I have been a user of Facebook for about a decade now and, to some degree, have grown weary of it. To some extent I have become worn down by the constant flow of outrage and venting on its pages from friends and acquaintances, and have started to see more signs of this sort of behaviour myself. I think Facebook is starting to become toxic, so I decided yesterday to go on a Facebook sabbatical, and do old fashioned stuff like read books, tend to my terrace garden and get out and about a lot more instead. And I suspect I’m not unique.
These thoughts of mine come up because there is mounting pressure, it seems, for lawmakers in Washington DC or other places to “do something” about Facebook following revelations about the use/misuse of users’ private data. My brief take on this is that anyone using Facebook should assume as a starting point that they are on a public forum, and exercise due care and attention. (I don’t use its messenger function and prefer Whatsapp instead, or indeed, good old email.) And no-one is forcing me to use Facebook. It may be inconvenient in some ways to give it the cold shoulder, but no more.
With that in mind I reject this sort of argument, in the Wall Street Journal, which ought to know better:
Facebook Inc.’s climb to the pinnacle of business success was nurtured by a grand policy experiment: that a light regulatory touch would turbocharge innovation and make consumers wealthier and happier. Companies who mistreated their customers would succumb to competitors, or be punished with rules already on the books.
The events of the last few months suggest the experiment may have run its course. It has left Facebook effectively an unregulated monopoly and despite founder Mark Zuckerberg’s latest apologies, the company has little economic incentive to change its ways. Its business is to sell its users’ attention to advertisers and thus it must keep pushing the boundaries on privacy, while the paucity of competition limits the consequences if it goes too far. If policy makers want to change that calculus—a big if—they will either have to enact tougher regulation, or use antitrust authority to nurture more competition.
There is no need to re-run the mistaken anti-trust wars against the Standard Oils or Microsofts of the past (both largely unjustified). Facebook will, unless it changes significantly in my view, be threatened most effectively by competition, as has been the case down the decades. The cycle is always the same: we are told that a firm is “too big” or a monopolist and that something must be done about it; and about the same time, new competitors and business models are taking form so that by the time the government action occurs, the new business models are already pushing into the field. This is the classic “creative destruction” of the free market and I don’t expect the situation with Facebook to be any different from earlier business episodes.
One final thought: the complaints about Facebook, a social media platform that was born in US higher education dorm-rooms, has all the trappings of a classic “First World” problem. In Syria, North Korea or Venezuela, I doubt very much that the locals’ main concerns are about people saying mean things on Facebook.
Here is a good take on the issue by Robert Tracinski.
I used to laugh at David Icke’s claim that the world was run by “lizard people”, but after seeing extracts of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to congress I’m not so sure. I’ve never seen someone struggle quite so much to give the appearance of being human…
The problem with facebook isn’t facebook 😛 it is facebook being co-opted by the US government (and other governments) as an adjunct of state mass surveillance & state control. The solution is not state regulation or a purported lack therefore, it is for a critical mass of people to stop using facebook. That might seems a quixotic notion but tech giants do not endure.
The government interest in Facebook isn’t really about data misuse, or anything like that. The real aim is to enable the ramping up of the censorship of political opinion under the guise of blocking ‘hate speech’.
Of course.
That is a classic example of a static view of the world: if some company is currently a “monopoly” (or if some person is currently poor compared to most, or there is some other phenomenon seen as negative by the reasonable majority), then it will never change, unless “we do something about it”. Of course some times something must be done about certain problems, but in other times things are best left alone to sort themselves out over time. Too many people seem to be unaware of utility of the second option.
I think the problem is, when we view history, a fifty-year period is a barely measurable flash in the pan, but when we think about our own time, fifty years is forever. Fifty years also seems to be the outside life of a monopoly.
We can talk about monopoly as a quickly self-correcting thing, without acknowledging that, before correction occurs, we could see twelve different USA presidents. That’s enough time to effect great social change.
So, before a monopoly naturally self-corrects, it could have profound negative influence over the course of our society.
The pro-regulation side’s argument isn’t that the monopoly won’t self-correct, but that it’s a slow process and much harm can be done while awaiting the correction.
Fair point. Of course then the main argument must be one showing that regulation tends to strengthen monopolies rather then weaken them, which naturally leads back to my prior point. As JP says, the only effective way to weaken monopolies is for their customers/users to stop using them, and sometimes there are simply no good shortcuts.
Perfect opportunity for an entrepreneur like Peter Thiel and others like him to start a competitor. That company should issue a set 5, 10 20 rules that states they will not remove
a page simply because the Cultural Marxists, Islamo- Fascists and other assorted jackasses object. If a company were to do that people all over the world would bail on Facebook. Facebook would likely survive but its market cap would be shrunk – Big Time.
