We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to employ only 125 people.

And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has been sold to Microsoft.

While this outcome isn't best for the economy, it is a good solution for the environment, and perhaps that was the goal of the Netherlands.

The municipality abused the subsidy to lure in a corporation instead of using it to power homes. It would've been better for the environment if Microsoft paid full dime for their own windmills and the subsidy was spent on something that actually reduced greenhouse gases.

500 mil$ to get a 2 bil euro datacenter.

The datacente will then create revenue through services and add jobs. Jobs wont be just employees, you're going to have security, shipping, power plant jobs, recycling servers, etc.

It also seems that they'll get some energy from datacenter heat back plus greenhouse heat... so a nice opportunity to do research and create bleeding edge facilities.

It's also credits, as in Microsoft first invests and then gets free electricity for a while...

Then there's a nice national security benefit having datacenter in your country.

So overall a good deal...

I suppose it is, still it's an abuse of the subsidy. They should have found some other way to give Microsoft 500 million. This way it's literally stealing from a fund that's meant to save the environment.

How is that a better solution for the environment than using the windmills to power homes?

It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.

If your moderation is the equivalent of a low fence keeping people away from the other side, with 2B users the fence will always be swamped by people leaning over it and bending it while looking you in the eye and going "See ? I'm not passing it. This is what you allow."

If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a reputation for opaque capricious moderation.

NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.

> NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.

The problem is that what is "widely applied in the world" is using the grey-area of who to bring the hammer down on randomly to tip the scales in some way.

Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities.

How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone.

Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice.

You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.

Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.

I don't see the issue with reddit. People can vote with their feet if they don't like the local lords.

I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of problems being discussed in this overall thread.

(I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)

Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they could play a more effective card were they to be banned.

And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.

That may be somewhat due to policy changes. Reddit did try to be more hands-off in the past.

But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and moderation is mostly left to the individual sites. Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for them to do anything at all.

In other words we need more platforms that put themselves front and center, avoiding that also avoids the reputation problems with a hands-off approach.

Many city, state, and even country subreddits have been taken over by right-wing moderators. This has been a coordinated process over many years. And while you can create new subreddit for your country easily you're still can't be /r/canada.

Time to start your own perfect reddit. /r/Canada may be currently occupate but wvenable should be available.

Moderation is labor, and you get what you pay for. Given how notoriously mental health threatening Facebook moderation has turned out to be, adding unpaid moderators with no health care benefits and especially no mental health protections seems the exact wrong direction for Facebook.

That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn there from existing governmental technology.

That's certainly a great strategy if you have those options available. However, if you can't maintain a certain moderator to user ratio then that's going to be impossible.

I want a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of Facebook

The dude will abide

Government gives free lawyers in some cases. Perhaps we could get free access to get support from something like this.

Also it's kinda messed up Facebook can't just add more moderators because it's gonna cost them. They are worth 786b because they decided not to moderate their content enough.

Finally why isn't advertising taxed like oil and cigarettes is? Seems obvious we should disincestivise consumption, but then FED's primary goal is minimise unemployment...

There's a simple solution: cap the number of users. With a closed system you don't have to worry about the registration mechanisms being gamed, and moderation of a fixed-size group is easy to plan out.

Similarly you could use an invite system with limited invites, if you want growth at a constant rate- although this could still lead to moderation problems if you don't grow your moderation team at the same rate.

> And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.

That's the million (billion?) dollar question for me. I observe that it will sadly follow the precedent of the oil industry and other industries -- a slap on the wrist to the tune of a fraction of the true damage, with society left to bear the brunt of the externality in perpetuity and prosecutors able to say "at least we tried!"

I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.

Trillion dollar question, really. When you have a multi-billion dollar platform costing magnitudes more in social disruption, election and democracy itself being disrupted.

There is a better answer and that is to not use Facebook, because we don't need it.

Search is altogether another problem, because we really do depend on it.

What fraction of the 2B actually post vs “just” read & like?

If it’s 1% then the moderator to writer ratio is 1:1000 instead of 1:100,000.

And presumably the moderators are working full time (?) whereas the posters hopefully don’t spend more than 1h or so on average per day writing. So the moderator hours to writer hours ratio may be closer to 1:200?

