5 ms·

> Zuckerberg should take note. Yes, it’s crazy for one person to have such massive control over what people say online. But like it or not, our system gives lea

> Zuckerberg should take note. Yes, it’s crazy for one person to have such massive control over what people say online. But like it or not, our system gives leaders of huge corporations massive power. In his total control of Facebook, he must be the arbiter—of harm. We must demand that he perform that role in the best possible way, minimizing the toxic speech posted by his customers, whether they are peons or presidents. His employees are speaking out. His billions of users should let him know as well. And the government should back off. And when Zuckerberg steps down as the CEO of facebook and his successor is someone leaning towards a different political ideology - what happens then? The next CEO of Facebook is not an elected official. Unless you count Wall Street appointed board of directors approving a successor as somehow being representative democracy. I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech - Facebook engineers have incredible impact in connecting friends and families all over the world. Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted.

igammarays 6y ago
> I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech You missed the whole point of the article, which is that "building tech" at that scale is inseparable from widespread political implications.
mrits 6y ago
Alex Jones is the new CEO of Twitter. How would we think differently about the real problem here?
- espadrine 6y ago
  > Alex Jones is the new CEO of Twitter. How would we think differently about the real problem here? That is a useful question to showcase an important aspect that I don’t see discussed. There is a single government, while there must be multiple competing private corporations. Twitter vs. Gab, Youtube vs. Liveleak: each corporation is defined by what it refuses, NOT by what it accepts. So, if Alex Jones becomes CEO of Twitter and puts “Did you know? The Earth is flat.” on all tweets mentioning SpaceX, users will simply move to a greener pasture. Twitter will die when its business model loses viability. Twitter’s moves are not political, they are economical first and foremost! The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term. > [T]he company claimed $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, and a 31% boost in sales. – https://www.fastcompany.com/90399316/one-year-later-what-did-we-learn-from-nikes-blockbuster-colin-kaepernick-ad https://www.fastcompany.com/90399316/one-year-later-what-did...
  - mrits 6y ago
    If what you are saying is true then there is no need to censor. In your scenario people already know what is propaganda. Twitter allowed Oprah getting arrested for sex trafficking to trend to #1. There was no financial hit for that.
    - espadrine 6y ago
      I think your misconception is that content has positive value. Content can definitely have negative value. More is sometimes worse. The extremes are obvious (users gain less value from a website with more bullying), but the principle is true even in the middle ground. While good advice brings value, bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere, or causes their ruin and subsequent decrease in value to advertisers. Even when the content does not have negative value, if it floods content with positive value, people no longer get the value they used to.
      - mrits 6y ago
        "While good advice brings value" -- absolutely it doesn't "bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere" -- absolutely it doesn't
  - remarkEon 6y ago
    >The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term. This is extremely charitable to Nike, assuming that they internally had some meeting about correcting racial injustices or something and not that they decided to capitalize on a moment in the political zeitgeist. Even if the ad was hated it would have generated enormous free marketing for the company. I tend to agree that these companies will make economic decisions first, most of the time, but over the last couple years we've seen many companies explicitly intertwine the two - where making political statements as marketing is now common. I'd be very very skeptical that they have anything but dollar signs in their eyes.
    - 6y ago
- foxes 6y ago
  Yep, the real problem is conservatives/right wing.
aeternum 6y ago
I'd argue that Zuckerberg was elected. People voted by signing up for his website and using it regularly because it was better than the alternatives at the time. People are free to stop using facebook and move to a different site, as many have. This only requires a few clicks. I overwhelmingly prefer the option of having many companies to choose from vs. having the government or laws determine what is truth. Switching governments often requires either a revolution or a decade-long immigration process.
salimmadjd 6y ago
> Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted. I'm 100% with you. I actually think Zuck is showing incredible leadership and vision under all these pressure and my respect for him has grown enormously (BTW I've voted Democrat all my life). My belief is Facebook is a tremendous challenge to the established media and their owners. What Facebook does, it actually democratizes ability of smaller publishers to have the potential to reach the same volume of audience as the corporate media. This is upsetting to the old guards and what I'm seeing is a chorus of pressure on Facebook to basically limit information distribution to the same old guards. As a reminder, many people believe Trump was elected because of Facebook. This narrative is mostly created and pushed by the mainstream media (the old guards). However, data shows Trump rode on $5 billion of free coverage [0]. We also know that around 8.5 million of 2012 Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016 (about 2-2.5 million 2012 Romney voters vote for Hillary). [1] The reality is my party, the Democratic Party has been moving economically to the right and socially to the left. That's great for many people in SF or NY, but it has impacted many working class people who were traditionally Democrats. Blaming FB is a very convenient way for the Party to brush off responsibility of failing the people and pointing the fingers at Zuck. Facebook has a lot of reach, don't get me wrong. But as data showed these claims of interferences by foreign powers, which implies we need to control Facebook were overblown as Nate Silver who best predicted the 2016 results summarized the best [2]. I'm of the opinion Obama would have not won without social media nor we would have gone to the disastrous Iraq War if we had Facebook or something as strong as the reach of Facebook back in 2003. There are some of us who remember the yellow stickers of "Support our Troops" campaign in parallel with mainstream narratives[3] that created the mass hysteria and momentum to build consensus to go invade Iraq and in the process killed a lot of innocent people. The mainstream media not only didn't do much to challenge the Bush 43 administration it ratted out the person who was investigating the infamous yellow cake connection [4]. Years later everyone did a mea culpa, but it was too late. By some account close to 400,000 Iraqis were killed [5] and we're still paying the price of the Iraq War. So I agree, there is decent chance the person replacing Zuck one day will have a completely different political views. Maybe a hawk (appointed by Wall Street) who will hire a new executive team around himself or herself and help push a narrative that favors the board members who put them into that position. It is very shortsighted for Silicon Valley to push Zuck to control the narrative anymore than Facebook is already doing. It'll normalize censorship so when the next person takes over they can easily put more control and censorship without much resistance. So please stop. Zuck is right and we should really back him up on this (and no, I don't for FB nor I'm friends or connected with Zuck). [0]https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house-13896916 https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi... [1]http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama-2012-trump-2016-voters-were-there/ http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-m... [2]https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1074833714931224582?lang=en https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1074833714931224582... [3]https://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/ https://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/ [4]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/wilson.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/intervi... [5]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3797136/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3797136/

