9 ms·

What absolute mindless drivel! Mr. Clegg starts his opinion piece with a nirvana fallacy: breaking up Facebook won't solve all the world's problem, so why bothe

by oil25 7y ago

What absolute mindless drivel! Mr. Clegg starts his opinion piece with a nirvana fallacy: breaking up Facebook won't solve all the world's problem, so why bother? More appeals are made throughout to Facebook's large user-base, as justification for continued market dominance. Yet Mr. Clegg claims anti-trust laws do not apply to Facebook those laws are to ensure "low-cost, high-quality products" - and since Facebook is free, they're immune from such rules. He proudly denigrates and defies the laws simply because they were "developed in the 1800s" which is an outright disgrace. I find his arguments wholly unedifying and severely lacking in substance and creativity. That pro-Facebook propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of publishing (in NYTimes of all places!) is frankly a disappointment.

remarkEon 7y ago
>That pro-Facebook propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of publishing (in NYTimes of all places!) is frankly a disappointment. Ehh this seems completely appropriate to me. NYT often publishes controversial OpEds (including from Putin in the past). This seems well in line with the mandate of established media outlets.
- livueta 7y ago
  Moreso, given that it's a direct response to a previously-published op-ed arguing the opposite side: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hugh... I agree that this response is drivel, but not affording FB the opportunity to respond in kind smacks of bias. If the NYT had really sacrificed all objectivity in their campaign against their main rival for eyeballs, they would simply have not published this and allowed their readership to assume that the anti-FB piece had gone unanswered. In this case the NYT is acting as a somewhat neutral stage for a public debate, a role which I think is important when it's very easy for both sides to talk past each other to different audiences. Think for a minute on whether you'd have read this rebuttal if it were posted on FB, instead of in the same medium as the argument it is responding to. Would you, as a presumed Facebook detector, have even read it then? I probably wouldn't have.

by oil25 7y ago

remarkEon 7y ago

>That pro-Facebook propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of publishing (in NYTimes of all places!) is frankly a disappointment. Ehh this seems completely appropriate to me. NYT often publishes controversial OpEds (including from Putin in the past). This seems well in line with the mandate of established media outlets.

livueta 7y ago
Moreso, given that it's a direct response to a previously-published op-ed arguing the opposite side: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hugh... I agree that this response is drivel, but not affording FB the opportunity to respond in kind smacks of bias. If the NYT had really sacrificed all objectivity in their campaign against their main rival for eyeballs, they would simply have not published this and allowed their readership to assume that the anti-FB piece had gone unanswered. In this case the NYT is acting as a somewhat neutral stage for a public debate, a role which I think is important when it's very easy for both sides to talk past each other to different audiences. Think for a minute on whether you'd have read this rebuttal if it were posted on FB, instead of in the same medium as the argument it is responding to. Would you, as a presumed Facebook detector, have even read it then? I probably wouldn't have.