[HN Gopher] Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook
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Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook
Author : RageoftheRobots
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-10-09 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (doctorow.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (doctorow.medium.com)
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| I'd add to this sentiment, Google Adwords. Google increasingly
| push people to put your money here and trust our systems. Except
| their systems and account managers push people towards what is
| good for Google and not the business.
|
| It amazes me what they get away with. I suspect it happens out of
| lack of awareness, but if any switched on regulatory body looked
| into it, its ripe ground for greater regulation.
| joshsyn wrote:
| It would be nice for facebook to charge users like the author who
| can't help themselves for using facebook. This kind of rhetoric
| that somehow facebook is controlling our lives is getting
| annoying when they can simply stop using it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Regulating tech is a great idea (assuming the regulations are
| thoughtful and productive, of course),
|
| I'm not nearly as enthusiastic for these calls to bring heavy
| regulation on to the tech industry.
|
| Articles like this have a hypothetical ideal mental image of
| regulations that will punish only the bad guys while protecting
| themselves and the content they like. There's also an implicit
| assumption that regulation will only apply to Facebook, without
| bringing negative effects on to the sites and services the tech
| community prefers.
|
| This article may be well-meaning in intentions, but how would
| such regulation work in practice? Writing regulation that outlaws
| companies from forbidding customer API automation sounds good if
| you're a tech user who wants to automate some clicks, but would
| that also mean that spammers must have free reign on the API as
| well? How would such a law be structured to force sites to allow
| consumers to use "good" tools while also allowing them to catch
| and stop the "bad" tools like auto-friend bots?
|
| Some of these arguments are starting to feel like utopian
| fallacies where people want impossibly perfect regulations
| applied with the assumption that only their enemies will be
| affected. I'm also surprised to see authors like Cory Doctorow
| advocating for more government control and regulation of popular
| internet communication sites. Once we open that Pandora's box of
| government control, it's hard to imagine future politicians
| _won't_ be teaching for it as a way to push their agenda.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control
| of the regulations.
|
| I think the real issue is that people live in black holes of
| misinformation on the internet because that is where they want
| to be. When I look at the many Herman Cain Award threads on
| reddit, it seems the predominate original source of most posts
| is groups that the user signed up for.
|
| This isn't new, before Facebook, there were usenet and forums,
| AM Radio and even mailing lists and magazines.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| > Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in
| control of the regulations.
|
| Even the worst politician is (ostensibly) accountable to the
| people. Corporations are not.
| goatlover wrote:
| Corporations don't have customers?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in
| control of the regulations.
|
| Exactly this! Every time I see someone proposing some new
| expansion of government reach and power, it seems to be
| considered only from the angle of "just think of what the
| (people I think of as the) good guys could do with this
| increased authority!"
|
| "Yeah, but what could the bad guys do with this increased
| authority? Because as sure as the sun rises in the East,
| whoever you think of as the bad guys will eventually come to
| power and have this authority..."
| dcow wrote:
| You can 1) make something illegal without 2) requiring any
| sort of regulation.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Yes, there's a technical legal distinction between a law
| (legislative) and a regulation (executive), but nothing
| in my comment above was intended to signify that I want
| _one or the other_ to have broad authority to protect
| their incumbency or exercise power over the People to a
| greater extent than today.
| erentz wrote:
| Why does it have to mean giving anyone power? We could for
| example enact privacy laws that make it illegal to share
| personal data. That gives no one power, and takes away
| power from corporations. We could enact laws that prevent
| targeted advertising, which would make it pointless to
| gather a lot of the data they gather in the first place.
| That doesn't make the bad politician any more powerful. So
| on.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I estimate that laws to prevent all forms of targeting
| advertising serve to protect incumbents (both corporate
| and political incumbents). That makes incumbent
| politicians more powerful (in relative terms).
| dasil003 wrote:
| Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard
| to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create
| unintended distortions at best, and new innovation-killing
| moats at worst.
|
| But we have to try.
