I think this is a bad analogy.. The NYT is a left leaning paper, but people who have some intellectual honesty already know this..

Even if the Times went completely far far far left, they aren't the only game in town. I can choose to read any of a number of other papers, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist etc..

What alternative is there fire FB?? Mastodon.. Hubzilla..? They're great, if someone has the capability to run the service. I'd argue that most users can't be bothered to learn more than a chromebook let alone understand how to run their own server.

When you have a monopoly like this, it either needs government regulation, ( which is generally bad because it tends to hurt other similar companies), or break them up, i think this is the ideal option, but i don't know in this case.. Break it up by forcing all their code to open source, of perhaps force them to run it more federated or diaspora like and mandating interoperability with these other services..

I'm not sure what the answer is. Of course the real answer is nobody has to use Facebook.. But for a lot of people, that's not an option they're interested in, and since fb literally have all the data, it likely needs regulation which i find very distasteful and terrifying.

Why do we need to break up FB? That makes no sense to me. In previous antitrust cases, there was always the economic argument (to help out up-and-coming competitors or to prevent price gouging). But Snapchat clearly showed that new players can compete.

Are we breaking them up because they have "too much information"? What does that even mean? A move like that would be beyond unprecedented.

The point for government to breakup anything is to prevent monopoly.

NYTimes is far from a monopoly - there are tons of news site with more traffic. But there's no competitor that comes close to Facebook

And the purpose of preventing a monopoly is, yet again, generally an economic one: to prevent price gouging or help out smaller competitors. Neither of those applies to FB.

It could be a monopoly on ideology too. There's a precedent for this. Back in the early days of broadcasting, NBC was broken up into NBC + ABC for having too much control of public discourse

This is simply not true. It was an economic argument[1]. Newer & smaller radio stations could not compete. And if anyone should be broken up for monopolizing online ad revenue, it should probably be Google (Alphabet).

[1] http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

> since fb literally have all the data, it likely needs regulation which i find very distasteful and terrifying.

Why? Do you find it terrifying that your doctor, hospital, and health insurance company have very strict regulations on keeping your health data private? I, frankly, find it distasteful and terrifying that they have essentially no regulations on the data and can do whatever they want with it. I mean look at what happened at Equifax for example.

Er... nice way of shooting down your own argument. Equifax has a ton of regulation already, it didn't seem to help any.

Actually, I think you've just shot down your own argument. Please explain why you feel that existing regulation of Equifax "didn't seem to help any". That is a truly laughable assertion.

Early in their history, credit agencies collected very private personal information about people for inclusion in their credit files. The information in peoples' credit files was frequently inaccurate, and consumers had no way of correcting that information, and no way of even knowing what was in their credit file.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act [1] limits the information that credit agencies can keep on people, mandates that people be allowed to access what is in their file, mandates that people be able to correct inaccurate information, and restrains how third parties can access the information.

In fact, that all sounds like a great start to regulation for social networks and other internet giants!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act

It might be true that the NYT can't be trusted to regulate itself for the same reasons raised in the article - primarily that it has no incentive to do so, and lots of incentives not to. That said, I care a lot more about Facebook being properly regulated than I do about the NYT, simply because of the amount and scope of data that Facebook has.

He's right. NYT flips from a reasonable centrist publication to a war monger at the first hint of fighting. How many bodies do they have on them from lending legitimacy to Afghanistan and Iraq let alone Vietnam?

What are those reasons? Genuinely curious what you disagree with.

Regulation is a form of consumer protection that provides where corporate policies fail. The data the FB owns is vastly more rich and personally identifiable than what NYT owns on its users. Hard to accept a comparison to NYT.

And I could retort; can you file a defamation suit towards Facebook for something their users did? Can you file a defamation suit against NYTIMES for something their reporters did?

Hacker News is just as ideological as the NYT.

Actually both journalists and media are regulated. Perhaps you should address specifics of why regulation is not required in this case, rather than attack the messenger?

By what regulations? They are allowed to publish pretty much anything other than libel.

Yeah, and the US definition of libel is incredibly narrow, especially for public figures. Basically, unless you can prove they intentionally lied, forget it. As the Rolling Stone demonstrated, they can go into a story with a pre-existing bias against the subject, skip normal journalistic checks, conceal from readers just how weak the story is and how much it relies on a single source, and say something false and damaging, and that's still not enough; the only thing they could be got on was the odd technicality of counting adding a note to the story after they knew it was wrong as republishing it.