In other words, they are a syndicator.

In the physical world, syndicators remain accountable for what they publish through through their channels. They are not responsible for the material (given they didn't create or commission it), but they sure as hell carry the responsibility for letting the material propagate.

Incidentally, several years back I was talking to FB after they reached out. Visited their office for an informal chat and got to talk to couple of their senior(ish) engineering managers. I asked if they were doing, or planning to do anything like actually educating the users on their platform once they've identified someone having been subjected to propaganda or misinformation campaign. I said that I could imagine working on that type of project.

It's not often that you see a person physically recoil from an idea. "We don't do that!"

As far as I'm concerned, until FB actively fights not only the propaganda being funnelled through their machine, but also its effects on groups and individuals to undo the damage, the company is beyond redemption.

Just like tv channels optimize their content for TRP ratings and for ad sales, FB does the same – except its engagement optimization cycle is super-micro and super-fast and super-scalable and its ads are super-cheap and super-granular and super-micro.

Its the same business model followed by newspapers/magazines, other forms of content based attention grabbing and holding mechanism which make money through ads. The older business models are more coarse-grain in everything (cost, price, target size, targeting precision, time-cycles etc) and newer tech-enabled business-models are fine-grain everything.

Obviously, the same old social/behavioral/moral rules that worked (or didn't work, but didn't matter) at coarse-grain/slow-cycle/less-massive/more-local won't work (or needs to work better because it matters at scale!) at fine-grain/fast-cycle/huge/global levels. And the answer isn't obvious.

It is obvious same notions/rules/mechanisms won't scale (like content editorialship/moderation etc).

Facebook penetration in my country is so complete, I would wager there is absolutely no way to, say, successfully run for public office without at least maintaining an active Facebook page. This is why I say that Facebook must be destroyed. It is not acceptable that some company half the world away, based on American morals and American interests, gets to decide who can and cannot realistically get elected here.

In my experience when this argument is made, I typically follow it up by "well if it's so unimportant, why don't you delete your account?". 99/100 times I've asked this in real life the person responds by saying, "well I don't have anywhere else to say things" (this is during covid).

For the past two years, social media is the only public square allowed by government fiat. Thus it must be regulated as such.

Without the promises made on behalf of FB's tracking tech and the behavioural feedback loops they farm, the social features are basically worthless.

FB's problem isn't a 1st Amendment issue. It's the fact that it lies about the effectiveness of its ad tech to its advertisers, while also attempting to hide the toxicity of its behaviour mod techniques.

And there are too many parts of the world where it has monopoly status on both.

And that's completely irrelevant to my argument which is that, since Facebook is the only public square by government fiat, it ought to be treated as such regardless of how it got there.

When government exercises eminent domain for the public interest, it does not worry about why it is the house it is seizing was placed there. It just notes that the house is there and then takes proper action to secure it's future aims for public benefit.

What?

No, FB users talk to each other not to FB (the editor).

Quantity has a quality of its own - when size is huge it should be reclassified as public interest, not private. There should be mechanisms for people to ensure their voices matter similar to elections and parliament.

Note to readers: the author of the blog post is not espousing this, at least not overtly.

I think we're thinking about this the wrong way - we should break up Facebook the same way we broke up Bell into baby Bells. Make "Facebook" a utility. Split Facebook into five different companies, maybe some not even in the US. Each "Facebook" company would have to provide Facebook service to a subset of current users. Allow new people to run Facebook providers.

Unhappy with the customer service from your current Facebook provider, or with the quantity of ads? Don't like the algorithm that's running your timeline? Switch to one of the other providers who may do things differently. Create competition in this market where there simply isn't any.

Some people will point out this forces all these providers to interoperate somehow, so users on one Facebook provider can talk to users on another. This is a really great part of this plan! Our social networks become based on open standards and interoperability instead of being walled gardens.

[edit] Further, im not sure how you’d slice it up horizontally instead of vertically - that is to say Facebook is Facebook for “millennials,” Instagram is Facebook for gen z“. It feels like each of these vertical slices retain the same incentive structure they have today but targeting different demographics.

What could slicing it horizontally look like? An independent infra AWS? A social graph? Curious your thoughts.