|
| As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we
| have over giant corporations. Existing regulation and agency
| structure is completely unsuitable for the world we live in
| today. So far tech has relied on creative destruction as
| compute power grew and form factors shrunk rapidly, leading to
| ever increasing waves of adoption, and "software eating the
| world". However at this point most people have a smartphone in
| their pocket and the attention economy is maxed out. A lot of
| future innovation will be capital (and data) intensive, and
| with adoption already saturated, the natural power of Google,
| Facebook, and Amazon will not be naturally disrupted the way
| PCs disrupted mainframes or the web disrupted Windows hegemony.
|
| Of course there's nothing worse than bad regulation, and
| historically tech regulation has been a minefield due to the
| general cluelessness of congress. The good news is that this
| will improve with turnover and younger staffers helping build a
| broader understanding of the issues. Hopefully we can start to
| pivot away from distractions like section 230 and asking
| corporations to be arbiters of truth, and instead focus on
| anti-trust and data privacy angles, with specific focus on size
| and power.
| livueta wrote:
| > As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we
| have over giant corporations.
|
| I don't think this is exactly true. There have been many
| words written about the effectiveness of technological
| countermeasures vs. regulation, but I think the proof is in
| the pudding: Facebook wouldn't go nuclear against Unfollow
| Everything if it didn't work (i.e. tilt the balance of power
| back towards the end-user). Google wouldn't be trying the
| whole manifest v3 shenanigans if they weren't concerned about
| content blockers.
|
| But here, as Doctorow points out, _regulation_ stands in the
| way of these effective technological countermeasures. I think
| that the apparent slowdown of technological disruption and
| creative destruction you reference has at least some
| grounding in the increasing use and chilling effect of
| applying IP law against adversarial interop, rather than some
| inherent limit of attention or hardware.
|
| So, I agree with the parent in bring surprised by the combo
| of Doctorow's insightful analysis around the Unfollow
| Everything debacle and a call for additional regulation via
| existing agencies. I'm not as hopeful as you that younger
| staffers will bring some kind of renaissance of enlightened
| regulation - consider how popular the "let's make Facebook
| ban the nazis" take appears to be across generational
| divides.
|
| To sum up, I'm afraid that anything we pass now is going to
| be a lot closer to the DMCA, in terms of how it protects
| corporate interests over individual rights, than the sort of
| utopian wishlist that is usually quoted as an ideal.
|
| On a positive note: I've recently been interested by some of
| the electoral successes of the Czech Pirate Party
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party) and
| wonder if the way forward for internet rights is to tie the
| idea to a broader campaign for transparent, effective, and
| highly democratic governance.
| dcow wrote:
| Why do we have to regulate? It seems an alternate yet much
| more difficult path would be that we could grow a societal
| backbone and make certain destructive practices illegal
| instead of trying to figure out a central list of allowed
| practices and licenses and policies and permits and
| bureaucracy etc. For example, it's pretty clear that internet
| scale data markets and user attention platforms harm the
| individual. Why is step one always to reach for a regulatory
| solution instead of a slightly more radical "outlaw such
| machines and then figure things out from there" approach? A
| naive example might be a law stating: "It is illegal to
| profit from the sale of advertisements to your own users." In
| the same vein, why cant we outlaw DRM because it's bad for
| users and tell movie studios we care more about users health
| and well being than we do about your "piracy" problem?
| simonh wrote:
| Outlaw what specifically though? You're falling into the
| same trap OP is calling out, that your extremely vague hand
| wavey proposed laws would only ban "the bad guys".
| dcow wrote:
| I list two examples (as does Doctorow) of things that are
| pretty clearly bad for users: 1. attention marketplaces,
| 2: DRM. I am falling for no such trap I really don't
| understand your angle there. My suggested solution to 1
| is rather than try to regulate Facebook, which I agree is
| hand wavey, just ban the business model altogether
| because it demonstrably breeds machines and software that
| harm users. The "good guy" user attention businesses are
| collateral, yes, but this is a move to protect _us_ not
| our ad marketplaces and the hypothesis is that the
| incentives just aren 't aligned for there to exist a
| "good guy" ad platform. (If one exists please show me so
| I can understand the extent of any collateral harm I
| might be advocating.) I like this solution because it's
| principled and specifically not hand wavey. The
| collateral seems worth it IMO. Same with DRM.
