_Metho...

pexaizix 8y ago

>I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. I definitely want the US, with their strong ideas of free speech, to be the ones controlling those platforms. Because, as they are now, they are severely restricted.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
notatoad 8y ago
The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor. Telling users of their platform to shut up is part of their free speech rights. Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  Where did you come up with the idea that free speech laws give them the right to censor. It doesn't. Ownership and private property rights give them the right to censor.
  - jedmeyers 8y ago
    Ownership and private property makes them liable for what happens on that private property, yet they are somehow exepmted from that liability. So all perks and none of the responsibilities.
    - dnautics 8y ago
      That's a funny view. If someone comes to your bar and pushes another person's into a stool and kills them are you liable?
      - samatman 8y ago
        The government will absolutely entertain a lawsuit on those grounds, yes. Whether liability and damages are assigned would depend on the details, but the principle is quite clear here.

kodablah 8y ago

> I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. I have come to the admittedly sad conclusion that you can't reside in the middle here. I mean, you can idealistically, but slope will slide to one side or the other in practice. At least at this time I think you can ask for government interference or not. I would like to think that you could trust each side to know its boundaries, as we see in other regulated industries, but time has shown either side cannot. Which side would you want to give an inch to, because a mile will be taken (or according to some doomsayers it already has)?

kokokokoko 8y ago
The US government has censored the broadcast media(tv, radio) since their formation. So we do have some fairly solid evidence that the US government has not wildly abused that power. I'm not sure this has to be an all or nothing thing. We have some reasonable protections built into the Constitution and case law that back that up. I understand your hesitation about having the government involved as there are plenty of examples of government influence on the media around the world. I share the same fears. With that said, do we really have any real world proof that the US government in recent years has over stepped its boundaries in regards to media restrictions?
- deleted 8y ago
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- kodablah 8y ago
  We don't all publish TV content. We can see from retransmission fees for over-the-air content to the decimation of business models like Aereo what happens when content is governed. I see the Aereo business model as very similar to what's happening w/ article 13 in the EU right now. But in general I don't think you can compare broadcast mediums to bidirectional ones (e.g. words on the telephone or text on the internet).
  - 8y ago

gammateam 8y ago

A more robust id solution which is applicable to entities with revenue over X would be a constitutional way to solve the issues discussed in the article The governments most successful crackdowns regulate the intermediaries So in graph theory, you look at the node you want to control and then take the complement and restrict the nodes in the complement, while prohibiting the target node from interaction with non-restricted nodes there is no sanction on non-restricted nodes and no sanction on the behavior of the target node, with voluntary compliance entered into by the restricted nodes Examples of this approach: Accredited investor regulation (non-accredited citizens not prohibited from investing, businesses risk consequences) Online gambling prohibition (citizens and online casinos not prohibited, voluntarily licensed financial institutions are prohibited from processing transactions)

ep103 8y ago

I'm increasingly of the position that without regulating these platforms, we don't ensure that they stay open and free, we ensure that they are controlled by foreign governments the occasional well-backed PR firm.

pixl97 8y ago
As for your end statement I'd say it's the other way around. They are commonly controlled by your well backed PR firm and occasionally controlled by governments.

burtonator 8y ago

One major issue is discriminatory access. They shouldn't be able to pick and choose who gets access to what APIs and under what terms. Everyone gets the same terms or no one does.

thisisweirdok 8y ago

>Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. If you're operating a business you fundamentally need that control. The platform you're talking about it the internet. It already exists. You can use it to say whatever you want within law. If you use someone else's servers to do so they can boot you, just like I can kick someone out of my house.

chii 8y ago
What's needed is not antitrust laws, but interoperability laws (or, construe them as antitrust laws). If there's interoperability between networks, then no one network can become dominant via momentum only, and has to actually provide value to users, and prevents lock-in.
chrischen 8y ago
what's the point of the internet if, due to network effects, everyone is using the facebook app?
- thisisweirdok 8y ago
  Which network effects are locking you in to using Facebook and not self-publishing, or using Twitter, reddit, hackernews, Medium, Tumblr, or any other website?
  - chrischen 8y ago
    Nobody is going to do the rounds to manually check their friends’ mediums, tumblrs, hacker news, reddit posts, for every friend.

knowThySelfx 8y ago

The problem is that FB and Twitter has become a regulating entity in themselves - often with a political slant.

pixl97 8y ago
I would add Google to that list, but they are generally quieter about their actions.

intended 8y ago

How will this solve any problems ? There’s several assumptions here (for example: more platforms will mean better ‘X’), but how would that link with the actual issues being faced by society vis-a-vis social media?

golemiprague 8y ago

How about the first amendment? Facebook and twitter are the de facto town square of the last decade, they should adopt free speech and stop censoring anything. Let the public decide what they want to consume and what not.

cabalamat 8y ago

> What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. One way to achieve that would be to require that platforms for user-generated content make that content available on open protocols, such as ActivityPub and RSS. > I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms [...] don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally Then they wouldn't be allowed to ban spam, which would be a regressive step.

ericd 8y ago

I think in order to have any effective antitrust action, interoperability needs to be mandated, with data being easily exportable/visible to other companies.

tokyodude 8y ago
that's far easier said than done. Simple example a basic chat who's only info is userId+message. Then service A decides they want userId+message+timeSent and service B decides to they want userId+message+userStatus(happy/sad/busy/away) and on and on. Basically forcing interoperability means a huge slowdown on innovation as you can't add anything without a committee and years of negociation
- pixl97 8y ago
  Heh, because Facebook has been so highly innovative lately. Just exempt 'small' services from the rule. Maybe this will kick some of the get big at all cost behavior that's permeated tech companies recently in the teeth.
- ericd 8y ago
  It’s really not that hard. I ran a site for many years that interfaced with hundreds of different sites. It could be as simple as not actively thwarting crawlers. Or in your example, they provide everything they have as an API and it’s up to the competitors to adapt to whatever features they provide. In which case, other companies can focus on the lowest common denominator and making that interoperable. It’s not perfect or seamless, but the baseline isn’t that hard, and that’s good enough for most people. And it’s funny you bring up messaging, for many years it was interoperable across many services via XMPP and it worked pretty well, until everyone decided it was in their competitive best interest to silo it. We really haven’t gained much in terms of innovation in that space since then, in many ways it’s much worse.

treis 8y ago

>What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform. There are a lot of platforms out there today. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and Whatsapp are all huge. Plus there are smaller players like Tumblr, Viber, Telegram and plenty of regional players. The only anti-trust error was allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. But that was a result of poorly enforcing existing laws not a regulatory gap.

ace_of_spades 8y ago

Find I find interesting is that there is little talk about actual attempts to provide solutions for this situation: Thee feediverse with mastodon, etc. or matrix.org. To bring it down to a populist formula: Why not make a law that requires the interoperability/federation of social networks? We have laws that set requirements for restaurants... why not for social networks?

sl1ck731 8y ago

How does anti-trust legislation work for these kind of sites? If Facebook was split up then what would stop a single identical entity from popping up in some other country that fills the niche for the entire world? I've seen it mentioned in various places on this site but I can't understand how it would work in practice.