I think the problem is the incentive structure - a company goaled on engagement will focus on the most engaging content. That’s hate, division, fear and anger. Without a fundamental reimagination of incentives I think the same beast will emerge. The new T-1000 of corporations - as Colbert referred to at&t at the time.

FB is not a medium. It may be a de facto platform for social organisations and advertising, but it's still just an app.

Whilst FB made more money than MySpace and lasted for a longer time, its demise is inevitable for the same reason, and we're seeing the slide occur now.

FB, like AOL and MySpace before it, was fashionable when its feature provided new reach for participants. Sooner or later, these apps reach maximum cachet and after that, they are for "old people".

FB is for old people. And that's not even the worst of its problems.

I'd break out FAANG's advertising operations. Prohibit conflicts of interest, fraud.

I sorta expected the online advertising bubble to pop, mooting the need for remedy. But somehow it keeps not popping.

Set some threshold. Reach a certain size and your ops get divided up. Spitballing: $10m annual revenue, 100k monthly visitors, whatever. So indies like daringfireball can continue to do their own thing.

Lets be serious, the youth market is strongly moving towards TikTok, and its feed algorithm already has created a notion of 'the different sides of TikTok', for conservative vs liberal content.

While I'm not sure parent's suggestion is feasible or would solve anything, it is more like the AT&T breakup in that the system is still cohesive, even if operated by separate entities.

Federated social media for me has been much less toxic in terms of discussion quality and is much less addictive, I love checking it but I don’t doom-scroll to oblivion…

But server doesn’t get payed to make me doom scroll to oblivion so incentives are much more aligned.

Its one thing if the content being served is what some nefarious actor wants a group to consume, for influence sake. Its another when its the content produces and consumes themselves. The current misinformation discourse on FB is the current culture, especially the culture of a large group of people. It originates both on and off FB. 'Q' didn't originate on FB, it originated on 8chan, let that sink in.

huh, that's the first time i have read this one. the one i read about recently has to do with connecting the world.

now this is making me realize that maybe, just maybe, nobody knows what their true business model is?

I’m joking of course. None of those make as much money as Facebook, and I think we can all agree it’s the fact that they are so rich that bothers us most. Far more than any public square argument. Where’s my yacht?!

I care that they have a monopoly and consolidate so much power that they can shift the balance for the interest of their stakeholders or lobbyists.

If everyone had sufficient bandwidth to host their own content from their home Internet, and ISPs were prohibited from also being media companies, free speech would be much stronger.

Can anyone seriously argue that disinformation on Facebook isn't dangerous? The only possible question should be what can we do about it to preserve debate, free speech, etc. while stoping the literally deadly parts.

- "I'll probably get put in facebook jail for this..."

- A misinformation label attached to the bottom of the post.

- The post completely blanked out, with a statement that this is misinformation.

This seems to indicate some moderation being done. What I don't see from the "facebook should stop' this group, is any attempt to get cable companies to do the same with "news" stations that broadcast misinformation. An attempt to have the FCC take AM radio station's licenses for broadcasting propaganda.

The underlying fact is, what we label misinformation is just what a large group of people wrongly believe, and they really like sharing it with each other.

All of this was evident many years ago, based on the ad delivery system Facebook built, and the kinds of information their early APIs were exposing to people. It didn’t take a genius to realize having people building more and more sophisticated systems to spy on people to get data to drive the development of products to persuade people was a dangerous flywheel, and one that was held up by good intentions (making services “free”), so it was likely to be sustainable via an “ends justify the means” rationalization.

Now we are seeing a large group of people freely sharing misinformation amongst themselves. The fueling of this, I would argue, is outside of facebook and is being brought there by the people themselves.

It was really easy to blame the lowering of the level of discourse to social media. However, the "our side at any cost" has its modern seeds in the advent of right wing radio with Rush Limbaugh, followed by the rise of fox news. With the internet, the public has learned that they too can be players in the political landscape by commenting on news articles. All of which predates the rise of social media to a large extent. In the early 2000s, Yahoo News political articles would have 10s of thousands of comments, even now, the 2020 election market on predictit had 300k comments on it, of people posting memes and s*t talking to each other.

This is the culture now. To change this, you can't go and regulate a social media company, you have to change the culture.