| simonh wrote:
| what's an attention marketplace? facebook, twitter,
| reddit, ok, all gone. But then advertising is attention
| and a marketplace, so does that mean banning all online
| or app based advertising? Amazon has attention and it's a
| marketplace, so does Etsy.
| dcow wrote:
| No you don't ban by name like that.
|
| A start might be to say: it is illegal both run a content
| platform and also to profit from the sale of targeted ads
| on your platform.
|
| Or simply but more radically: you cannot use user data
| collected in the operation of a software platform in
| order to target advertisements to your users.
|
| The goal would be to ban the bad incentives by
| eliminating the ability to profit. Yes that kills the
| profit. That's the point. I don't think anybody is at war
| with e.g. a news site that runs an integrated ad on their
| headline or landing page or even a search engine that
| inserts its own contextual ads. We're talking about
| dismantling the user content advertising platforms where
| the incentive becomes maximizing the time users spend on
| the platform.
| simonh wrote:
| I'm not suggesting by name, I just had no idea which
| platforms you think your law would target. Banning using
| user data to target adds is a lot more specific and
| actionable.
|
| That would hurt facebook and Twitter's revenue quite
| badly, but it would do nothing at all to stop the toxic
| effects of facebook particularly. My main problem with
| facebook isn't targeted adds, yes I'm against their toxic
| attitude to privacy but it's not their most toxic
| behaviour. The main problem for me is the way they turn
| peoples feeds into firehoses of radicalising, enraging,
| adrenaline juicing hostility.
| dcow wrote:
| I guess the hypothesis is that they engage in that
| behavior exactly because their business depends on
| driving up engagement so they'll go as far as to, as you
| say, show people content that pisses them off so they'll
| spend an extra hour as a keyboard warrior and hopefully
| see an ad in there. I don't think those incentives exist
| for e.g a paid phonebook.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I'm not following your argument, what do you see as the
| difference between regulation and outlawing something?
| dcow wrote:
| The argument against regulation people often reach for is
| that it actually benefits incumbents and stifles
| innovation because it involves permits and checks and
| licenses etc generally just roadblocks to doing something
| in a domain. And that if you open the door to it in one
| spot then you can definitely expect it to crop up
| everywhere. I generally agree with this take and
| understand why people are not excited about working in,
| using products in, living with, heavily regulated
| industries.
|
| What I'm saying is that form of regulating FB seems silly
| to me too and I think we could avoid the "fear of central
| government control raining on our disruptive tech utopia"
| problem and the "any regulation here would be a hand
| wavey slippery slope" problem by simply taking a more
| aggressive principled stance as a society and declaring
| bad things illegal instead of trying to compromise and
| regulate "tech" into submission. Punish the bad behavior
| seems like such a simple solution.
| dcow wrote:
| That box is already open. Respectfully your comment kinda reads
| like you assume tech is some new untouched frontier unexploited
| and ripe for the picking. We're way past that and we must
| decide as a society how we want to navigate a world of global
| software services and immense data collection.
|
| Doctorow has always been against government central control of
| information. I suspect he's against _any_ overly large
| centralized information control regime because it has the same
| practical impact to people's everyday lives. It's not weird to
| see him (or anyone) call for "regulation" when the regulation
| being asked for pertains to enforcing we as a society retain
| certain rights with respect to how we interact with our world.
| That's the whole point... don't get distracted on some "govt
| control vs no control" axis. Nobody is asking the govt to tell
| you how to run your business, they're just asking that we make
| it illegal to abuse users in the way Facebook has by
| permabanning the developer of a genuinely socially good tool
| that is obviously not spam for the insane "it automates user
| interactions" blanket reason. My password manager automates
| user interactions... GTFO FB.
|
| Also laws aren't regulation. You can make something illegal
| without imposing back-pressure on every new venture in the
| space it pertains to.
| jdonaldson wrote:
| Lately, it seems like our only remaining choice as a
| civilization is to decide if we want to be exploited or
| controlled.
| jes wrote:
| All of us are controlled, all the time, by how reality
| happens to unfold.
|
| With some practice, it's possible to accept that this is just
| how the world is, and to no longer be bothered by it.
| simonh wrote:
| It's either/or?
