Someone’s being studying strategy. This is a great move for FB. This is the correct strategic move - punting the ball. Fundamentally most people, and that inc

Someone’s being studying strategy. This is a great move for FB. This is the correct strategic move - punting the ball. Fundamentally most people, and that includes most people even on tech websites like HN, don’t understand that social media governance is a black hole which leads to hell. By pushing the ball into the regulator’s courts, he’s hoping to divorce himself of the baggage of lawsuits and moderation costs. Moderation work is fractal in nature - the more nuanced your rules, the more training surface area for abusers. Leading to more nuanced ways to define the same issue, but the overall structure not changing. That means it’s a cost/spending black hole as well. This day was coming anyway, no matter what the free speech advocates who’ve never had to moderate difficult forums have to say. I’m an active mod elsewhere and its obvious to me that the internet and social media firms will dump the costs of actually moderating the web at first chance. It would eat their income almost entirely. There’s no automated way to fix this so scaling is man power driven. The manpower issues are simple anyway - deciding whether something is newsworthy or whether it will be pg-13/A/or PEGI-x is a whole different problem. This means a national editorial desk in each country. So all the benefits SM firms have been enjoying by sucking up the benefit of attention which used to be filtered by editor and journalists teams now has to be spent. (I recognize that news was dying before the internet.) Facebook has the answer. It’s good PR. It’s good law. And it’s good for profits.