9 ms·

Facebook's ‘oversight board’ is proof that it wants to be regulated by itself

123 points by caution 6y ago

nelsonic 6y ago
Covered by Wired in more detail last week: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-regulation https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-r... designed to "move slowly and keep things intact."
pacamara619 6y ago
In other news: water wet, sky blue. Jokes aside, not only Facebook but a lot of companies do that so it seems they are proactive while they pretty much do nothing valuable and hope they don't get regulated.
pesenti 6y ago
I am curious, given the international nature of Facebook which makes it hard to rely on country authorities to settle content moderation disputes: what would be a better alternative? (Disclaimer: I work at FB)
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  A stronger global government. Facebook is one of many global companies trying to abide by (or cheat) national laws and regulations. If they want to abide by the law, it can be very expensive and burdensome. If they want to cheat the law, they can play nation-states against each other. Global governance should better match global companies. Right now, many of the global laws and regulations seem more like suggestions than enforceable laws. I wonder if Facebook and other global companies want stronger global governance or prefer the status quo. In other words, would these companies want more standardization across regions or prefer to play the regions against each other?
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > what would be a better alternative? None. I see too often the argument 'it's difficult for company X to follow the law, so how should countries change the law to fit the company needs?'. I have worked for decades in regulated markets. It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports. But, we always follow the law, we do what local regulators ask us to do, we filter, or change the content to fit the local government decisions. Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit. If you work for Facebook, ask the company to look for experienced companies in regulated markets. And I do not mean just to hire lobbyists but to create a technical infrastructure that allows to follow the rule of law in all countries where it operates. To just lobby for more political power only makes Facebook mindset worse.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    > Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit. I wouldn't trust Facebook any further than I could throw my smartphone, but many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". All the censorship laws out there, lese majeste in Thailand, "don't allow insults to our religious feelings" in other jurisdictions... Then there's all the various forms of protectionism. "Society's needs" is not a phrase that can effectively advance our understanding of Facebook, and if we're going to talk about the goodness and badness of the mindset, we should be critical on both ends. Which needs are we talking about? Why does this society's rulers think it needs them, and not the society next door? And are these so-called needs really about entrenched powers oppressing someone?
    - pjmorris 6y ago
      > many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". Philosophical question: what is a better approach to advancing society's needs' than government and its regulations? If a given corporation, ala Friedman, best serves its owners by maximizing profit, it seems corporations are not in a position to serve any interests but their own.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  Each country makes its own rules and FB has to abide by all those which are relevant based on how content is distributed? That's rather the point of nation state (or supranational legislative bloc) sovereignty, you don't have to agree with anyone else to make the law.
foolzcrow 6y ago
Facebook needs to be regulated. They dont allow dissent or opinions that oppose their own. While controlling the vast majority of social media.
raspasov 6y ago
"Toxic business model" - oh yeah? Like the same one that pays the bills for theguardian.com? (I just disabled my ad-block and saw scammy+nasty "feet" ads of some sort, pretty sure those would not be allowed on FB.com) (edit: fixed The Guardian link)
- raspasov 6y ago
  Screenshot evidence https://ibb.co/VV0TmyY https://ibb.co/VV0TmyY
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Love their self-righteous call to action in the footer. "just when we need it the most. The Guardian’s honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting has never mattered more. As we face the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, we’ll remain with you, so we can all better understand and combat the crisis. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an existential threat. With advertising revenues plummeting, we risk losing a major source of our funding. More than ever before, we need your support to help fill the gap." According to The Guardian, The Guardian is honest, authoritative and fact-based. Easy enough to not use the site if I don't like it. The same applies for FB. Apparently non-violent opt-out isn't enough for The Guardian though. The Guardian (honest, authoritative) proposes that the state should guard us all from FB and their "supreme leader" Zuckerberg. At what point do the principles of private property and free speech no longer apply to the websites we create?
  - raspasov 6y ago
    Exactly my thoughts. Posted in the "opinion" section, I'll give them that. It's disappointing, I generally like The Guardian, especially what they did around publishing the Snowden docs initially.
  - makomk 6y ago
    Speaking of companies that want to regulate themselves, The Guardian is pretty much the only UK publication that's refused to join the industry-wide, nominally independent press regulator IPSO, which means that they're effectively the only one who are not held to any external standards regarding the honesty and factual accuracy of their reporting. Which is more than a little ironic in this context. They've also been using their opinion section to undermine IPSO for such offences as not being aggressive enough in helping their preferred political party send different messages to its members and its voters by forcing other publications to take down articles revealing to the everyone else what they've been telling their members. (Remember how we were told Facebook ads were a danger to democracy because they'd allow politicians to promote different, contradictory messages to different audiences?)
iamthemonster 6y ago
I work in a completely different industry, but it is a well-known principle that if you can show the regulator that you're regulating yourself effectively they'll leave you the fuck alone. As soon as a fuckup becomes public, the regulator will start delving into every detail of your fuckups (of which you have many). It costs money and ties up valuable resources to respond to the regulator when they start getting stuck into details, so it always pays dividends to maintain an outward display of effective self-regulation. It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.
- titzer 6y ago
  That's a bingo.
- draw_down 6y ago
  All of that is very contingent, even by your description. Facebook is itself very visible and in an industry that has a target painted on its back, and it's an election year in America. They could pull it off though, who knows.
- baryphonic 6y ago
  Peter Thiel has takes about this kind of propaganda (he calls it "lies") in the context of antitrust law. Firms in highly competitive markets will lie that they are highly differentiated from other firms, while monopolistic firms will lie that they are highly competitive.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  >It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves. Propaganda is right. Call me a cynic (because I am), but a significant portion of "effective" self-regulation is a self-interest spin on manipulating perception of efficacy. As long as you can spin your self-regulation to a point the outside mostly believes you, you can make compromises between what you should be doing and what you can get away with in the framework of profit seeking motives. Perhaps this is still more effective than external regulation? I'm skeptical.
