At this point in time it will take an act of God to fix it, the lock-in is very strong and their ability to buy up anything that even begins to compete with them serves to cement that lock-in to the point where I don't see a way of ever dislodging it.
There is a key difference being being able to afford to buy anything, and actually being able to buy anything. The competing founders need to be willing to sell. If a competitor arises that is mission-driven, Facebook cannot buy them.
A direct threat to Facebook is unlikely to succeed. More likely is a competitor based in a niche where Facebook cannot enter for structural reasons that slowly out-competes Facebook on Facebook's turf.
One possible niche is the privacy-focused community. Facebook can't flip all of those users, ever. If something privacy-focused emerges that has low-maintenance utility for the broader world, Facebook's days are numbered.
Can anyone help me brainstorm what features would be compelling for a privacy focused social media/event planning/group discussion platform?
Facebook's network graph is its single most-valuable asset. Responsibly placing it back into the hands of its users will require some subtle care, both to avoid Facebook's ire and to avoid abuse.
Bonus points if you can do it with your spouse and children by your side.
But granted, mission-driven people are less common. To the point that many people who are not fundamentally mission-driven truly do not comprehend that some of us are. We all have our own motivations.
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instag...
It's not morally sound to have an organization optimize for public image, but they are THE public image platform. Optimizing for social good would be so much better but that's really hard to track and quantify and it can be so divisive on some topics. Esp. now that trends marked "social good" are so quickly developed and redeveloped as other things.
Even if the rational reason for being slapdash is lack of resources and lack of focus, that means the company is not investing enough on addressing the underlying problems. Things happen, and sometimes you need to jump to put out a fire - but if putting out fires is a routine mode of work, it's a symptom of a much wider problem.
I am under no illusion that trying to protect against disinformation and propaganda would be easy. As you said, the volume is so vast that it's going to require a lot of effort and immense focus. Constant firefighting shifts the efforts, and deprives focus.
Whether that's intentional or an emerging property, the end result is the same.
The degree of nuance leads me to believe it's just impossible to do at commercial/global scale (though I would agree it could be done better than it currently is).
One person : one opinion seems a fair goal.
Posting all day about something as yourself is very different than running a network of accounts.
If they are managing to do so much harm through indifference and greed just imagine what they could do if they were explicitly trying to manipulate the world for "good"?
Powerful groups who try to optimize the world have a pretty poor track record compared to those who just try to do their own stuff right and let the world sort itself out.
So let's handle moderation in... let's say Saudi-Arabia, by having them silence LGBT and women's rights advocates?
And who is responsible for Saudi-Arabian citizens in exile? Saudi-Arabia? The country where they live in? The country where they are currently on vacation?
Hence the boycott of South Africa.
There was a brief window in which Twitter was allowed to spread dissent pretty freely in the Arab world. I've no idea what that looks like now.
"It's why I've seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space," Zhang wrote.
That is a damage control role. Perhaps more tellingly, it highlights the entire organisation's priorities: if it isn't drawing press attention, ignore it. Of course that's not the phrase FB would use in a press release. They'd deploy a convenient euphemism, such as "dedicate the resources elsewhere".