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I find it ironic that reading this article requires logging in or
| using the app, presumably so you can be more accurately tracked.
| Qi_ wrote:
| The author seems to be filled with a sense of "knight-in-shining-
| armor-ism." If Facebook's actions really are a problem to most
| people, then most people would stop using it.
|
| He calls Zuckerberg a "pope-emperor" of Facebook's users, but
| that's because the users choose to give him power. If the users
| stop choosing to give him power, he loses it.
| quantified wrote:
| The nature of addiction (etymologically, "without-say-ism") is
| that the problem is most felt by those who can't stop using it.
|
| We can turn this to a giant regulate-tech topic but the source
| complaint, simple enough, was a desire to have the feed consume
| less of life's attention and be more worthy of what attention
| he was giving it.
| dcow wrote:
| Since when is "most people don't speak up so it's obviously
| okay" a healthy way to determine whether anything should be
| legal or not?
|
| Where is the knite-in-shining-armor-ism? What even is that?
| Doctorow is asking for for us to build a society where we don't
| take a company on their word that they will do right by users
| because he cites multiple examples where a company leader
| charged as the steward of software integral to peoples' lives
| has said they will and then about faced to chase profits.
| There's clearly something worth discussing here... Remember how
| nice and interoperable chat was before Google killed xmpp?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >If Facebook's actions really are a problem to most people,
| then most people would stop using it
|
| what do you call this argument, best of all worlds-ism? So a
| priori any institution that persists is beneficial to its
| constituents merely because it continues to exist? Do concepts
| like power and dependence exist in the kind of worldview that
| produces these arguments?
| Qi_ wrote:
| My argument is based on free-market economics. The
| users/customers seem to not care enough to put their time and
| money elsewhere.
| epgui wrote:
| No it's not, and a cursory glance at studies of human
| behaviour (what economics is really about, in a way) would
| dispel this notion.
| Qi_ wrote:
| Could you please elaborate on what you mean? Facebook is
| a company and therefore its success and failure is
| dependent on its customers/users, right?
| eljimmy wrote:
| The users aren't the customers, they are the product.
| dcow wrote:
| It seem you don't understand the economics of this
| situation.
|
| Facebook makes money from ad partners not users. Users
| are not paying Facebook for the software. People who want
| to run ads are. There is no market for newsfeed software
| here. Only a market for user attention.
|
| Because FB made a creepy tool 15 years ago they won some
| users and have an established base they can market to.
| People using it these days do so because of the network
| effect not because it's the best tool to keep in touch
| with people. Facebook has to maximize time spent with
| users eyeballs glued to the newsfeed because that's where
| ads appear. The friend network portions of the software
| only exist vestigially at this point to keep people
| locked in to a newsfeed platform.
|
| Facebook _is_ dependent on their customers but their
| customers aren 't the people glued to the newsfeed, those
| are the product literally for customers paying for an
| advertising platform. If it was legal, Facebook would
| literally chain you to your computer and force you to
| interact with the world through their platform because
| that maximizes their profits.
| [deleted]
| the-dude wrote:
| Sounds as a just-world to me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
| rst wrote:
| There's an actual name for it -- Panglossianism -- named for
| Dr. Pangloss, the tutor in Voltaire's Candide who keeps
| insisting, despite catastrophically mounting evidence, that
| "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
| (This was a deliberate parody of moral philosphy written by
| some of Voltaire's 18th-century contemporaries, most notably
| Leibniz.)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| joshgel wrote:
| Like cigarettes? I have no sense of whether FB is physically
| addictive like smoking.