michaelcampbell 6y ago
It reminds me of Bernie Madoff's brother being the Head of Compliance, although even HE was allegedly kept in the dark about the Ponzi scheme.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
crsmithdev 6y ago
Another breathless, gasping story about the evils of FB / technology / capitalism / <insert boogeyman here> from the Guardian, which has established itself as the nexus for alarmist 'journalism'. The footer: "in the coming year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times..." Doesn't sound much like a news outlet to me. ...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content, just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.
- adamsea 6y ago
  It's not like they have any context or history of gross, concerted efforts at manipulating public opinion through Facebook and/or a lack of social responsibility to draw upon. /s
  - creddit 6y ago
    But, like, here’s The Guardian having a go at a gross, concerted effort at manipulating public opinion. Should we have a problem with that?
    - adamsea 6y ago
      Yeah a newspaper article is not the same as a covert social media influence campaign :/. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
      - creddit 6y ago
        What gives the newspapers special status here that changes it from being apples to apples? Why do newspapers get to use broadcast media to influence the public but others aren’t allowed or at least should be looked at negatively?
        adamsea 6y ago
carapace 6y ago
I think the linked article at the bottom is more interesting ("Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic" https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how... ) I think FB is creepy af personally, but this article doesn't do a good job of reviewing the oversight board.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 6y ago
Their toilet systems also prove water is wet. In all seriousness though, Facebook get a lot of shit but they are at least trying to clean up their act. Legacy media has been vastly more corrupt and treacherous for decades and shows no sign of any reform.
- Traster 6y ago
  I'd love to see any evidence at all that Facebook is trying to clean up their act.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Lol, you’re commenting on an article criticising one such attempt!?
- MAGZine 6y ago
  Do you want to offer any evidence to substantiate either claim?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Most people want to self regulate. Some people want to get enough political power to regulate other people.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
"Facebook is not a public body: it's a powerful and rich global corporation with no democratic legitimacy" Facebook is a website. That is all. It does not even produce content, let alone run a business in the real world (e.g., Amazon). It is a remarkable phenomenon, no doubt, but it is just a website, with billions of template pages each filled in with data from users. They do not do anything else at Facebook except maintain a website and conduct surveillance. That's it. If someone tomorrow started a website and offered to give out free web pages (i.e., not a paid blogging patform, not Wix, etc.) without any surveillance or ads/promotions, would you sign up? There will always be naysayers whenever we share thoughts of the possibilities. Surely, if someone told you in 2003 that he/she was going to start a website that would sign up billions of users who would submit photos of themselves and personal information to be published, most of you would dismiss the idea as impossible. There was no such thing as a single public website with _billions_ of pages of personal information voluntarily submitted. The same goes for Wikipedia. What if someone told you in 2001 they were going to start a website and grow it to 53 million pages? No doubt, naysaysers would have asked "How do you make money?" It is a website. Anyone can start one. Of course, Facebook is not fond of this reality hence the notion of "platform". It is still a website. The fact that anyone can start a website is the only democratic aspect of the www.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  You are very dismissive of Facebook, yet I'm not sure what insight should be gleaned from this simplification. I'm open to understanding your point, but it sounds like your point is that Facebook is a website. And I'm not sure what insight that simplification allows me to unlock. Beyond being a website, it's also a mobile app, marketplace, communication platform, hardware manufacturer, and cultural driver. (Not to mention that it's a research organization, crisis response tool, ally to law enforcement, etc.) Would you similarly describe the US Constitution as a piece of paper? Such a simplistic reduction doesn't seem all that useful to me.
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    You write: "Beyond being a website, ..." This is what the author is upset about. He thinks Facebook believes it is something other than what it is, e.g., it behaves as if it were a nation state. When you continue: "it's also ...", you are simply referring to properties of computers, software, the internet and the www. This has been debated on HN before. Facebook is a website. If Facebook were implemented in distributed Rolodexes and analog photo albums I doubt you would be making such statements. As for the implication that a website, e.g., Facebook, can be compared to the US Consitution, this is the sort of thinking that sets off journalists and yields rants like the OP. Whereas you refer to my comment as "simplistic reduction", the author of the OP might refer to yours as "delusional thinking". The properties of the US Consitution that make it important do not come from the fact it is a piece of paper or the conveniences that paper allows. They come from what is written on the paper and the authors of the document. Facebook does not produce content. It manages a website full of content submitted by the public, then surveils and spams them to service advertisers and promoters, for a fee. The topic of the article is in fact how they purport to manage filtering that content. Much of the content on Facebook is very low quality. A website with billions of pages that takes submissions from the public, which has heaps of low quality content. Surprising. This is precisely what the web was designed for.
KaiserPro 6y ago
There are a bunch of problems with facebook. The biggest first one is moral cowardice. The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its "freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo of the like. (Fair enough.) They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards. So, instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules. The second problem is that they can't PR for shit. Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand. Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them. an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me about it that I realised what it was. The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are 20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff (when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift through mountains of mindfulness crap. In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.
nitwit005 6y ago
Governments are forcing companies like Facebook to act as a judge and decide what content is acceptable. Yes, I think that's stupid, but that's the reality. If you want some sort of democratic method for deciding this stuff, you need to get governments to stop dumping the problems on companies.

