That is a useful question to showcase an important aspect that I don’t see discussed.
There is a single government, while there must be multiple competing private corporations.
Twitter vs. Gab, Youtube vs. Liveleak: each corporation is defined by what it refuses, NOT by what it accepts.
So, if Alex Jones becomes CEO of Twitter and puts “Did you know? The Earth is flat.” on all tweets mentioning SpaceX, users will simply move to a greener pasture. Twitter will die when its business model loses viability.
Twitter’s moves are not political, they are economical first and foremost! The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term.
> [T]he company claimed $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, and a 31% boost in sales.
– https://www.fastcompany.com/90399316/one-year-later-what-did...
This is extremely charitable to Nike, assuming that they internally had some meeting about correcting racial injustices or something and not that they decided to capitalize on a moment in the political zeitgeist. Even if the ad was hated it would have generated enormous free marketing for the company. I tend to agree that these companies will make economic decisions first, most of the time, but over the last couple years we've seen many companies explicitly intertwine the two - where making political statements as marketing is now common. I'd be very very skeptical that they have anything but dollar signs in their eyes.
Content can definitely have negative value. More is sometimes worse. The extremes are obvious (users gain less value from a website with more bullying), but the principle is true even in the middle ground.
While good advice brings value, bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere, or causes their ruin and subsequent decrease in value to advertisers.
Even when the content does not have negative value, if it floods content with positive value, people no longer get the value they used to.
"bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere" -- absolutely it doesn't
You missed the whole point of the article, which is that "building tech" at that scale is inseparable from widespread political implications.
I'm 100% with you. I actually think Zuck is showing incredible leadership and vision under all these pressure and my respect for him has grown enormously (BTW I've voted Democrat all my life).
My belief is Facebook is a tremendous challenge to the established media and their owners. What Facebook does, it actually democratizes ability of smaller publishers to have the potential to reach the same volume of audience as the corporate media. This is upsetting to the old guards and what I'm seeing is a chorus of pressure on Facebook to basically limit information distribution to the same old guards.
As a reminder, many people believe Trump was elected because of Facebook. This narrative is mostly created and pushed by the mainstream media (the old guards). However, data shows Trump rode on $5 billion of free coverage [0].
We also know that around 8.5 million of 2012 Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016 (about 2-2.5 million 2012 Romney voters vote for Hillary). [1]
The reality is my party, the Democratic Party has been moving economically to the right and socially to the left. That's great for many people in SF or NY, but it has impacted many working class people who were traditionally Democrats. Blaming FB is a very convenient way for the Party to brush off responsibility of failing the people and pointing the fingers at Zuck. Facebook has a lot of reach, don't get me wrong. But as data showed these claims of interferences by foreign powers, which implies we need to control Facebook were overblown as Nate Silver who best predicted the 2016 results summarized the best [2].
I'm of the opinion Obama would have not won without social media nor we would have gone to the disastrous Iraq War if we had Facebook or something as strong as the reach of Facebook back in 2003. There are some of us who remember the yellow stickers of "Support our Troops" campaign in parallel with mainstream narratives[3] that created the mass hysteria and momentum to build consensus to go invade Iraq and in the process killed a lot of innocent people.
The mainstream media not only didn't do much to challenge the Bush 43 administration it ratted out the person who was investigating the infamous yellow cake connection [4].
Years later everyone did a mea culpa, but it was too late. By some account close to 400,000 Iraqis were killed [5] and we're still paying the price of the Iraq War.
So I agree, there is decent chance the person replacing Zuck one day will have a completely different political views. Maybe a hawk (appointed by Wall Street) who will hire a new executive team around himself or herself and help push a narrative that favors the board members who put them into that position.
It is very shortsighted for Silicon Valley to push Zuck to control the narrative anymore than Facebook is already doing. It'll normalize censorship so when the next person takes over they can easily put more control and censorship without much resistance. So please stop. Zuck is right and we should really back him up on this (and no, I don't for FB nor I'm friends or connected with Zuck).
[0]https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...
[1]http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-m...
[2]https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1074833714931224582...
[3]https://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/
[4]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/intervi...
People are free to stop using facebook and move to a different site, as many have. This only requires a few clicks.
I overwhelmingly prefer the option of having many companies to choose from vs. having the government or laws determine what is truth. Switching governments often requires either a revolution or a decade-long immigration process.
And when Zuckerberg steps down as the CEO of facebook and his successor is someone leaning towards a different political ideology - what happens then?
The next CEO of Facebook is not an elected official. Unless you count Wall Street appointed board of directors approving a successor as somehow being representative democracy.
I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech - Facebook engineers have incredible impact in connecting friends and families all over the world. Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted.