Its mostly the sheer influence that FB has. Google has a ton of sway itself, but outside of Youtube, most people mostly spend their time on the internet with Facebook. As seen with Cambridge Analytica, a lot of info on people's beliefs and party affiliations is known by facebook, so FB can actually influence a persons votes. Google has that power as well, but to a much lesser extent.

You are ignoring google news, where they effectively run their own editing by selecting the articles at the top, and also what comes back as the first page of result when you type “joe biden thinks” for instance. I’d say they have at least the same political influence.

Particularly given that never mind what their reported engagement numbers say, I only know people who stopped using facebook around me. I just don’t believe their numbers.

Google News is completely irrelevant, comparing to Facebook. Particularly for news.

Google News is not a proper competitor to FB though. No one I know uses it at all

Doesn't seem to be the opinion of news websites when they were cut out by google

> outside of Youtube, most people mostly spend their time on the internet with Facebook

I suppose this (the fact that people are using Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp more than the various Google products) is atypical in my "personal bubble" (my family, close friends etc.), so that's probably where my perception is skewed.

I think it's a matter of PR/optics, no matter how bad a situation may be Google are able to stay on message without coming across as untrustworthy idiots, whereas Facebook seem to only know how to make a bad PR situation worse. One recent example of this was how both companies handled the Apple enterprise certificate fiasco. Both companies admitted to using them for sketchy means (and both were knowingly taking the piss here) yet Facebook seemed to suggest that there was no issue with what they were doing whereas Google basically admitted fault right off the bat.

For Mozilla, that's likely a conflict on interest between their search deal (which AFAIK is their primary source of income) with Google and the hardline privacy/FOSS direction they're moving toward.

I'm shocked no one pointed out the why of news media though. It's not about statists liking Google and not FB, and it's not about headline clicks (well, it is but there's more to it than just company name in headline = more clicks).

Eighteen months ago[1] Facebook effectively depublished news/journalism sites. Almost overnight, major news media outlets started publishing anti-Facebook articles and it hasn't stopped since.

I'm not going to cry about disproportionate media attention unless this yellow journalism results in Facebook getting trust-busted but not the other monopolists.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/11/facebook-...

Yes I was wondering if it could be connected to the Facebook News Feed changes, and it is also worth pointing out that, conversely, many news sources use Google News actively and at least part of their traffic depends on it.

PS regarding Mozilla: as you correctly noted, their focus on privacy and their deal with Google are at odds. I guess the deal is good in terms of money but it doesn't look good in terms of PR and could be damaging in the long term, I think they should do something about it.

I think Google is as dangerous as Facebook, Amazon, etc... All of these companies are in the business of capital centralization. They make a profit by restricting options for consumers; they funnel all the consumers to the highest bidders. They increase the winner-takes-all factor. They're turning our capitalist free market economy into a pseudo-communist economy whereby consumers have fewer and fewer options within any given product category (they do this by driving producers out of business by saturating media channels with their chosen winner for each category); it's just like in the USSR when they were producing only one kind of each item and ran propaganda campaigns to control consumer behaviour; that's where it's heading. They are profiting from the erosion of the free market, democracy and capitalism.

A lot of Americans blame Facebook for Trump's election.

The same thing happened to Wikileaks. Everything that might remotely have helped Trump getting elected is now subject to witch hunt.

Yes I thought that may be the case, I also thought that the links between Thiel and Fb may contribute to reinforce this perception in the eyes of many progressives. When it comes to American politics I'm just an external observer so I may be wrong though.

Many smart people have looked into that, danah boyd being the most insightful.

It has little to do with the information or sway that companies actual have, or how much they mishandle it — no one cares about Experian or even darker data traders, few people worry about Amazon’s ability to dump and rake up prices, etc. Facebook resonates, no matter how faintly the actual issue relates to something the company does.

What makes Facebook unique is that you interact with other people in your close environment: family, school, often colleagues, all together. Twitter doesn’t have that: you are not following everyone you know, just people you share an interest with.

That is a recipe for constant context collapse. When I was working there, my cousin told me that she hated Facebook. I asked why: there were some obvious issues with several boys she was interested in, who noticed each other and acted like jealous teenagers. She glazed over that but somehow chose to point out that her mother wasn’t the best at staying away from the situation. Nothing new, but with Facebook, my cousin had lost her ability to have the mating dances away from her family. Another thing she hated was that I was posting status updates in English. I don’t talk to her in English, so she felt this was me acting “fake”. It’s not our native language but I have legitimate reasons to be legible by most of my friends.

Having a single context is problematic for many reasons: hegemony I think is the best angle — there’s an acceptable public face and not everyone likes it but employees over-index people who are comfortable. I see this as the main reason Groups and large Messenger chats have proven so successful: you can reclaim context.

Facebook is not the worst data-handler or has the most incriminating details, but it is the place where you have to deal with your racist uncle, so stories about Trump being elected there add up. It’s the place where your aunt discovered her son’s “roommate” was half-naked and covered in glitter during Pride, so arguments about “sharing private data, including your sexual orientation” resonate.

I’ve made that argument in HN before, I know many responders will argue “There are _really bad! What about _that_ scandal?” Yes, Facebook has made bad choices, reacted poorly to some, and yes they are patterns of dominant position and abuses thereof (which I argued in my PhD 15 years ago). Hell, I’ve made bad errors when I was working there. It’s a large platform so they are close to a lot of unsavoury things.

But the attention, the likelihood of an article being clicked on depending it the title reads “Tech companies, including Google, have exposed…” vs. “Tech companies, including Facebook have exposed…” isn’t commensurate to the reality of their bad decisions. I think everyone should be as outraged by all similar scandal, not less — but I think we should first try to understand why certain stories resonate and not others, and I strongly believe it’s proximity and relatability.

Thank you, your points about social context are spot on in my opinion, I have those problems in my own circle of friends and acquaintances as well. I feel that those mostly apply to Facebook itself and not to the other services that Facebook owns, like Whatsapp and Instagram. It is interesting that much of the negative press coverage also ignores IG and Whatsapp and instead focuses on "Facebook proper" so you may be onto something. I remember Danah Boyd from reading a paper about the social differences between Fb and Myspace users, that must have been a few years ago :-)

There’s a lot of criticism on WhatsApp and Instagram. The most interesting are:

- WhatsApp is used by conservative political parties (notably Mohdi in India) to promote non-representative, outrageous stories. Those spread in group chats, away from fact-checking. Reducing group maximum size should help slow down and allow media to counter-message before the message spreads too far.

- Instagram is promoting a superficial, edited, material lifestyle. There’s good pushback from the company like reducing the visibility of Likes.

I don’t think that either of those examples contradicts the general trend of issues with context collapse.

danah boyd on MySpace vs. Facebook users, there were two main ones in 2007 [1] and 2010 [2].

[1] http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html [2] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/07/21/myspace...

Thank you, yes I had heard both of those lines of criticism, I think that the solution of limiting group size on Whatsapp is going to be effective but I'm more sceptical about hiding the number of likes on IG.

Thanks for the Danah Boyd links, the one I remember is the one from 2007, it's still an interesting read in my opinion!

The Google guys are (self proclaimed) world improver types and therefore liked and celebrated by statists (which includes a lot of techies - “progress through government-approved AI”).

The FB guys are primarily business people, which in the eyes of the former group is a big minus.

This guy is against FB because he knows more about it than about Google so it makes more sense to fight them than Google or Tencent. I believe other factors (which I mentioned above) are also in play.