I also completely understand how you posted a screed, without making a point at all or taking a side at all.

That Facebook has found a way to have a service that provides content, and not have to pay for it, is one of the reasons they are so immensely profitable.

I kind of laugh at your comparison to a warning in front of a show that its 'fictional' as some sort of equal warning and how that relates to what right wing cable tv news and radio have been putting on the air nearly 24/7 for the past 3 decades.

My point, is that the seeds of the misinformation and right wing propaganda isn't the leaf node that is facebook, but comes from the right wing media outlets, that are carried on cable or over the air. Its also a concern that no one on the 'left' seems entirely concerned about this, when you can dump on social media.

Your point seems to be that a cable company purchasing shows from content creator companies, is the same as facebook having random users post whatever they want. One of those is a broadcaster purposefully running content they want to run. The other is a platform to let anyone say whatever they want. When you give a platform to someone to say whatever they want, you are free to put limits on that platform, and warnings on that platform. When you are purchasing content, you are showing what you want to show. Things aren't "carried on cable or over the air." Things are bought by the broadcaster, then broadcast by the broadcaster.

I do believe you're being purposely dense here, so this conversation has now come to a conclusion. I won't read your reply.

The core mechanism of political polarization is that the internet inexorably pulled society out of its temporary state of mass media consolidation. For a couple decades, we had an unusual situation where a few companies ran mass media, and those companies all sort of agreed to toe the centrist consensus line politically. Now, we've reverted to something like what we had before radio, which was that socialists read the socialist newspaper, right-wing folks read the right-wing newspaper, etc., if not even worse -- some folks just got their news from the loudest partisans at the bar.

We've gone from an era where news distribution was fragmented because it was very difficult, to an era where it was consolidated because it was easy for large corporations only, to an era where it's so dead simple that anyone can do it, so it's fragmented again.

Legacy media folks hate this. They blame the biggest players helping people share fragmented media sources with one another, rather than recognizing the inevitability of this fragmentation, no matter what products people use to share news over the internet. They demand a return to elite consensus blocking extreme viewpoints. It is simply not gonna happen. That barn was always temporary, and it has collapsed around the horse.

But when it became obvious that “ads” was the wrong mental model, and that the products being created were ultimately about the general problem of persuading people by using data collected by spying on them, it should have been realized this was an incentive structure that any sane code of engineering ethics should abandon. Facebook ended up being the best and most successful example of an organization taking this system to its most logical endpoint, but someone always would have unless a code of ethics managed to materialize upon seeing the damage it was causing before it got too far.

I don’t judge people who work at Facebook generally, but do think every one of them at this point should resign on ethical grounds. The situation could be fixed if the company (even just internally) owned up to the malincentives they have fallen into and committed to exiting it and leading on forming a code of ethics on when these kinds of system ought not be built.

I really don't understand why it's taken almost a decade for you idiots to figure out what that would result in.

"At this point"

What point? The point they started hiding your friends "boring" posts in order to serve up the most clickbait shit possible?

Or the point they allowed political parties to ram Obama and then trump down your throat.

Or the point they decided to become arbitors of truth?

Or the point they decided to censor you over your beliefs?

Nah, it was made very clear by very many back when, all of my friends understood my concerns clearly, I made sure they knew what was happening.

They chose not to care. I don't blame them, but I have no sympathy for them either.

I don't really have many regrets either, my life improved a lot since distancing myself from the online world.

Sure, media is more fragmented now. But that doesn't address any of the criticisms in question.

The surveilance is going to happen no matter what country. Thinking any other country would actually respect privacy is truly delusional.

Further bear in mind that “free speech” refers to the government not precluding your speech and Facebook ain’t government. Unless you’re proposing nationalizing it.

Basically the modern version of riling up a lynch mob … for profit.

To some extend, all social media use this feedback loop, even this site.

P.S. Yes, I realize the irony of this comment.

First amendment refers to the government not precluding your speech. "Free speech" is a much broader concept.

Given the constitutional safeguards you may be right on this one.

> Thinking any other country would actually respect privacy is truly delusional.

This, however, I had to read several times to be sure you were saying what I thought you were saying. At which point I just shook my head in amazement.