123 points by caution 6y ago

Covered by Wired in more detail last week: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-regulation https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-r... designed to "move slowly and keep things intact."

pacamara619 6y ago

In other news: water wet, sky blue. Jokes aside, not only Facebook but a lot of companies do that so it seems they are proactive while they pretty much do nothing valuable and hope they don't get regulated.

pesenti 6y ago

I am curious, given the international nature of Facebook which makes it hard to rely on country authorities to settle content moderation disputes: what would be a better alternative? (Disclaimer: I work at FB)

jimkleiber 6y ago
A stronger global government. Facebook is one of many global companies trying to abide by (or cheat) national laws and regulations. If they want to abide by the law, it can be very expensive and burdensome. If they want to cheat the law, they can play nation-states against each other. Global governance should better match global companies. Right now, many of the global laws and regulations seem more like suggestions than enforceable laws. I wonder if Facebook and other global companies want stronger global governance or prefer the status quo. In other words, would these companies want more standardization across regions or prefer to play the regions against each other?
Hokusai 6y ago
> what would be a better alternative? None. I see too often the argument 'it's difficult for company X to follow the law, so how should countries change the law to fit the company needs?'. I have worked for decades in regulated markets. It sucks to have a dozen implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly different reports. But, we always follow the law, we do what local regulators ask us to do, we filter, or change the content to fit the local government decisions. Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit. If you work for Facebook, ask the company to look for experienced companies in regulated markets. And I do not mean just to hire lobbyists but to create a technical infrastructure that allows to follow the rule of law in all countries where it operates. To just lobby for more political power only makes Facebook mindset worse.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  > Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit. I wouldn't trust Facebook any further than I could throw my smartphone, but many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". All the censorship laws out there, lese majeste in Thailand, "don't allow insults to our religious feelings" in other jurisdictions... Then there's all the various forms of protectionism. "Society's needs" is not a phrase that can effectively advance our understanding of Facebook, and if we're going to talk about the goodness and badness of the mindset, we should be critical on both ends. Which needs are we talking about? Why does this society's rulers think it needs them, and not the society next door? And are these so-called needs really about entrenched powers oppressing someone?
  - pjmorris 6y ago
    > many local laws are poorly tailored to advance "society's needs". Philosophical question: what is a better approach to advancing society's needs' than government and its regulations? If a given corporation, ala Friedman, best serves its owners by maximizing profit, it seems corporations are not in a position to serve any interests but their own.
NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
Each country makes its own rules and FB has to abide by all those which are relevant based on how content is distributed? That's rather the point of nation state (or supranational legislative bloc) sovereignty, you don't have to agree with anyone else to make the law.