It generally is actually. Many people on the left (indeed most in my experience) regard monopoly (or oligopoly) as the inevitable end-point of capitalism & only the state can prevent that. In reality the reverse is true (a monopoly can only survive if the state enforces it & prevents competitors from emerging).
This is yet more evidence for my hypothesis that industrial and consumer regulations come mainly in two forms: those that are requested by the industry itself for the advantage of an incumbent or incumbents (elevators, aviation, telecom); and those that are implemented in an attempt to solve a legitimate problem that is already on its way to resolving itself (seat belts, motorcycle helmets, Windows, Facebook). Whenever I investigate an industrial or consumer regulation I invariably find this.
The second type is probably somewhat related to bobby b’s point about time. But it’s not just that these things resolve themselves in half a century. Typically, the solution has actually already started to kick in by the time governments start proposing legislation. It’s more that legislators’ and voters’ thinking and opinions are always behind what’s actually happening. I guess another factor is that some legislators and voters get on a morally-charged campaign and then, rather than realize that the problem is resolving itself and backing down, they isolate themselves in a bubble of like-minded people, and press on.
Thinking more about that latter point, a more general problem is the propensity to force solutions on people rather than doing the hard work of convincing them that something is to their own advantage. That comes into play even when the argument in favour of something is rock solid, such as with seat belts. But I suspect I’m preaching to the converted on that point, here at Samizdata.
“The cycle is always the same: we are told that a firm is “too big” or a monopolist and that something must be done about it; and about the same time, new competitors and business models are taking form so that by the time the government action occurs, the new business models are already pushing into the field.”
And by the time the competitors are in a position to actually compete, the government regulation is in place that not only keeps them from effectively competing, but permanently ensconces the incumbent. Your tax bux at work.
I’m struggling to understand exactly what it is that people think Facebook has a monopoly on. It can’t be “social media”, because we’re told that Twitter, Reddit, and even YouTube come under that category. As far as I can make out, it’s “being Facebook”.
To which I can only say, “So what?”.
Seems only fair Zuckerberg’s Facebook receives the government intervention he believes will benefit the rest of us.
Maybe some of the other web geeks running huge companies will pay attention and adjust their politics…..
Facebook and the other social media companies, Twitter and YouTube (Google), market themselves as open – neutral and unbiased. And they are not neutral and unbiased – they are biased in favour of the left and hit conservatives in various ways.
Either these companies must stop marketing themselves as neutral and unbiased (must stop LYING), or they must actually be neutral and unbiased – no more hitting conservatives for “hate speech” and all the other persecution and abuse the Social Media companies practice against the foes of the left.
It really is that simple – either actually be neutral and unbiased, or openly admit that you (the social media companies) side with the left. Stop trying to con people.
There is no way, ever, that such intervention would be confined to FB.
I’m not keen on new regulation, for the reasons already given above (I especially endorse Tedd’s point that in the case the government ‘solves’ a real problem, it often begins doing so just as the problem is starting to diminish of itself). I do not regret that this debate has taken the shine off Zuckerberg et al, and hurt the narrative (and may assist rivals to reduce facebook’s dominance).
Would enforcing existing common carrier law on them address Paul’s point (Paul Marks, April 12, 2018 at 8:56 pm) and be an honest application of existing law?
Maybe, rather than imposing new regulation, we simply re-evalute existing legislation. (USA-centric stuff follows.)
Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and their ilk currently enjoy a rather broad protection against legal liability for what appears on their pages, on the theory that they act as common carriers, allowing everyone to board neutrally, without regard to who they are or what they say. (See the DMCA – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.) This essentially extends to internet providers the same protection given to the phone company, which never gets sued when you say illegal things over the phone.
In theory, once a provider (such as FB) starts taking active control over what others place on its platform, it is supposed to lose this protection. Zuckerberg may have shot FB in the foot in his recent Congressional comments when he said that FB is responsible for content. It’s that responsibility that negates the whole “but we didn’t say that, our users did” excuse for the defamation, copyright violation, etc., that happens daily on FB but which isn’t legally chargeable to FB.
So, a re-examination of the safe harbor given to FB by the DMCA might be just the thing needed now. Once FB takes a hand in crafting, or swaying, its user-generated content, it’s no longer a common carrier. It’s a publisher, with all of the legal responsibilities of a publisher.