igammarays 6y ago

> I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech You missed the whole point of the article, which is that "building tech" at that scale is inseparable from widespread political implications.

mrits 6y ago

Alex Jones is the new CEO of Twitter. How would we think differently about the real problem here?

espadrine 6y ago
> Alex Jones is the new CEO of Twitter. How would we think differently about the real problem here? That is a useful question to showcase an important aspect that I don’t see discussed. There is a single government, while there must be multiple competing private corporations. Twitter vs. Gab, Youtube vs. Liveleak: each corporation is defined by what it refuses, NOT by what it accepts. So, if Alex Jones becomes CEO of Twitter and puts “Did you know? The Earth is flat.” on all tweets mentioning SpaceX, users will simply move to a greener pasture. Twitter will die when its business model loses viability. Twitter’s moves are not political, they are economical first and foremost! The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term. > [T]he company claimed $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, and a 31% boost in sales. – https://www.fastcompany.com/90399316/one-year-later-what-did-we-learn-from-nikes-blockbuster-colin-kaepernick-ad https://www.fastcompany.com/90399316/one-year-later-what-did...
- mrits 6y ago
  If what you are saying is true then there is no need to censor. In your scenario people already know what is propaganda. Twitter allowed Oprah getting arrested for sex trafficking to trend to #1. There was no financial hit for that.
  - espadrine 6y ago
    I think your misconception is that content has positive value. Content can definitely have negative value. More is sometimes worse. The extremes are obvious (users gain less value from a website with more bullying), but the principle is true even in the middle ground. While good advice brings value, bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere, or causes their ruin and subsequent decrease in value to advertisers. Even when the content does not have negative value, if it floods content with positive value, people no longer get the value they used to.
    - mrits 6y ago
      "While good advice brings value" -- absolutely it doesn't "bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere" -- absolutely it doesn't
- remarkEon 6y ago
  >The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term. This is extremely charitable to Nike, assuming that they internally had some meeting about correcting racial injustices or something and not that they decided to capitalize on a moment in the political zeitgeist. Even if the ad was hated it would have generated enormous free marketing for the company. I tend to agree that these companies will make economic decisions first, most of the time, but over the last couple years we've seen many companies explicitly intertwine the two - where making political statements as marketing is now common. I'd be very very skeptical that they have anything but dollar signs in their eyes.
  - 6y ago
foxes 6y ago
Yep, the real problem is conservatives/right wing.

