FB have datasets designed to find those people who will register for a conference, sign up to a streaming service or buy a shoe. The same tools also work for "spreading fake news, etc." There are side effects to large scale use of this, beyond the basic. "Bubbles" was a first pass at describing it, but I think it understates the issue by putting the emphasis on groups of people, and implying insularity is the root cause. I think the truth is more individual focused. There are two types of groups. One is the type you could describe in terms of facebook's "social graph," people connected to eachother in various ways. Another is a segment. People who are not necessarily related to eachother, but "inform" on eaother statistically.
Finding a piece of content you will like is becoming finding a piece of news you will believe.
FB are now a news outlet, the biggest and most important one. I don't know if regulation is the best path to a better news media, it could also make things worse. But, what I'm worried about is that FB does not want to be a news outlet. They would like to maintain their "agregator" designation, like the news tab in google search. I'd like to see them abandon that position, and take on the role of news media more consciously and deliberately. Journalism has an ethic, it's not perfect but at least it recognizes that they play a responsible role in society. FB need to adopt something like this, regulaton or not. .
Call it a conspiracy theory. I really don't see the actual cause being, primarily, anything other than those.
This doesn't have anything to do with Hillary or that whole "election hacking" story. If you've followed the hearings and the angles that US legislators have been taking on these companies it seems clear that most of them don't see this as being related to the elections at all.
From what I've seen the focus has been on the fact that foreign nation states are able to use the tools provided by these companies to target groups of people and then directly use the promotion and communication channels provided by these companies to pump propaganda to those groups.
And that this has been done already, specifically to instigate division and confrontation between groups within our society.
Side notes:
1. Maybe you think that their tools don't have an impact on people and this is all just hyperbole. Perhaps that's true, but if it is true then the business model they've been pitching to advertisers seems like hyperbole as well.
2. All of that aside. These few companies have quickly become the dominant gateway for which a majority of people access the internet. It's where they read news, talk to family and friends, organize events, keep all of their photos, keep their contact list, authenticate into other websites on the internet, get tracked by ads and social media buttons across the internet... None of which is inherently bad but it seems foolish for us to not keep them in check. We don't exist to make sure their companies survive. If society decides that the amount of risk and harm resulting from them outweighs the potential good in their current form then we should consider regulation.
If your opaque point is that we need to break these companies up for... reasons... (Because maybe Russia-something?) Then I suppose I disagree with you less, but not on that principle.
It seems to me that these problems are better solved through education, rather than censorship & policing. But educating is impossible because it would lead to a more informed public.
Regulation by publicly elected and representative officials in our democracy.
> It seems to me that these problems are better solved through education, rather than censorship & policing.
I'm not talking about censorship. My point was regarding the mass data collection and analysis of our personal information that's being done at an impressive scale by these for-profit companies without any form of oversight or transparency.
It isn't cool when the NSA does it and it isn't cool when they're doing it either. Especially not if they're actually profiting from selling our data to other people who are doing whoknowswhat. There is no incentive for them to be responsible.
When I hear a Senator Dianne Feinstein scolding a panel of tech giants, I don't hear a benevolent leader with our best interests at heart, I hear someone infantalizing me for their own gain.
If the topic is data retention, let's target everyone. No one should be safe unless they can justify it under scrutiny & demonstrate security.
If the topic is "fake news", then its a battle of definitions, & regulation is unconstitutional on any government level--no matter how you spin it.
The definition of “Fake News,” that was being used when it started “trending” and the definition FB are now using in their anti-fakenews efforts is not inaccurate news, bad news, biased news or anything like that. It refers to a simple, common sense meaning of “fake.” Articles pretending to be news: written by a fictional journalists in a fictional publication, citing fictional sources at a fictional address.
Fake news did quickly become an insult that everyone (especially you -know-who) uses to flavour their scorn of regular news. …like the way “fraud,” or “whore” are used as insults.
This is not some impossibly abstract conversation about truth. It’s a simple conversation about spam.
I'm genuinely asking. I don't intend for my question to be a slight against your argument.
It also shifts the blame away from Americans who liked what Trump was saying.
A similar thing is happening in the UK with the brexit vote. People are now claiming that Russians bought some adverts. They want to deny the decades of Euroskepticism and misleading stories (bendy bananas anyone?), and years of anti-immigrant newspaper stories.
No one is forced to give their data to Facebook. It's not a public utility. It's an entertainment site, first and foremost.
Neither do we have to. Facebook is grabbing it all anyway. With pre-emptive measures ala ad-, cookie and tracker blocking we can reduce the amount of data they get, but they still get something.
If they'd only collect data about their users, that would be totally fine. But they don't. They build shadow profiles of people who are not on FB and track them just the same way.
FB is a whole lot closer to Orwellian surveillance apparatus than it is to entertainment site.
Maybe they think "you don't have to use FB"... By that logic "you didn't have to use AT&T or the internet at all" either.
And then there's also the thing that, arguably, Google and FB give those people something in return which they might consider worthwhile for just data. I'd question that the majority of the user population is aware of the implications of handing over data about themselves and specifically other people, who may or may not be okay with that.
All the more reason to keep an eye on the people who control the page that so many people view their news from these days.