|
| But, _if_ a company directly contributes to decline in civil
| discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users,
| then isn 't it a government role to step in? And isn't this the
| governments role even if users can't see the harm at the micro-
| level of their daily interactions with the company? I guess
| that is the argument at least. Really its a balance between
| values: individual freedom and the collective good.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > _if_ a company directly contributes to decline in civil
| discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users,
| then isn 't it a government role to step in?
|
| The chief problem here is "who decides?" If a government in
| power is being undermined, they have incredibly strong
| incentives to determine that those undermining actions are
| "harmful to democracy" (rather than merely harmful to their
| party). (I think we could point to many examples in US
| politics in the last 5 years where "this is bad for my party"
| is cast as "this is bad for democracy!")
|
| Which is why I think that, of all the speech that must be
| protected, political speech is of the highest criticality to
| protect. (And that claims by the government or strongly
| politically aligned citizens that 'X is bad for democracy'
| should also be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism.)
| cute_boi wrote:
| Facebook is addictive tbh. I heard they hired some prominent
| psychologist to make it more addictive.
|
| My mother is surely addicted to facebook. She knows all data
| implications but she enjoys getting likes/shares etc. And
| fake news etc which is intentionally specious make the
| platform even more enjoyable.
|
| I can't tell her to stop facebook and I am sure it is harming
| her right?
|
| Yes this is government role but as with every government in
| democracy most of them are vested for short term profits and
| company like facebook lobbies a lot. We know facebook pushes
| millions of dollar in lobby so why would government solve it?
| Also facebook also provides sweet taxes to government.
| mavhc wrote:
| Humans enjoy being liked, what specific harm does your
| mother experience from using facebook?
|
| Better to be addicted to typing words than drugs, it's free
| and you don't die.
| janmo wrote:
| "If Facebook's actions really are a problem to most people,
| then most people would stop using it."
|
| No. Because all your friends are on Facebook. And by buying out
| all the serious competition (Whats App, Instagram) they have
| guaranteed a monopolistic position. Even if you move to another
| place, if will grow too big, odds are it will end up being
| acquired by FB.
| joshsyn wrote:
| So...???? These companies sold themselves to facebook. You
| don't own these companies. Build something yourself and get
| your friends to use it.
| echelon wrote:
| > If Facebook's actions really are a problem to most people,
| then most people would stop using it.
|
| Just like sugary soda, loot crates, cigarettes, and opium then?
| Companies design products that are bad for people all the time.
|
| > Zuck: they "trust me"
|
| > Zuck: dumb fucks
|
| This was said after his AOL hacking days [1], so he already had
| a certain predisposition towards "ordinary people".
|
| Given that his history and his present behavior aren't much
| different, it seems he hasn't changed much. He designs products
| to extract from people.
|
| [1] https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Mark-Zuckerberg-
| was-a-...
| dresdenfire wrote:
| Have you thought how old he was when he said this? I am sure
| you never did anything stupid as a teenager.
| shukantpal wrote:
| I don't see your counter argument. People eat sugar because
| they want to. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't eat sugar
| and no one is forcing them to.
| simonh wrote:
| Arguably facebook provides useful, valuable services and also
| causes some harm. Lets suppose the good it does outweighs the
| harm. That's not a good argument to simply accept the harm it
| does. The benefits and harm are not an inextricably linked
| package, it should be possible to mitigate the harm without
| eliminating the benefits Facebook provides to people.
| ISL wrote:
| By that measure, most of those who live under oppressive
| dictators think their leaders are okay. If not, "they would
| just rise up and replace them".
|
| Doctorow's piece here reads to me as a call for viable
| alternatives. The prose attempts to advance a number of his
| favored alternatives, which makes it a little confusing.
|
| To me, I believe we are headed toward a world where social
| media operates via an open API, like email. The road between
| here and there will be rocky.
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