aeternum 6y ago

I'd argue that Zuckerberg was elected. People voted by signing up for his website and using it regularly because it was better than the alternatives at the time. People are free to stop using facebook and move to a different site, as many have. This only requires a few clicks. I overwhelmingly prefer the option of having many companies to choose from vs. having the government or laws determine what is truth. Switching governments often requires either a revolution or a decade-long immigration process.

salimmadjd 6y ago

> Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted. I'm 100% with you. I actually think Zuck is showing incredible leadership and vision under all these pressure and my respect for him has grown enormously (BTW I've voted Democrat all my life). My belief is Facebook is a tremendous challenge to the established media and their owners. What Facebook does, it actually democratizes ability of smaller publishers to have the potential to reach the same volume of audience as the corporate media. This is upsetting to the old guards and what I'm seeing is a chorus of pressure on Facebook to basically limit information distribution to the same old guards. As a reminder, many people believe Trump was elected because of Facebook. This narrative is mostly created and pushed by the mainstream media (the old guards). However, data shows Trump rode on $5 billion of free coverage [0]. We also know that around 8.5 million of 2012 Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016 (about 2-2.5 million 2012 Romney voters vote for Hillary). [1] The reality is my party, the Democratic Party has been moving economically to the right and socially to the left. That's great for many people in SF or NY, but it has impacted many working class people who were traditionally Democrats. Blaming FB is a very convenient way for the Party to brush off responsibility of failing the people and pointing the fingers at Zuck. Facebook has a lot of reach, don't get me wrong. But as data showed these claims of interferences by foreign powers, which implies we need to control Facebook were overblown as Nate Silver who best predicted the 2016 results summarized the best [2]. I'm of the opinion Obama would have not won without social media nor we would have gone to the disastrous Iraq War if we had Facebook or something as strong as the reach of Facebook back in 2003. There are some of us who remember the yellow stickers of "Support our Troops" campaign in parallel with mainstream narratives[3] that created the mass hysteria and momentum to build consensus to go invade Iraq and in the process killed a lot of innocent people. The mainstream media not only didn't do much to challenge the Bush 43 administration it ratted out the person who was investigating the infamous yellow cake connection [4]. Years later everyone did a mea culpa, but it was too late. By some account close to 400,000 Iraqis were killed [5] and we're still paying the price of the Iraq War. So I agree, there is decent chance the person replacing Zuck one day will have a completely different political views. Maybe a hawk (appointed by Wall Street) who will hire a new executive team around himself or herself and help push a narrative that favors the board members who put them into that position. It is very shortsighted for Silicon Valley to push Zuck to control the narrative anymore than Facebook is already doing. It'll normalize censorship so when the next person takes over they can easily put more control and censorship without much resistance. So please stop. Zuck is right and we should really back him up on this (and no, I don't for FB nor I'm friends or connected with Zuck). [0]https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house-13896916 https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi... [1]http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama-2012-trump-2016-voters-were-there/ http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-m... [2]https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1074833714931224582?lang=en https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1074833714931224582... [3]https://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/ https://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/ [4]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/wilson.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/intervi... [5]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3797136/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3797136/