Why is that mechanism so much worse than, say, a Donald Trump stooge deciding on how to enforce transparent, viewpoint neutral criteria?
It makes me happy to see Trump and his ilk booted from platforms. It also makes me very uneasy. FB and Twitter are how people communicate now, they are the community square. It does not seem good for a very few people to control access to that forum.
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Right now, if a railroad wants to end service to a customer or triple his rate or something, the railroad has to do so in a way that is in accordance with the regulations of and is subject to the approval of the bipartisan Surface Transportation Board. The decisions of which can be challenged in federal court. This seems like a much better system than letting the railroad tycoons do whatever they want. So that sort of arrangement is what I’m proposing.
Making an unaccountable court consisting of lifetime appointees who can write self-contradictory reasons for their decisions the final arbiter of social media regulation doesn’t seem to be the massive win for transparency and accountability that you think it is.
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If the model is the Surface Transportation Board, they have five year terms and they aren’t the final arbiter. Their decisions can be challenged in federal court.
If Zuckerberg steps too far out of line, government will seize control of Facebook. These companies aren’t without limit.
Like if he allowed his platform to be used by people to incite an insurrection?
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I honestly don’t know where I sit on this issue but don’t think it’s a clear cut and some here pretend. A few years ago we were all praising social media during the Arab Spring, which was also an insurrection. Seems odd to praise Facebook for that one and blame them for this one.
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Insurrection against dictators → good
Insurrection against democratically elected government → bad
Doesn’t seem all that odd to me.
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Sure but you you want Facebook making that decision?
Just break up Facebook. The solution to a company having too much power over national discourse is to break them up, not to give neo-Nazis a platform to spread their hate and organize terrorist attacks on our capitol.
Plus Facebook should’ve died off along time ago. They’ve only survived due to anti-competitive practices and infecting themselves into every part of our lives. There is no question that Facebook has been a massive net negative on society.
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How does this even happen without running into the same issues already mentioned in the thread?
Boom. And it is Econ 101. Adam Smith would have broken them up a long time ago.
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I’m a freedom lover and don’t even like to think of it as breaking companies up. Big companies exist because of laws and policing by government. Just stop protecting them and they can’t get so ginormous. Like courts will no longer enforce Facebook IP protection. That has limits. Courts will hold owners of facebook liable for their actions the way they would any mom and pop who own a business as opposed to allowing them to be held unaccountable because of this “fictitious person”. Owners will lose the tax advantages.
It’s reasonable for society to grant some of these protections to corporations because it’s good for society (maybe), but it’s not some kind of natural right. It’s a carve out. It’s an unnatural right and that should be kept in mind. Don’t grant it to enterprises that are so enourmously powerful and monopolistic.
- I don’t think FB is powerful because of IP, it’s more that they were first to market and achieved a critical mass of market saturation that makes it tough to touch.
- Not sure how you could hold them ‘liable for their actions the way they would any mom and pop’ would.
If you want to break fb up, don’t think these would do much… if anything.
Why Facebook and not MySpace?
No idea, but Facebook was so much more popular than MySpace very quickly.
“Break up facebook” is pointless at its core. The problem is the blue app, not Instagram Whatsapp Oculus etc. Unless Zuck gets sent to pasture and someone gets put in who cares about society at large, enough to actually try to fix the lies being spread there, nothing will or can happen with the first amendment.
I’m sure people will come up with a decentralized social media platform if you drive these companies out of business.
Mastodon is a distributed alternative to Twitter. Adopters include the alt-right Gab, as well as sex workers after FOSTA/SESTA. So stuff like that will pop and eventually they’ll figure out something that does the same things as Facebook in terms of enabling like-minded people to form communities not bound by geography.