Given that the mass media is in direct competition with FB, I wonder why they haven't destroyed FB already.
All things considered, Facebook presents a similar level of risk, especially if nation states use it as a digital weapon as we've seen recently.
When the state tells you its on, its at least to your face.
Many social groups use Facebook to organize on. If an individual weren't on Facebook, they'd be much more socially isolated in the same way that if they didn't use a phone (considered a public utility), they'd also be more isolated. I suspect for some people, Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp is more important than a telephone number.
Some services now require Facebook to use their service. For example, for people who can't afford to own a car, GetAround lets you rent neighbors cars, but they don't accept a government issued ID, only Facebook.
This meme has to stop. In many countries universities are state-run, and they provide more value than most companies.
There are also countless examples of privatisation disasters. Source: am British.
Although those often are to some degree a result of corruption.
- Universities develop social media algorithms that are provenly secure and respectful of privacy. "Federation" should handle issues of trust over network partitions.
- Governments (not a single one) decide if they want to provide computing infrastructure for said algorithms. Alternatively, users could host their own social networks or partitions thereof.
- Big companies provide hardware and maintenance. (And that's all they do. I.e., hands off of our valuable data).
Basically, that's a lot like how the internet functioned when it just started (Universities and DARPA developing the concepts, and companies doing just hardware).
Efficiency is out of the question as well. You cant argue the State will do it better. It wont. And in this case, it can even be harmful.
With shadow profiles, they are being forced to give their data to Facebook or live like an outcast.
How intrusive are the shadow profiles actually? We will know only if their data collection process (as well as the data collection process for all these ad-first companies) is completely and thoroughly investigated.
By having it myself, I have the technical capacity to cut the middleman, which is better for me and for the advertisers that target me.
(This is not a defense of FB, only trying to be useful)
The above statement has a high reach: information fb uses to then deduce something for advertisers has to be included. It doesnt work immediately, so I will have to wait analyze what they share. Its certainly good that they do.
EDIT: just looked at the docs and it is better than I thought but might not be probably enough to get the effect I want to achieve.
ITs revelatory that it contains all the chats I ever had, and would find that hard to share with anyone, yet, clearly FB has it .
Is it? I've always seen it pitched as a communication service with emphasis on staying in touch with friends and always being connected with loved ones.
Why should they be regulated?
Because the more ubiquitous a service becomes, the more it is ingrained in everyday life, the harder it is to avoid. And it should be regulated.
After all, nobody is forcing you to have and use electricity. So why should power companies be regulated?
Or car manufacturers. Or anything really.
Because it makes society a better place.
It is absolutely possible to have privatized power supply.
Edit: to elaborate a little, one shows the ownership form and the other how free of constrains is that activity on the market.
It is. And power companies should be regulated anyway.
For example: to provide current within specific parameters so the white smoke doesn’t escape our devices.
Same with Google - website optimise for Google and Google ranks them higher. Network effect completely captured the market.
Another word for it is 'experience monopoly' - there is no one else that can offer remotely useful to it.
Most people recognize that behaviors that can be seen as voluntary agreements between independent parties can still be problematically imbalanced or in need of "regulation."
It's not reasonable to just ignore the power of network operators. How do you think about net neutrality?
Facebook is a social media website. It doesn't provide a basic, necessary service. It doesn't operate under the physical constraints that utilities do, and it's not impossible to compete with Facebook, as evidenced by the numerous social media services out there like Snapchat, Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+, Qzone (China), and Sina Weibo (China).
I'm certainly not against regulation as a general concept. The free market does not produce the best, ethical incentives in all cases. That being said, I fail to see why regulating Facebook is even necessary, and what that would look like in practice.
People on HN seem to take as a given that Facebook having loads of personal data is somehow a bad or dangerous thing. Why? Facebook has 2 billion users. That's 25% of the human population. 2 billion people voluntarily created profiles, provided details about themselves like their age and relationship status, and uploaded photos of themselves, their friends, and their families. For those 2 billion people, the "cost" of "losing privacy" was worth it to them. Face it, nobody outside of the tiny HN bubble cares about the security of their vacation photos or cat pics, nor should they.
And people say Facebook allows companies to upload their customer data to Facebook so they can be targeted through ads on FB, so it would be possible (in theory, not sure about the practice) that Facebook has things like your address and income level as well, for example if you ever filled a marketing survey.
Speaking as someone who often feels disconnected due to their refusal to accept facebook TOS, I would come at this from a very different direction.
Facebook should be required to provide a standardized API and data storage format that allows syndication with other social networks and allows users to transition their data to other social networks.
Think "Pacific Railway Act 1863" for social networks. You can build as much infrastructure as you like, but it _must_ be inter-operable with your competitors.
Then Facebook can ban who they like, there's nothing stopping people from using a different provider.
But the thing I would want more regulation on is their possession of personal data and the tools to target people using that data. The same applies to all similar advertising-first platforms.
If all of this data and the tools to analyze it are as powerful as the data giants seem to suggest by their marketing and actions (given the increase in collection, storage, and analysis)... Then maybe we, as a society, need to have a conversation about that. And possibly regulation of some kind is an outcome of that conversation.