foolzcrow 6y ago

Facebook needs to be regulated. They dont allow dissent or opinions that oppose their own. While controlling the vast majority of social media.

raspasov 6y ago

"Toxic business model" - oh yeah? Like the same one that pays the bills for theguardian.com? (I just disabled my ad-block and saw scammy+nasty "feet" ads of some sort, pretty sure those would not be allowed on FB.com) (edit: fixed The Guardian link)

raspasov 6y ago
Screenshot evidence https://ibb.co/VV0TmyY https://ibb.co/VV0TmyY
aww_dang 6y ago
Love their self-righteous call to action in the footer. "just when we need it the most. The Guardian’s honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting has never mattered more. As we face the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, we’ll remain with you, so we can all better understand and combat the crisis. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an existential threat. With advertising revenues plummeting, we risk losing a major source of our funding. More than ever before, we need your support to help fill the gap." According to The Guardian, The Guardian is honest, authoritative and fact-based. Easy enough to not use the site if I don't like it. The same applies for FB. Apparently non-violent opt-out isn't enough for The Guardian though. The Guardian (honest, authoritative) proposes that the state should guard us all from FB and their "supreme leader" Zuckerberg. At what point do the principles of private property and free speech no longer apply to the websites we create?
- raspasov 6y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Posted in the "opinion" section, I'll give them that. It's disappointing, I generally like The Guardian, especially what they did around publishing the Snowden docs initially.
- makomk 6y ago
  Speaking of companies that want to regulate themselves, The Guardian is pretty much the only UK publication that's refused to join the industry-wide, nominally independent press regulator IPSO, which means that they're effectively the only one who are not held to any external standards regarding the honesty and factual accuracy of their reporting. Which is more than a little ironic in this context. They've also been using their opinion section to undermine IPSO for such offences as not being aggressive enough in helping their preferred political party send different messages to its members and its voters by forcing other publications to take down articles revealing to the everyone else what they've been telling their members. (Remember how we were told Facebook ads were a danger to democracy because they'd allow politicians to promote different, contradictory messages to different audiences?)

iamthemonster 6y ago

I work in a completely different industry, but it is a well-known principle that if you can show the regulator that you're regulating yourself effectively they'll leave you the fuck alone. As soon as a fuckup becomes public, the regulator will start delving into every detail of your fuckups (of which you have many). It costs money and ties up valuable resources to respond to the regulator when they start getting stuck into details, so it always pays dividends to maintain an outward display of effective self-regulation. It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.

titzer 6y ago
That's a bingo.
draw_down 6y ago
All of that is very contingent, even by your description. Facebook is itself very visible and in an industry that has a target painted on its back, and it's an election year in America. They could pull it off though, who knows.
baryphonic 6y ago
Peter Thiel has takes about this kind of propaganda (he calls it "lies") in the context of antitrust law. Firms in highly competitive markets will lie that they are highly differentiated from other firms, while monopolistic firms will lie that they are highly competitive.
Frost1x 6y ago
>It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves. Propaganda is right. Call me a cynic (because I am), but a significant portion of "effective" self-regulation is a self-interest spin on manipulating perception of efficacy. As long as you can spin your self-regulation to a point the outside mostly believes you, you can make compromises between what you should be doing and what you can get away with in the framework of profit seeking motives. Perhaps this is still more effective than external regulation? I'm skeptical.

michaelcampbell 6y ago

It reminds me of Bernie Madoff's brother being the Head of Compliance, although even HE was allegedly kept in the dark about the Ponzi scheme.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

crsmithdev 6y ago

Another breathless, gasping story about the evils of FB / technology / capitalism / <insert boogeyman here> from the Guardian, which has established itself as the nexus for alarmist 'journalism'. The footer: "in the coming year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times..." Doesn't sound much like a news outlet to me. ...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content, just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.

