Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potential Political Bias

Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by lmm on Thursday August 06, 2020 @10:57PM (#24077547)

The first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable. We need better protection for free speech that applies to corporate platforms (or perhaps to just apply the same common carrier rules we apply to the phone system to other platforms).

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:02PM (#24077581)

> first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable

The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3].

Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by im_down_w_otp on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:08PM (#24077636)

The East India Trading Company preceded the writing of the First Amendment by some distance, and that company for some period accounted for fully 1/2 of all global trade.

Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by three_seagrass on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:03PM (#24077585)

Not true. The Dutch West Indies Corporation, one of the largest in history, existed before and during the ratification of the U.S. constitution.

You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by sjwright on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:07PM (#24077626)

If you think the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm, you’re being utterly delusional.

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:18PM (#24077707)

> the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm

Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by oneplane on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:24PM (#24077767)

The Dutch West Indies Corporation ate entire countries for breakfast, and wasn't hiding it either. While tech companies can certainly play a role in communication when overthrowing governments, they aren't usually rolling in to other countries and taking over whatever they want.

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by JamisonM on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:20PM (#24077724)

The British East India was also founded around the same time. Their cultural impact was at the time certainly as vast as Facebook's, the company literally passed laws in India.

The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March

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Re:Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potenti... by sjwright on Friday August 07, 2020 @03:49AM (#24079419)

I don't agree that laws influence culture.

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