Once they lose this protection, FB and Twitter and YouTube will die under the thousands of stolen-music lawsuits that will immediately pop up, plus all of the defamation claims people will bring, the privacy-related suits from people whose racy pictures have been put on FB pages, . . . For any violation, if you can’t reach the person who posted something illegal, or if they have insufficient assets to make it worthwhile, you simply include FB or TWTR or YT as a defendant.
Look. Facebook, in this day and age, is a necessary component of our infrastructure. So perhaps it should be considered as a common carrier, since it is operating as a monopoly (I guess), and it should be required to transmit whatever content anybody wants to communicate to other people via Facebook.
Just like, for example, the Electric Company, or the Gas Company, or the TelCo.
/REMOVES tongue from cheek/
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I’ve been wishing for this topic to come up ever since I heard the guys at “Right Angle” — Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, Stephen Green: the old Trifecta gang — considering the suggestions above with respect to Facebook.
UT .com/watch?v=Ka5u2XJZ-jk&index=9&list=PLobA-WQ_mD_dZOkserCfLTdI2B7wJoJJr&t=0s .
(For anyone who might not have made their acquaintance, they do like to make humorous little jabs and off-the-wall suggestions, so one must exercise some judgment as to whose tongue is in which cheek when.) Anyhow, they’re exploring the issue. I don’t care for what they’ve come up with so far, but with time they may come to see things a little differently. And they do seem fairly sure that in any case, FB is going to burn itself out and go the way of Myspace and AOL.
As a matter of fact, part of their discussion rests on the assumptions that are deeply embedded in Richard’s (Epstein’s) view of “long, skinny network systems which must be regulated under rules that apply specifically to Common Carriers — have to serve all comers, rates will be regulated one way or another, what other businesses (like local RR’s or TelCo’s) will be allowed to connect where, so forth. Because after all, the customer has nowhere else to go given the barriers to entry that cause the businesses operating these networks to be monopolies in practice.
The Foot of all Knowledge has a fairly detailed history (and, in my opinion, the eventual demise) of the once-great Bell Telephone System, at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
How accurate and complete it is, I have no idea. But because I know that all Samizdatistas everywhere are in agonies because they don’t have my own User’s View of that history, here it is: In brief, the system was set up for disaster when Bell first got some sort of monopoly rights. (I can’t help wondering whether it “got” these rights the same way BB&T and other reluctant takers “got” all that $ under TARP. But of course, I don’t know.) And the rot began during the first “Progressive” era, as might be expected in the era of T.R. and Trust-busting as a holy calling.
I was all for the Gov’s rescinding legal-monopoly status of Ma Bell. But breaking the company up [as a (long-term) project in trust-busting] was, as far as I can see, a disaster for the American customer. There was a time when you could call Information and get all sorts of arcane information, such as the proper spelling of “ichthyology.” Western Electric, its manufacturing arm, turned out reliable equipment, and Bell Labs might have been the premier electronics and data-communications (in both the software and the hardware dimensions) research institution in this country or perhaps the world. And it seemed to me, as a user, that Bell understood its position to require the highest standards of helpfulness when dealing with John Q. Public.
Anyhow, it’s not only the boys at Right Angle who have brought up this trust-busting and common-carrier business as a solution to getting FB cleaned up. And they themselves seem to be taking the position that If all you got is Facebook, honey, you ain’t got much.
Or so it seems to me.
P.S. If anybody wants to watch 4 1/2 hours of Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony, it’s at
https://www.c-span.org/video/?443543-1/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-testifies-data-protection
I haven’t seen it.
bobby b:
I think what you propose falls under the category of “be careful what you wish for.” While it might seem like a good thing that FB, et al, die a thousand cuts from lawsuits (or any other cause), it’s my opinion that the ‘common carrier’ principle needs to be reinforced, not weakened. Services need to have an absolute waiver against liability and prosecution for the content their services convey that they do not create. Otherwise, we virtually force them to self police. And prosecution, in particular, makes that self policing a de facto form of state censorship.
Now, if FB wants to police itself for its own purposes–to advance a political narrative or suppress certain points of view, for example–that’s fine. There are always alternatives.
Tedd (April 13, 2018 at 1:33 pm), IIUC bobby b does not wish to destroy facebook, twitter and youtube but rather to destroy their censorship of right-wing views. They would only die the death of a thousand cuts if those who sue them can show they are censoring. If they restore Diamond and Silk and etc., and stop treating Lauren like they’re a branch of our home office, they can justify their common carrier exemption. If they censor a pro-Israel site while leaving up a pro-Palestinian site advocating an exactly-equal degree of violence – as an experiment showed – then they are not acting like a common carrie, so in current law should should not have the protection of such.