adamsea 6y ago
It's not like they have any context or history of gross, concerted efforts at manipulating public opinion through Facebook and/or a lack of social responsibility to draw upon. /s
- creddit 6y ago
  But, like, here’s The Guardian having a go at a gross, concerted effort at manipulating public opinion. Should we have a problem with that?
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Yeah a newspaper article is not the same as a covert social media influence campaign :/. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
    - creddit 6y ago
      What gives the newspapers special status here that changes it from being apples to apples? Why do newspapers get to use broadcast media to influence the public but others aren’t allowed or at least should be looked at negatively?
      - adamsea 6y ago

carapace 6y ago

I think the linked article at the bottom is more interesting ("Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic" https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how... ) I think FB is creepy af personally, but this article doesn't do a good job of reviewing the oversight board.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

LatteLazy 6y ago

Their toilet systems also prove water is wet. In all seriousness though, Facebook get a lot of shit but they are at least trying to clean up their act. Legacy media has been vastly more corrupt and treacherous for decades and shows no sign of any reform.

Traster 6y ago
I'd love to see any evidence at all that Facebook is trying to clean up their act.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Lol, you’re commenting on an article criticising one such attempt!?
MAGZine 6y ago
Do you want to offer any evidence to substantiate either claim?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Most people want to self regulate. Some people want to get enough political power to regulate other people.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

"Facebook is not a public body: it's a powerful and rich global corporation with no democratic legitimacy" Facebook is a website. That is all. It does not even produce content, let alone run a business in the real world (e.g., Amazon). It is a remarkable phenomenon, no doubt, but it is just a website, with billions of template pages each filled in with data from users. They do not do anything else at Facebook except maintain a website and conduct surveillance. That's it. If someone tomorrow started a website and offered to give out free web pages (i.e., not a paid blogging patform, not Wix, etc.) without any surveillance or ads/promotions, would you sign up? There will always be naysayers whenever we share thoughts of the possibilities. Surely, if someone told you in 2003 that he/she was going to start a website that would sign up billions of users who would submit photos of themselves and personal information to be published, most of you would dismiss the idea as impossible. There was no such thing as a single public website with _billions_ of pages of personal information voluntarily submitted. The same goes for Wikipedia. What if someone told you in 2001 they were going to start a website and grow it to 53 million pages? No doubt, naysaysers would have asked "How do you make money?" It is a website. Anyone can start one. Of course, Facebook is not fond of this reality hence the notion of "platform". It is still a website. The fact that anyone can start a website is the only democratic aspect of the www.

edmundsauto 6y ago
You are very dismissive of Facebook, yet I'm not sure what insight should be gleaned from this simplification. I'm open to understanding your point, but it sounds like your point is that Facebook is a website. And I'm not sure what insight that simplification allows me to unlock. Beyond being a website, it's also a mobile app, marketplace, communication platform, hardware manufacturer, and cultural driver. (Not to mention that it's a research organization, crisis response tool, ally to law enforcement, etc.) Would you similarly describe the US Constitution as a piece of paper? Such a simplistic reduction doesn't seem all that useful to me.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  You write: "Beyond being a website, ..." This is what the author is upset about. He thinks Facebook believes it is something other than what it is, e.g., it behaves as if it were a nation state. When you continue: "it's also ...", you are simply referring to properties of computers, software, the internet and the www. This has been debated on HN before. Facebook is a website. If Facebook were implemented in distributed Rolodexes and analog photo albums I doubt you would be making such statements. As for the implication that a website, e.g., Facebook, can be compared to the US Consitution, this is the sort of thinking that sets off journalists and yields rants like the OP. Whereas you refer to my comment as "simplistic reduction", the author of the OP might refer to yours as "delusional thinking". The properties of the US Consitution that make it important do not come from the fact it is a piece of paper or the conveniences that paper allows. They come from what is written on the paper and the authors of the document. Facebook does not produce content. It manages a website full of content submitted by the public, then surveils and spams them to service advertisers and promoters, for a fee. The topic of the article is in fact how they purport to manage filtering that content. Much of the content on Facebook is very low quality. A website with billions of pages that takes submissions from the public, which has heaps of low quality content. Surprising. This is precisely what the web was designed for.

KaiserPro 6y ago

There are a bunch of problems with facebook. The biggest first one is moral cowardice. The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its "freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo of the like. (Fair enough.) They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards. So, instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules. The second problem is that they can't PR for shit. Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand. Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them. an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me about it that I realised what it was. The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are 20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff (when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift through mountains of mindfulness crap. In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.

nitwit005 6y ago

Governments are forcing companies like Facebook to act as a judge and decide what content is acceptable. Yes, I think that's stupid, but that's the reality. If you want some sort of democratic method for deciding this stuff, you need to get governments to stop dumping the problems on companies.