Add some AI based admin tools and it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous?

This assumes that facebook creates the problems that exist on their platform.

All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook. Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become a part of them.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't great. That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.

>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.

Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?

> Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they?

Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.

If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product (e.g., safety equipment, emissions standards).

If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government (e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building large suburbs that require vehicles) or consumer behavior (e.g., driving drunk, reckless driving), you'll either: (1) destroy the industry or (2) create strong incentives for the industry to lobby government to make such behavior impossible (say by passing an amendment to ban the consumption of alcohol).

You also either create a situation where victims can double-dip, getting paid both from the industry and from the individual consumer—who has already paid in aggregate by paying the industry; or a situation where the consumer has no direct responsibility, which will likely have the effect of riskier behavior; at least until the industry successfully lobbies the government.

In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following:

>Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.

I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior?

Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there.

So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.

> Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars.

This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives.

> A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool.

I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers.

I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.

> I think we can do better.

Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.

>This isn't true.

Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation incidents are fungible for the purposes of this discussion. That segues right into the question of relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick google search brought up this article from the washington post [0] which gives the following:

Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles

Car: 7.28

Ferry: 3.17

Train: 0.43

Subway: 0.24

Bus: 0.11

Plane: 0.07

Granted this is skewed by cars being the only viable last-mile rural transportation method but we can examine that too. According to USDOT, urban motor vehicle crash deaths overtook rural crash deaths in 2016 in a reversal of the previous longstanding trend of deaths being 60% rural and 40% urban [1]. You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car. That's almost 90 lives saved per day if we all rode the bus. I suspect this rate is tied to CDL and bus maintenance standards and would remain largely unchanged if buses became the transportation method of the majority.

>I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence.

I'd love to see some data but given what I've seen of the local street racer scene and how they view certain movie franchises that glorify their subculture I think the influence is significant. Would society be better if we straight up banned everything that shows people doing bad stuff? Probably not, but media still has a tremendous impact on how people behave. It's again a case where an industry offloads negative externalities onto society.

>I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.

Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no? I used to be a vocal proponent of not yielding an inch of freedom as well but I'm less and less convinced about that as time goes on. Just because the harm isn't as immediate as people getting trampled 30 seconds after one yells fire in the crowded theater doesn't mean it's still not real harm that could've been avoided. There's a significant amount of internal propaganda here in the US about how amazing freedom is but I'm really not sold on the idea that the average person's life here is better as a result of it compared to a society that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of the world and responds to it with structure rather than "individual freedom" and a literal world-leading number of people sitting around making license plates in jail.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/14/the-s...

[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...

> You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car.

These numbers don't reflect the absolute difference in safety between these modes of transportation. Imagine a world in which buses replace cars as the primary mode of transportation. You've now got many, many more buses on the road. So, if there is a collision, rather than probably being car-on-car or car-on-bus, it's most likely to be bus-on-bus. That will raise the fatalities per billion passenger miles in two ways: (1) The amount of energy in a bus-on-bus collision will be quite a bit larger than when a car hits a bus or a car hits a car. (2) When there is a fatal collision, the number of fatalities is likely to be higher. (It takes no stretch of the imagination to imagine if one person on a bus dies in a collision, his fellow passengers are more likely to also die.)

You also have second-order effects, like vastly reduced visibility for bus-drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists...

> Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no?

No. Not if they don't actually have any control or responsibility over the externality, like in the case of drunk driving, which was my original point. The only things a manufacturer could do in that case is fight for prohibition or install a breathalyzer in every car. The former was tried and turned out to be pretty bad for society. The latter probably would destroy the industry and/or be trivially worked around by the dedicated drunk.

> Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society

Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?

>Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?

For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things.

Not having free will doesn't mean people immediately turn into dust, it just means the reason you decided to get a Big Whopper Breakfast Bucket™ from McWendallKingFC© has more to do with explicit and intentional psychological manipulation on their part than it does on you as the individual making a totally intentional, rational, and well thought out choice that definitely doesn't have anything to do with their highly optimized (to their benefit of course, not the benefit of your health) food and very realistic commercials of smiling happy people and great vibes.

There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).

On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

"A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.

Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face."

The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.

Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.

If you run across anything, I would be super interested to take a look as well.