Here’s a bit from the what the NYT bills as part of Z’s testimony (starting with the third paragraph). It does not make him or his outfit any more palatable, in my view.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/09/read-mark-zuckerbergs-testimony-to-congress-annotated/?utm_term=.43d14006e23e
Sounds to me as if he thinks his job is to police the world. (Or else is pandering to the public, so as to re-polish the image.)
He has every right to try on the robes of the Philosopher-King, of course, as long he doesn’t pretend to be anything but a Guardian of the Public Moral Fiber who is therefore, in light of his Almighty Goodness, entitled to various legal perks — and as long as he openly informs his users and his advertisers that they are subject to his personal censorship.
Does Mr. Z have any idea of how much power this sounds as if he thinks he should have?
. . .
As for the notion of the Common Carrier: A lot of those sympathetic to the bakers, photographers, so forth who choose not to participate in “weddings” of homosexual customers have argued that after all these folks are not in the position of being common carriers, precisely because there are available in the same area other businesses that are more than willing to provide the cakes or the photos or whatever to such couples. In other words, the businesses are not “natural” nor legal monopolies at the time and place of the desired service, and for that reason they should have the right not to serve whomever they choose not to serve.
(Personally, I think this is wrong-headed because it infringes on people’s right of self-determination as instantiated in the conduct of their business. But maybe it has more resonance with the general public … unfortunately. After all, it’s not that hard to come up with a scenario where there is no one willing to supply drinking water to some subgroup of people stranded in the desert, or in New Orleans; surely someone should have to do so!)
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ETA: I completely agree with Niall that Z ought to be able to run FB however he likes, as long as he’s open and honest about his rules, and doesn’t get any legal perks not available to other businesses. (He has to reject the perks of the Common Carrier.)
Mulligan. I meant,
Julie near Chicago (April 13, 2018 at 3:47 pm), I’ve heard of fibre broadband but not of moral fibre broadband. 🙂
Niall,
Good point! 😆
A friend and I were discussing this Face (nobook) to Face (nobook).
Lots of pro / con items, but the best bit was the start of “Facebook Humour”, beginning with the name itself. Best one so far:
“FaceBorg.”
Runner-up:
“Farcebook”
Said associate has also been calling FB, “The greatest Data-Mining Operation in history” for some years. The KGB / GRU would have left a LONG trail of corpses to attain that sort of power in their “Golden Age”.
If the screen-shots I have seen are any indication, the sort of stuff that some of the “members” post with glee and enthusiasm, is staggering.
Niall:
I take your point. But it was the flawed idea that services such as Facebook (or ISPs) can and should be held accountable for content that legitimized (in the public’s mind) such ‘policing’ of content in the first place. It all started going down hill when legislators failed to see that holding ISPs responsible for content is like holding paper companies responsible for printed pictures of child pornography. That essentially forced companies like Facebook to forcibly remove content that offended the squeakiest wheels. It could just has easily have gone the other way, if it weren’t for one particular set of squeaky wheels having more friends in the press. (And one set of squeaky wheels having few compunctions about forcing censorship.)
It’s mildly interesting to me to watch as people apparetly discover for the first time in their lives that FB collects and sells metadata to both corporate and political buyers, when in fact they’ve been doing that for FB’s entire existence, and, of course, said data is also “of interest” to the deep state, which I think we can safely assume has it’s greedy Jack Horner thumbs cramed into that data pie already.
Why?
Because they can.
People using “Snowden” tools can act as invisible digital gods.
The truth is, FB pretty much sucks. It’s a less appealing adult version of MySpace.
You have “friends” who you largely don’t know or have probably never even talked to, “following” you as you repost other people’s clever texts in JPG format, and/or the occational funny cat screw-up video or “grandson riding his bike” video. It’s mostly an in group-preference group-think circle-jerk, and it seems that even circle jerks get old.
“Jesus is cool. Prepost if you agree”.
Such twaddle can be entertaining only just so long.
The sad thing is, FB classifies me ultra-conservative because I support the 2nd Amendment, yet knows NOTHING about my views on abortion laws, abortion in general, sexual preferences, views on divorce or child custody, views on gay marriage, views on transsexualism, etc, etc. But my views on David Hogg is apparently enough for them
I sidetracked myself with the regulation issue and just realized that I missed an opportunity to promote something I’ve been practicing for about twenty years, which I call neo-Amishism. Briefly, neo-Amishism is the practice of knowing what, in your mind, constitutes high quality of life and then deliberately choosing which technologies to become involved with based on how they contribute to your quality of life.
That is exactly how I ended up not having a Facebook account in the first place. When Facebook came along I said to myself, “Interesting idea, but not how I, personally, want to spend time on line.”
