Flack or slack? They don’t get much slack ‘round these parts and in fact get lots of flack. I just checked the article. Proposal #1 is primarily there to limit

Flack or slack? They don’t get much slack ‘round these parts and in fact get lots of flack. I just checked the article. Proposal #1 is primarily there to limit Facebook’s liability. That said, it is incompatible with the First Amendment. A government or government sponsored regulatory body deciding what is socially harmful speech is precisely what the First Amendment guards against. You would have to go with a corporate governed body on a corporate volunteer basis for it to be a meaningful proposal. Essentially, Facebook can ban le Nazis, but the US Government can’t. 2 is arguably a good proposal, but it isn’t a new proposal. To the extent that the People in Power give a damn about protecting the integrity of elections, it is to protect their own seats. When election integrity is inconvenient, it gets pushed down as a non-issue. The real goal here is to force Facebook’s ad competitors to play on the same playing field as Facebook has been pressured into to stave off further regulation. This is regulation to protect their business, and if it happens to also protect what is left of the integrity of our elections, elections that the Russians didn’t make a considerable dent in the last time around despite their best efforts, great. There are however more effective measures to defend the integrity of our elections, if we care to. 3 and 4 are both items that Facebook could roll out globally if they cared, so I’m inclined to believe that on Facebook’s political calculus, they have determined that it is politically expedient for them to come out for GDPR-style rules globally, even if they could already provide their global user base the same tools, rights and privileges afforded their European users by GDPR. Data portability is a technical challenge that is relatively easily resolved. The primary politics involved in preventing this are corporate, not governmental, and back when Web 2.0 was hot stuff, open standards were both expected and the default. Facebook played an enormous role in data portability backsliding on the web. If Facebook wants to bring out data privacy protections and data portability, then I’ll believe it when I see it. There aren’t any laws preventing this now.