I had been practicing neo-Amishism for a while before I named it. One day I watched a documentary about the Amish that explained their philosophy, which is essentially the same thing I do but based on a different definition of quality of life.
Tedd, companies are not held legally accountable for the content if they act as an objective platform and keep out of it, as long as the posted material is not, in itself, an illegal act. (Think child pornography.) But once the platform starts censoring or shadow banning content providers, they, allegedly, lose that immunity status, as well they should.
Such legal culpability SHOULD keep FB and google/youtube from abusing content providers when they attempt propaganda. And, let’s be honest, FB and google/youtube aren’t shadow banning because the Southern Poverty Law Center moderators get their knickers in a bunch. They shadow ban so that the shape, the “optics” of their published content acts effectively as propaganda. If it weren’t for a then-relatively free youtube, the American people as a whole would probably have fallen for the “Hillary has a 95% chance of winning the election” bullshit, instead of just the Leftist fishbowl dwellers, like the cast and crew of TYT.
The then relatively free citizen press covered the fact that Trump routinely filled stadiums on his campaign travels, whilst Hillary couldn’t draw flies. The latter point is the only reason I got the “No, Trump will win” prognostication correct. That the left were over-sampling was painfully obvious. Why would they? So you the voter would stay home, depressed. Citizen journalism and yes, even the likes of Alex Jones reporters with cameras is the only reason we know that Slithery had a public seizure at the 911 memorial event and had to be loaded into a black SUV like someone’s stiff boogie-board.
TO THIS DAY, the powers that be ask you who are you going to believe, them or your own goddamned eyes. Their gaslighting knows no bounds.
A largely free citizen press kept Slithery from winning. The powers that be are doing their damnedest to see that this does not happen again.
Indeed.
The DHS and FBI classify ANTIFA as a “domestic terrorist group”, yet they operate on FB apparently unimpeded, whilst “Diamond and Silk” were told they were shadowbanned because FB finds them to be a “threat to the community”. (No threat nor ‘community’ were specifically identified).
When D&S were recently interviewed by Laura Ingram (Yes, David Hogg’s favorite victim, next to himself), Ingram “reached out” to FB about this and FB responded that D&S have been contacted about this “mistake”, and corrections suggested, implying that the ball is now in D&S’ court. Diamond replied to Laura, “That’s a lie.”
Nuff Said.
And in the mean time, Zuckerborg addresses congress about…reasons. (Yawn).
The solution is much more simple than people are making it out to be. Individuals should own their digital metadata. It is theirs. Others may borrow parts of it with permission to perform a required service but no more. They don’t own it and they can’t sell it. Undermining the big data for sale concept of social media is the only approach that can work for the benefit of the individual.
Alisa:
Just noticed this now.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Jordan Peterson’s work, but that’s related to a point he often makes, which is that most likely the very best thing you can do to make the world better is just to focus on getting your own life right.
I’ll stipulate the truth of that. My point is that they should not be held so responsible even when the content is illegal, for the simple and obvious reason that it’s not theirs. History is the reverse of the model you laid out: services were held accountable for content first, then they started to self police. I don’t know if granting services immunity from prosecution for content now (which is what should have happened in the first place) will reverse the tendency of service companies to self-police. Maybe that Pandora’s box can’t be closed. But it’s certainly the right place to start.
As much as I would like to support that idea I don’t think it can work in practice. Meta data that doesn’t identify you uniquely (“customers who bought that also bought this”) is not a threat to anyone’s privacy and, even if it was, it would be wrong to prevent online companies from selling it since brick-and-mortar companies have always gathered and sold exactly the same kind of data. I suspect that if you drill down to the details you’ll discover that it’s impossible to define the boundary between that and genuine privacy invasion by any kind of algorithm. And if you can’t define it by an algorithm you’re not going to have any luck enforcing it in the digital age.
Also, most of that meta data was generated by the service provider or others, not by you, so I’m not sure you’re on very strong ground claiming ownership of it.
You have to take responsibility for the trail of meta data you create. Even if there were ostensibly some kind of legal protection for ‘misuse’ of ‘your’ meta data that would still be necessary. So it’s redundant (and damaging) to try to change things by forcing new rules on service providers.
Indeed, Tedd. I am well-familiar with Peterson’s work, and in fact consider the man to be the best thing that happened to Western civilization in quite some time.
I’m right pleased you wrote this up, because I too have taken a Facebook sabbatical and was tempted to write up why – only you’ve done it for me, in more or less the exact words I would have used.
I’ve set up on MeWe, and although content is still light I’ve found a couple of good Groups and several old ex-FB friends, mostly Objectivists.